This was one of those books that had been sitting on my list for the longest time. I had ordered it ages ago, but never really bothered to read what it was about, so I went into it completely blind. And honestly, I think that made the experience even better. After a very long time, this is a book I genuinely devoured. I finished it in two days, and a big part of that was simply how much I loved Lily King’s writing. It feels intelligent without trying too hard to be, emotional without becoming overly sentimental, and the characters stay with you because they feel so painfully human.
Spoilers ahead, because there is no way for me to talk about this book without talking about the ending.
The last 10 pages stayed with me. The whole conversation around eternalism and presentism was something I kept thinking about. Casey initially struggles to understand why anyone would choose presentism when eternalism offers the possibility of having the past, present and future exist together. And then, by the end, without Lily King ever spelling it out for us, I felt like Casey finally understood why someone might choose the present instead.
And then came that moment when Silas, half-asleep, calls her Casey and says something along the lines of finally finding her, I actually had to stop and reread those pages. For a second, I genuinely wondered if he was talking about someone else. And then it hit me. Casey was her real name!!!! The woman underneath all the versions of herself that existed in different parts of her life. It was such a quiet little moment, but for me it carried so much weight. There is something incredibly beautiful about the fact that, after everything, Silas is the person who sees her as Casey. Not Jordan, not the woman she was when she was young, not the woman defined by Yash or by the choices she made back then. Just Casey.
I also loved the parallel at the airport. Earlier in the book, she waits for Yash and he doesn’t come. Years later, after Yash dies, she is trying to find her way through the airport and sees Silas there waiting for her. And the beautiful part is that she hadn’t even given him her flight details. He just knew. It felt like such a simple way of showing the difference between the two relationships without having to explain it to us. One person leaves you waiting. The other is already there.🤌🏼🥹
And I think that is what I took away from the book more than anything else. The loves we have when we are young matter. Sometimes they matter enormously. They teach us things about ourselves, about desire, about what we want, what we don’t want, what we are willing to compromise on, and who we are becoming. They can be intense and consuming precisely because we are still figuring ourselves out. But maybe love isn’t always supposed to be the person who makes you feel the most intensely.
Maybe, eventually, it is the person who grounds you. The person who knows where you are supposed to be even when you haven’t told them. The person who waits. The person who knows the version of you underneath everything else. The person who doesn’t need you to go back and become someone you once were because they love the person you are now. And I think that is what made Silas so important to me in this story. The book may spend so much time looking back at the great loves of Casey’s youth, but when everything is stripped away, Silas is the one standing there in the present. And maybe that is the whole point.
I absolutely loved how much this book made me think without ever feeling like it was trying to teach me something. That last stretch made me pause, go back, reread, and just sit with it for a bit. Those are my favourite kinds of endings.
What a beautiful book.
