The Do-Over
: Prologue

Valentine’s Day Eve

When Valentine’s Day rears its sugary-sweet, heart-shaped head, there are two types of people who receive it.

First, you have the full-on lovers of the holiday, hopeless romantics obsessed with the idea of love itself. These individuals believe in fate and soul mates and the notion that the universe sends out winged, mostly naked babies to shoot arrows into select single people, thus infecting them with true love that may cause drowsiness and a massive happily-ever-after.

Then you have the cynics, those curmudgeonly souls who call it a “Hallmark holiday” and complain that if true love exists, its proclamations should be expressed spontaneously on any random day and without the expectation of gifts.

Well, I am neither—and both—of these people.

I do believe that Valentine’s Day is an overcommercialized Hallmark holiday, but I also think there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the materialistic side effects of the celebration. Bring on the chocolates and flowers, and throw in a gift card to the local bookstore while you’re at it.

And yes, I believe in the existence of true love. But I strongly suspect that fate and soul mates and love at first sight are concepts created by the same people still waiting for Santa to show up with that puppy they asked for when they were seven years old.

In other words, I absolutely expect love in my life, but there is no way I’m going to sit around and wait for fate to make it happen.

Fate is for suckers.

Love is for planners.

My parents got married on Valentine’s Day after a month of dating. They fell passionately, wildly in love when they were eighteen. Immediately, and with zero consideration of real-world facts like compatibility and differing temperaments.

While this foolish behavior led to, well, me, it also led to years of disagreements and shouting matches that were the soundtrack of my childhood before their relationship devolved into a screaming breakup next to the tiny cherub fountain on our front lawn.

But their inability to use logic in the face of feelings gave me the gift of clarity, of learning from their mistakes. Instead of dating boys who make me swoon but are totally wrong for me, I only date boys who hit their marks on my pros-and-cons sheet. I only date boys who on paper (or an Excel spreadsheet) share at least five common interests with me, have a broad outline of their ten-year plan, and dress like they aren’t prone to random outbursts of basketball.

Which was why Josh was boyfriend perfection.

He X’d every single box on my pre-boyfriend checklist the very first time we met, and he’d been overperforming every day for the entire three months we’d been together.

So, as I stood in front of my closet on that Valentine’s Eve, selecting the perfect outfit for the following day, I was excited. Not about nude, armed infants or epic cosmic surprises, but about my plans. I had the entire day plotted out—the gift, the words I would say, the appropriate timing of both—and it was going to be exactly what I wanted it to be.

Perfection.

Why would I wait for fate to lend a hand, when I had two perfectly capable hands of my own?