Most Important Quotes
The Defining Wound
"You only say that... because you don’t know what love is."
Speaker: Robby | Context: In his car the day after Hannah’s mother’s funeral (Chapter 2), Robby says this as he breaks up with her right after she tells him she loves him.
Analysis: This line is the core emotional injury that Hannah Brooks carries, weaponizing her deepest insecurity that she is somehow unlovable or incapable of love. The cruelty lands because it echoes her history of trauma and self-protective stoicism, turning a moment of vulnerability into shame. The irony is sharp: the shallow, disloyal Robby presumes to judge what love is, while the novel’s arc—Hannah’s genuine bond with Jack Stapleton—systematically refutes his verdict. Structurally, the line sets the stakes for Hannah’s growth and frames the thematic journey toward Love and Vulnerability.
The Public Declaration
"I do... In a heartbeat."
Speaker: Jack Stapleton | Context: At Thanksgiving dinner (Chapter 28), after Kennedy Monroe tries to humiliate Hannah by asking who would choose her over Kennedy, Jack answers without hesitation.
Analysis: This simple, decisive statement is the moment the fake romance becomes undeniably real, offering Hannah public affirmation where she expects rejection. It inverts the dynamics of Appearance vs. Reality by elevating substance and character over celebrity sheen. The communal response from the Stapleton family transforms the scene into collective healing, directly countering the wound inflicted by Robby. As a narrative hinge, the line crystallizes Hannah’s growing self-worth and establishes Jack’s love as active, visible, and brave.
Carrying It Forward
"I think just because you can’t keep something doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it. Nothing lasts forever. What matters is what we take with us. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to escape... But now I wonder if escape is overrated. I think, now, I’m going to try thinking about what I can carry forward."
Speaker: Hannah Brooks | Context: At Thanksgiving dinner (Chapter 28), during her turn to share what she’s grateful for.
Analysis: Hannah reframes her life from flight to integration, exchanging avoidance for the grace of memory and meaning. This shift shows her absorbing the warmth of the Stapleton family and recognizing that even temporary joys can leave permanent, sustaining imprints. Stylistically, the anaphora and reflective cadence enact her new steadiness, as if her thinking has slowed enough to feel. It’s a milestone of healing that prepares her to love Jack in a way not defined by emergency or escape.
The Buried Truth
"I wasn’t driving!"
Speaker: Jack Stapleton | Context: In a confrontation with Hank after the stalker is revealed (Chapter 24), Jack finally tells the family the truth about the fatal accident.
Analysis: This confession detonates the false narrative that has governed the family’s grief, especially the rift between Jack and Hank. It recasts Jack’s isolation as an act of loyalty to his brother Drew rather than a retreat from culpability, revealing a private burden of love and secrecy. The line’s abruptness mirrors the shock of truth breaking through years of silence. As the keystone revelation, it unlocks the novel’s movement toward Grief, Family, and Healing.
Thematic Quotes
Love and Vulnerability
Professional Boundaries
"You can’t—absolutely cannot—have a thing for your principal. That’s just Executive Protection 101."
Speaker: Hannah Brooks (Narrator) | Context: After Jack helps her through a tough moment (Chapter 16), Hannah realizes she’s breaking a cardinal rule of her job.
Analysis: The rule foregrounds Hannah’s internal stalemate between duty and desire, turning her professionalism into both shield and cage. Falling for Jack Stapleton threatens the identity she’s built on discipline and distance, heightening the slow-burn tension of their proximity. The declarative tone and repetition (“absolutely cannot”) underscore how she polices her own heart. By casting love as an occupational hazard, the line refracts the theme of Love and Vulnerability through workplace ethics, where intimacy equals risk.
The Nature of Love
"Maybe love isn’t a judgment you render—but a chance you take. Maybe it’s something you choose to do—over and over. For yourself. And everyone else."
Speaker: Hannah Brooks (Narrator) | Context: In the novel’s closing reflections (Chapter 33), Hannah articulates what she’s learned about love with Jack.
Analysis: This thesis statement answers Robby’s early condemnation by redefining love as practice rather than verdict. The parallel structure and incremental repetition enact the courage of choosing again and again. It marks the completion of Hannah’s arc from self-protection to generosity, reframing love as agency and daily work. As a guiding principle, it distills the ethos of Love and Vulnerability into a humane, actionable creed.
Appearance vs. Reality
The Unassuming Protector
"You’d think I was a kindergarten teacher before you’d ever suspect that I could kill you with a corkscrew."
Speaker: Hannah Brooks (Narrator) | Context: Early on (Chapter 2), Hannah describes her tactical advantage as a bodyguard who doesn’t look dangerous.
Analysis: The deadpan humor and hyperbole (“kill you with a corkscrew”) dramatize how surface deceives. Hannah’s underestimated appearance becomes both skill set and identity tension, especially as Robby and even Jack initially misread her. The line crystallizes the novel’s fascination with facades—from celebrity images to “fake dating”—and how truth hides in plain sight. It’s a mission statement for the book’s play with Appearance vs. Reality.
The Central Premise
"We’re going to tell them you’re my girlfriend."
Speaker: Jack Stapleton | Context: Jack proposes the cover story to protect his sick mother from worry (Chapter 6).
Analysis: With this, the novel snaps into its classic rom-com engine, forcing performance to rub against genuine feeling. The ruse literalizes Appearance vs. Reality, making each staged touch a test tube where real attraction reacts and compounds. As they co-create a believable fiction, the story asks what authenticity is in a world of practiced charm. The premise becomes a crucible that burns away artifice and reveals character.
Grief, Family, and Healing
The Need to Escape
"You can’t spend your entire life running away."
Speaker: Glenn Schultz | Context: After Hannah begs for an overseas assignment right after her mother’s death (Chapter 1), Glenn refuses to let her bolt.
Analysis: Glenn names Hannah’s coping strategy—flight—and denies her the familiar exit ramp. His unvarnished pragmatism places her in proximity to her feelings and the Stapleton family, where avoidance becomes impossible. The spare command cuts like tough love, a rhetorical slap that resets her trajectory. Forced stillness becomes the condition for grief work, connection, and change.
The Pain of Being Unloved
"I just hate myself so much for not being loved."
Speaker: Wilbur | Context: During the rooftop standoff (Chapter 31), Wilbur voices the hurt driving his dangerous choices.
Analysis: Wilbur’s confession echoes Hannah’s private terror, the lie that lack of love equals lack of worth—seeded by Robby’s cruelty. The line externalizes a universal ache, letting Hannah meet her own pain with empathy rather than escape. Its stark self-loathing shows what grief can curdle into when connection fails. The moment folds individual crisis into the wider pattern of Grief, Family, and Healing, where compassion becomes de-escalation.
Character-Defining Moments
Hannah Brooks
"I’m like a shark, you know? I just always have to be moving. I need to get water through my gills. If I stay here, I’ll die."
Speaker: Hannah Brooks | Context: Pleading with Glenn not to ground her after her mother’s funeral (Chapter 1).
Analysis: The shark metaphor captures Hannah’s restlessness as both professional posture and emotional avoidance. She equates motion with survival, revealing a belief that stillness equals psychic death. The vivid, slightly comic image humanizes her while exposing her fragility. Her time at the ranch with Jack challenges this creed, teaching her that staying can sustain rather than drown her.
Jack Stapleton
"I just wake up every day thinking about how a person—a really great person, a much better person than me—isn’t here, and I am. The only way to make my existence bearable is to try to do something every day that justifies my life."
Speaker: Jack Stapleton | Context: Jack confides in Hannah about life after Drew’s death (Chapter 21).
Analysis: This articulation of survivor’s guilt reframes Jack’s public withdrawal and quiet good deeds as penance. The contrast between his movie-star image and his private sorrow intensifies the novel’s meditation on image and truth. The language of “justify” suggests a moral ledger he can never balance, deepening his tenderness and restraint. Understanding this burden is key to his reconciliation with family and to accepting love without self-punishment.
Glenn Schultz
"Life is unfair. That’s not news. I know exactly what Robby did to you, and I know this isn’t exactly the escape you were looking for... but this is the best opportunity you’ve got. So you’re making the most of it."
Speaker: Glenn Schultz | Context: Assigning Hannah to protect Jack and framing it as a competition for London (Chapter 4).
Analysis: Glenn’s tough-love credo—part flinty realism, part mentorship—refuses to sentimentalize pain while still advocating for Hannah. He names the wound without indulging it, channeling her hurt toward growth. The clipped, managerial cadence mirrors his ethos: no excuses, only outcomes. As catalyst, he denies her escape and thereby engineers her healing.
Robby
"Just look! Nobody in a million years will ever possibly believe that this person, right here, bested the legendary Kennedy Monroe to become Jack Stapleton’s girlfriend."
Speaker: Robby | Context: At the office (Chapter 6), Robby sneers that Hannah is too plain to be believable as Jack’s girlfriend.
Analysis: Robby’s taunt is pure surface logic, equating worth with beauty and womanhood with competitive spectacle. It publicly extends the private narrative he used to erode Hannah’s self-esteem, sharpening him as an antagonist. The dramatic irony is delicious: the story’s central conceit proves him wrong, and Jack’s real choice undoes Robby’s value system. The line spotlights the novel’s critique of shallow optics.
Connie Stapleton
"You boys are going to find a way to get along—or kill each other trying."
Speaker: Connie Stapleton | Context: After another Jack–Hank blowup (Chapter 15), Connie orders Hank to move back to the ranch until Thanksgiving.
Analysis: Connie’s ultimatum, equal parts ribbing and resolve, reveals her as the family’s iron-willed heart. Even ill, she refuses to let the rift fester, using maternal authority to stage proximity therapy. The humor laces the threat, keeping warmth inside command. Her intervention sets in motion the confrontations that enable Grief, Family, and Healing.
Memorable Lines
An Astronaut's Allure
"He looks like an astronaut."
Speaker: Hannah’s mother | Context: Her first impression of Robby (Chapter 1).
Analysis: With five words, the novel sketches Robby’s all-American, heroic veneer—clean, capable, aspirational. The image is vivid and witty, instantly cinematic. Ironically, the metaphor highlights the gulf between appearance and character, foreshadowing his emotional cowardice. It’s a miniature study in how charisma can camouflage emptiness.
A Gruff Reality Check
"Bullshit... Dying’s a lot harder than you think."
Speaker: Glenn Schultz | Context: Glenn cuts through Hannah’s melodramatic claim that she’ll “die” if she has to stay in Houston (Chapter 1).
Analysis: Glenn’s profanity and gallows humor puncture hyperbole with lived-in truth, establishing the novel’s wry tonal blend. The bluntness is a boundary and a kindness—he won’t let her dramatize what real danger looks like. The line becomes a signature of his mentoring style: tough talk in service of resilience. It’s memorable for its bark and its hard-earned wisdom.
Laundry and the Rapture
"It’s like the Rapture happened, and they took Jack first."
Speaker: Hannah Brooks | Context: At family breakfast (Chapter 15), Hannah jokes about Jack’s habit of leaving clothes on the floor.
Analysis: The comic simile is perfectly visual, turning a mess into an absence with a wink. Humor acts as social glue here, easing tension and helping Hannah find her footing with the family. The line also shows what Jack loves about her: authenticity over polish. It’s a small, bright bead on the string of their intimacy.
Opening and Closing Lines
Opening Line
"MY MOTHER’S DYING wish was for me to take a vacation."
Speaker: Hannah Brooks (Narrator) | Context: The novel’s first sentence (Chapter 1), arriving immediately after her mother’s death.
Analysis: The juxtaposition of “dying” and “vacation” compresses the book’s tensions—grief beside levity, obligation beside avoidance—into one hooky line. It signals Grief, Family, and Healing while exposing Hannah’s workaholism as both refuge and flaw. The sentence functions as inciting irony, propelling her toward Glenn, the assignment, and Jack. It frames a story that will transform reluctance into restoration.
Closing Line
"He mirrors back to you a version of yourself that’s infused with admiration. A version that is absolutely, always, undeniably … lovable."
Speaker: Hannah Brooks (Narrator) | Context: Epilogue reflection on what Jack’s love has given her.
Analysis: The crescendo of modifiers builds to the word that undoes the novel’s first wound: “lovable,” the answer to Robby’s cruelty. The mirror image suggests that true love is a form of honest seeing that revises self-perception. It emphasizes that Jack offers not glamour but grace—the permission to believe in herself. As a thematic benediction on Love and Vulnerability, it leaves the reader with faith in chosen, sustaining affection.