Forget The Guy

She planned the perfect anniversary. He forgot it existed. Cleo Hensley did everything right. She ordered the cake. She ironed the dress. She lit the candles and roasted the chicken and carried the chocolate ganache anniversary cake home in a cab across Manhattan because Marcus didn't have time. Marcus never had time. So on the night of their sixth anniversary, sitting on her kitchen floor in an old NYU hoodie eating cake alone, Cleo does the one thing she should have done a long time ago. She lets him go. What follows is not a story about falling apart. It's a story about a woman who realizes she has been holding herself carefully in place for six years and finally, quietly, lets herself move. There's her brand strategy business that she built from nothing and refuses to apologize for. There's Jade, her best friend, who has opinions about everything and is right about most of them. There's the Blossom & Co. client who needs Cleo to find the honest version of a brand — which turns out to require the same skill as finding the honest version of yourself. And then there's Eli Thorne. Her neighbor in 4B. An architect who reads books at wine bars, remembers the small things she mentions in passing, and shows up — not dramatically, not with grand gestures — just consistently, quietly, the way the right people do. Cleo is not looking for someone new. She is not ready, not sure, not in the business of trusting her own feelings just yet. But New York is a small city when you live four doors down from someone worth paying attention to. Forget The Guy is a warm, funny, emotionally honest contemporary romance about what it takes to stop shrinking for the wrong person and start being specific about what you actually want. Set against the backdrop of the Upper West Side, Riverside Park, and the kind of New York autumn that makes everything feel like a second chance, this novel is for every woman who has ever been patient for too long and finally decided she was done.