Beach Read

by Emily Henry

I know feeling small gets to some people, he had once told me, but I kind of like it. Takes the pressure off when you’re just one life of six billion at any given moment. And when you’re going through something hard—at the time, Mom was doing chemo—it’s nice to know you’re not even close to the only one.

A life cast in a magical glow, every moment bigger and brighter and tastier than the last.

Again and again he told me I wasn’t myself. But he was wrong. I was the same me I’d always been. I’d just stopped trying to glow in the dark for him, or anyone else.

He fit so perfectly into the love story I’d imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.

Maybe a complicated truth, but not a lie.”

not quite together but definitely not alone.

we stayed there, letting nothing happen all around us.