Prologue Summary
On the eve of Valentine’s Day, Emilie Hornby sorts the world into two camps—hopeless romantics and eye-rolling cynics—and declares herself a third category entirely. She loves the chocolates and roses, but she refuses to leave love to destiny. Her mantra is simple and sharp: plans over fate, every time.
What Happens
Emilie opens by mapping how people approach Valentine’s Day: the believers who worship soulmates and cosmic signs, and the skeptics who dismiss it as a Hallmark scam. She stakes out her own lane. She’ll take the candy and flowers, but not the mythology. For her, love isn’t a lightning strike—it’s a calendar item. “Fate is for suckers. Love is for planners.”
She traces this philosophy back to her parents’ implosion. Her mom and dad meet at eighteen, marry on Valentine’s Day after a month, and spend years in a volatile on-and-off relationship that becomes the “soundtrack” of her childhood before ending in a “screaming breakup.” Emilie files their story under What Not To Do. She builds a system instead: a pros-and-cons sheet, compatibility tests, standards like shared interests, a ten-year plan, and decent clothes.
Enter Josh Sutton, the boyfriend who passes every checklist and has, for three months, delivered exactly what she ordered: predictability, compatibility, calm. Standing at her closet, Emilie doesn’t daydream about destiny. She fine-tunes a schedule. She has the gift, the words, the timing—everything arranged for a flawless Valentine’s Day. She crowns the plan with a line that reads like a dare: “Why would I wait for fate to lend a hand, when I had two perfectly capable hands of my own?”
Character Development
Emilie presents as precise, witty, and control-obsessed, crafting romance like a project plan. Her certainty feels like armor forged from a chaotic childhood, and her confidence edges into hubris.
- Builds identity around order: lists, criteria, timelines
- Chooses partners who fit metrics over sparks
- Masks fear of unpredictability with logic and structure
- Sees her parents’ passion as a cautionary tale, not a model
- Frames agency as safety, dismissing chance as a threat
Themes & Symbols
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Fate vs. Control: The prologue plants the book’s central conflict. Emilie treats fate as laziness and control as virtue, engineering outcomes to neutralize uncertainty. The setup primes a clash between her neatly managed expectations and the messiness of real life.
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Authenticity and Identity: Emilie’s planner persona looks sturdy, but it raises a question: if every feeling must be vetted and scheduled, is there room for something genuine to surprise her? The tension between curated self and spontaneous emotion begins here.
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Valentine’s Day as symbol: Emilie strips the holiday of mystique and turns it into a project milestone. The commercial gloss becomes her comfort zone—a controllable version of love that keeps chaos at bay.
Key Quotes
“Fate is for suckers. Love is for planners.”
This line functions as Emilie’s thesis and the novel’s gauntlet. It defines her values—agency, logic, preparation—while daring the story to prove her wrong. It also reveals her blind spot: equating control with security.
“Why would I wait for fate to lend a hand, when I had two perfectly capable hands of my own?”
Confident and ironic, this closing question tightens the dramatic spring. It frames the coming plot as a stress test of her worldview and foreshadows a scenario where her “capable hands” won’t be enough.
Her parents’ relationship was the “soundtrack of [her] childhood” culminating in a “screaming breakup.”
These images compress years of instability into visceral sound. They justify Emilie’s rigidity while hinting that her logic is, at heart, a trauma response disguised as a plan.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
The prologue lays the rails for the novel’s engine: Emilie’s need to control collides with the unpredictability of love and life. By anchoring her identity in planning—and scorning fate—the story builds strong dramatic irony. As explored in the Full Book Summary, her meticulously plotted Valentine’s Day sets up the central conflict and foreshadows the cosmic curveball that forces her to confront everything she refuses to leave to chance.