Not the Love Story You Were Expecting

Timing really can be everything

The Second Act is a weekly newsletter packed with obsessively-curated recommendations and ideas—let’s get to it!

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📚 Count My Lies by Sarah Bonner — If you’re craving a psychological thriller with serious page-turning energy, this one delivers. Tense, twisty, and dripping with secrets, it follows a woman juggling motherhood, marriage, and a carefully concealed double life. It’s the kind of book you stay up too late reading, convinced you’ll stop after just one more chapter (you won’t).

📺 And Just Like That (streaming on Max) — Look, I know this show gets mixed reviews, but it’s like comfort food for your brain. There’s something oddly grounding about watching Carrie & co. stumble through their 50s with the same chaotic energy they had in their 30s. Cringe moments? Yes. But also: fashion, friendship, and enough nostalgia to make it worth the ride.

📚 The Art of Vanishing by Morgan Pager — A spellbinding love story that blurs the line between reality and art. With echoes of magical realism and deep emotional resonance, it’s a stunning debut about longing, imagination, and the timeless pull of connection.

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“I think I’m done.”

The words landed before I had even got to his front door.

That evening, the air between us felt different, uncertain, fragile. It was early summer, and we had just returned from a weekend away, the kind that should’ve left us feeling more connected, not less. There hadn’t been a fight, no dramatic unraveling, just a quiet distance that had begun to settle in like fog, soft but unmistakable.

I paused in the entryway, not quite ready to step all the way in. My feet stayed planted, as if crossing the threshold might make it all too real. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft. Steady. Certain. Like the words had already settled somewhere inside him, long before I’d arrived.

“I think I’m done.”

“You’re done?” I asked, still. “What does that mean?”

“I just... I don’t think this is working. I don’t know how to move forward anymore.”

We’d been together for over a year, but it felt like we had lived a lifetime in that stretch. We shared so much, long walks at Woodward, playlists passed back and forth like love notes, creative dreams, the same pull toward deep conversation and the occasional dive into something philosophical at 11:11 p.m. He helped me unpack boxes when I moved into my first solo home after the divorce. He saw me learning how to be on my own, how to parent in this new version of my life, how to hold the shape of everything without dropping it. Exploring newness, not just in routines or spaces, but in the way I moved through the world. He witnessed the quiet bravery it took to set the dinner table for three instead of four, to laugh again without guilt, to rebuild rituals from the wreckage. He was there in the softness of becoming, as I figured out who I was without the titles, without the marriage, without the safety net.

And now it was over.

“I’m just done,” he said again, and I stood there, not quite sure what to do with that kind of finality.

I drove home, changed for a dinner like my life wasn’t quietly unraveling. Like I hadn’t just heard someone I love say he was done. I stood in front of my closet, staring blankly at dresses, willing myself to pick one. I put on mascara with a shaky hand, smoothed my hair, forced myself into the motions of normalcy. I’d done this before. I knew how to keep going. How to tuck the ache into the folds of an evening, how to slip on composure like a second skin. I could show up, smile, order the pasta, talk about the weather. I could make it all look fine, even when everything underneath was starting to fall apart.