This is what I never knew about loss—it’s also about what you gain. You carry a weight that you never had before. It’s never behind you. It’s alongside you.

Just Last Night (From ARC, quotes may have changed in publication copy)

Thank you, NetGalley and William Morrow, for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Eve, Justin, Susie, and Ed have been friends since they were teenagers. Now in their thirties, the four are as close as ever, Thursday night bar trivia is sacred, and Eve is still secretly in love with Ed. Maybe she should have moved on by now, but she can’t stop thinking about what could have been. And she knows Ed still thinks about it, too.

But then, in an instant, their lives are changed forever.

In the aftermath, Eve’s world is upended. As stunning secrets are revealed, she begins to wonder if she really knew her friends as well as she thought. And when someone from the past comes back into her life, Eve’s future veers in a surprising new direction…

They say every love story starts with a single moment. What if it was just last night?

This is one of those books that I think is going to stay with me for a while. It’s a little hard to talk about why I loved this book without completely spoiling what happens in it, but I’ll do my best. Just One Night focuses on Eve, a 34-year-old self-proclaimed Goth with a group of friends—Ed, Justin, and Susie—she’s had since she was a teenager. Sixteen years later, despite Eve’s secret pining over Ed and Ed’s girlfriend, who the group has never liked, the group of friends has remained as tightly knit as they were as teens—until something happens that irreparably changes the group’s dynamic forever. 

After “that night”, Eve has to navigate impossible grief while trying to find a new normal for her life. In this process, Eve finds out a secret that shatters the foundation of her “tight-knit” friendships and forces her to confront whether they were really ever as close as she thought they were. And to complicate matters, a person from her past comes back into her life, opening the door to more secrets that make her question even more whether she really had the life she thought she had to begin with.

When I read the blurb on NetGalley, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect—maybe some pining, intrigue, and uncovered secrets, a new love interest that changes the main character’s outlook on everything. And I did get that, but I also got a poignant look at loss, grief, and guilt and how those can affect even the tightest knit friendships and relationships. I think what I enjoyed the most is how powerful the relationships are in this story. While there is quite a bit of plot, the relationships between the characters really drive the narrative. 

The portrayal of the friendship between Eve, Ed, Susie, and Justin isn’t just a rose-colored view of friendship. Yes, their friendship is full of fun and laughter, but it’s also raw and honest and messy. When Susie’s brother Finlay enters the scene, we get a look at the complexity of sibling relationships and how two people living through what seems like the experience can come out of it with two completely different versions of events. The romance in this is slow to start, only really beginning in the second half of the book, but it’s set up well and resolves nicely. It isn’t what drives the book, which I actually really enjoyed. 

Just One Night takes a complicated and messy topic and manages to combine it with a sweet, slow-burn romance in a beautiful and powerful way.