Audrey Adams is a barista in a Brooklyn coffee shop. She can’t help but be attracted to Theo Sullivan, a painfully shy customer who doesn’t remove his KN95 mask, even to drink his coffee. One day Theo tries to help Audrey with an aggressive customer, but the woman retaliates by ripping the mask off his face, revealing a large, disfiguring facial scar. Theo flees the shop and doesn’t return, leaving only his sketchbook behind. A few weeks later, Audrey spies him on the street and encourages him to come back. The two begin dating and quickly fall in love. Audrey had moved to New York for college after being raised by a foster mother in Tampa, Florida. Now 24, she is just one semester shy of finishing her degree in electrical engineering at NYU. Theo grew up in New York. His parents divorced, and while his late father was a mechanic, his mother is a lawyer from a wealthy, powerful family. Theo never fit in with his mother’s clan, preferring to work in his father’s garage. He eventually pursued art and design instead of law school, making him even more of a black sheep. Even though there are interesting opportunities for friction and conflict in Audrey and Theo’s relationship—for example, class differences or their eight-year age gap—the novel’s only source of tension is Theo’s refusal to tell the story of his life-threatening accident. Harris makes several disjointed narrative decisions. The body of the novel is told exclusively from Audrey’s point of view, except for a 35-page flashback of Theo’s accident. Even more unusual is a 74-page epilogue that retells most of the major plot points from Theo’s perspective, which has the unfortunate effect of making this lonely, broken man seem sidelined in his own story.
