Spoilers Ahead: 

Miss Slade, once again you wow me, and leave me sobbing on my bedroom floor. After reading ‘The Rebound’, which very quickly became one of my ultimate favourites, I decided to read Slade’s second and most recent book, and it’s safe to say I’ve found my new favourite author. 

 

We follow Lucie as she’s on her way to her best friend’s wedding. She’s the maid of honour, and so has been there to fix most of the things that have been happening, and now they’re flying out to Spain to see them get married. 

There’s just one problem… she can’t stand the best man. 

Charlie has been an enormous pain in her ass since the first time she saw him, and she overheard him slating her job. She runs a column where people send in their problems, and she helps them answer it. After her parents died in a car accident, she was left grief-stricken, and she liked helping people. When her column was taken over, they were more concerned about the amount of clicks it had, and so the spark for her column was lost a little bit. 

On the flight over to Spain, which has already been delayed multiple times, she is sat next to a woman who quickly receives a lot of attention. This woman’s name is Miranda Bloom, and she is an alleged psychic, a famous one. She tries to help Lucie, apparently sensing her grief, and tells her that her fate is she will meet someone at the end of her trip in Spain, and return home with the love of her life. This will be someone unexpected, someone who she’s crossed paths with before. 

Lucie is unconvinced, but also secretly hopeful, having been alone for a long time. When she spots her ex, who had left her a few weeks after the death of her parents to pursue his photography career, she immediately thought he must be the one. She’d been harbouring after Drew for years, never losing those feelings for him, and knows immediately that he is it. But then her childhood best friend, Ethan, starts acting very weird, and she thinks that he might like her too. And then Charlie starts acting really weird, trying to figure out a truce between them, trying to be nice, and although she doesn’t trust him, she bites. 

The whole week is spent playing various wedding games (as per the request of Stacey and Rodrigo - the happy couple, Lucie and Charlie’s best friends) and she becomes embroiled between the three. What’s worse, her boss says her column is going to be cut if she doesn’t make a head-turning article, so she decides to do it on the prophecy Ms Bloom told her. 

Her very pregnant friend at home, Kimmy, tells her to not just focus on Drew, to maybe think about Ethan and Charlie too. And after Charlie tells her that he’s dating someone - her boss, Sammy - she feels relieved. 

One out of three, eliminated! 

She bounces back between the two. There’s an undeniable urge for her to pick Drew, but Charlie makes her feel safe, and he gets her to start knowing her worth. She begins to like him, to really like him. She tries to keep him at arm’s length, as she doesn’t want to be hurt by him again. They bond over their grief - his father passed away a few months ago, hence why he’s struggling so much now - and she sees him in a new life. 

When a fight breaks out between Drew and Charlie the day of the wedding, Lucie is distraught. She tells Charlie off, and he says that he’s been in love with her since the day he first met her, and he explains that everything he’s done since then has been because he’s had a crush on her, and she starts to see it. He tells her he doesn’t want to be a ‘plot twist’ in her article, and then he leaves. 

When she returns, Drew is expecting her to go straight to him. He was shaping her around his career again, saying he wanted to give it a go, but it would mean that she’d have to go with him, and they’d have to make their schedules work. If she stayed at home, Drew wanted to be able to see other women. Apparently, Drew said to Charlie that he ‘dumped’ Lucie because he couldn’t deal with her grief, and left her to do it by herself, and then she can see why Charlie punched him. 

She leaves with sadness, hoping to catch Charlie on their plane, but he isn’t there. And when she gets back to England - Kimmy has given birth! - and she goes to see Ms Bloom again, who said she didn’t con her, just gave her some hope, which is something she desperately needed at the time. Bloom tells her that she has to create her own path and put herself first for once, so she apologises to Charlie in her column, after telling everyone she’s shutting it down, and then tries to find something else she wants to do in her life. 

Lucie decides to fight for what she wants, for once, and so plans this big surprise to tell Charlie she loves him. However, when she finds him, he’s with a beautiful girl, and it almost sends her away, but she stands her ground. She confesses her love to him, and he says that she can “have all his chances”. 

They end by getting a house together, after Lucie finally sells the house that was gifted to her by her parents when they passed, and she finally parted from it. She got a degree in psychology, so she could still help people, and they were going to renovate their new house together. Both of them seeing grief counsellors, they’re both much happier now. And when they come across a box of photos, they realise that they were both in Spain one year on holiday, on the same beach, so their paths had crossed! The prophecy was true, and Bloom was right. 

This hit me so hard. I was expecting to really like her and Ethan together, but Charlie did grow on me in the end - despite being a massive prick. His intentions are sort of hard to believe, especially knowing everything that he’s said and done when he “liked” her. They’re not a perfect couple, and I like that. Once again, the relationships in this show are mostly developed by love, and not just sex and lust, which is a massive must for me, and Slade does this so well. She also does character arcs amazingly well, and that’s something that I haven’t witnessed a lot in books, so I was very happy after reading this. 

One tiny little thing is that Stacey was annoying as shit for me. I don’t know why, because she’s not supposed to be disliked, but I thought she was needy and quite selfish at times. She definitely wasn’t there for Lucie as much as she should have been - and yes, I do know it was her wedding, but Lucie needed her. Idk, that’s the only bad thing about the book that I can remember really. Another fantastic read, and I can’t wait until the next one is released!