“I didn’t need love. I didn’t need to fall into it. I didn’t need to find it at all. Not again. Never again. Because love stories were enough. They were safe. They would never fail me.”

This quote highlights Elsy’s overall view of love compared to that of love stories in the beginning of the novel. After her breakup with Liam, she felt like she could never love again, but her continual reading of romance novels shows how Elsy still sought out stories about love. Her qualification that she doesn’t need love also shows how Elsy often looks to what she needs on a broader scale more than what she wants for herself.

“If this was a romance novel, we’d kiss. That’s what always happens—the gumptious heroine meets her match in the first chapter. A meet-cute. Something memorable. Remarkable. […] My story wasn’t that interesting, anyway. A three-star read at best. I could imagine the trade reviews—Though she tackles the mundanity of her life with aplomb, nothing happens to Eileen Merriweather. Angst-ridden backstory told in deeply regrettable prose. An utterly skippable read.”

Elsy thinks this shortly after meeting Anders and being alone with him at the bookstore. It shows her encyclopedic knowledge of the romance genre as she ironically plots out exactly what would happen next. Yet this also shows Elsy’s self-deprecating nature, as she describes her life as a book that she wouldn’t read herself.

“It was a year I’d rather not remember. Mom said that everyone had them, when your entire world is upended and you can’t seem to get your footing again. Except, I never found my footing again, and I’d been stumbling ever since.”

Here, Elsy is referring to the year Liam ended their engagement and Rachel Flowers died shortly after, dashing her hopes of a happy ending to the Quixotic Falls saga. Her confession that she has been stumbling since shows how her breakup with Liam was only the catalyst for a series of bad feelings. Though she knows that other people experience this, Elsy sees how she is unable to shake the bad habits of her relationship with Liam and the aftermath of their engagement.