Yasmen and Josiah divorced after losing a child. They still co-own a restaurant. They still share school pickups. They still stand in the same kitchen where their marriage ended, negotiating how close they’re allowed to stand.
That tension isn’t dramatic. It’s domestic. That’s what makes it unbearable.
Two People Who Divorced but Never Actually Left
Yasmen Wade is the kind of protagonist who makes you feel underdressed emotionally. She lost a baby, then an aunt who raised her like a mother, and the depression that followed nearly ended her. She’s rebuilt herself through therapy, through her restaurant, through raising two kids who watched their parents fall apart.
Josiah is different. He kept moving. He signed the divorce papers, started dating, told himself he was fine. Ryan writes him as a man who believes composure is the same thing as healing. It isn’t, and the book knows it.
They are not fighting over who was right. They are negotiating how close they’re allowed to stand.
The Kitchen Where the Marriage Ended
Grief doesn’t end. It changes shape. Ryan shows this through Yasmen’s depression, which she refuses to romanticize. Yasmen doesn’t cry beautifully. She stops functioning. She says things like she didn’t want to die, she just didn’t want to live, and the book doesn’t flinch.
The imagery that anchors everything is the restaurant itself. Food, warmth, feeding people. These are the things Yasmen can still control when her own life feels unmanageable. Ryan uses cooking the way other authors use weather: to signal what the characters can’t say out loud.
I expected the therapy scenes to feel like homework. They don’t. They feel like eavesdropping.
Healing is not a prerequisite for love. It’s a parallel process. That’s where it gets uncomfortable: Yasmen and Josiah’s second chance only works because they stopped needing each other to be whole.
The Mess That Doesn’t Stay Messy
Not everything lands. The middle section stretches. Some of the side characters exist mainly to set up future books in the series, and you can feel the machinery turning. Deja, the teenage daughter, is written with real complexity, but her cruelty toward her mother needed one more conversation before the reconciliation to feel earned.
A few of the emotional beats arrive too neatly, like Ryan was afraid to let the mess stay messy.
Still, grief is not the opposite of love. Sometimes it’s the proof of it.
Anyone who has watched a relationship end not from betrayal but from exhaustion should read this. Parents. People who have sat in a therapist’s office and admitted they weren’t okay.
Readers looking for escapist romance should skip it. This book will find the soft places and press.
What you take away: that time doesn’t heal. It teaches you how to carry what happened. And sometimes, the person who saw you at your worst is the only one who knows what your best actually cost.
This book won’t fix anything for you. It will just make you feel less alone in the specific ache of loving someone through the worst year of your life.
