Read Abby Jimenez’s ‘The Night We Met’ Annotated Excerpt

Welcome to The Scroll, a new column that checks in with your favorite writers, asking them to exclusively reveal and annotate the best moments from their brand new books. We also get them to dish on their writing process and divulge a few plot secrets along the way.

This round, we chatted with Abby Jimenez, who basically needs no introduction at this point thanks to her beloved romance novels that have made her a household name around the world (along with her cupcakes). Her upcoming novel, The Night We Met, continues the Say You’ll Remember Me series and follows a brand new couple who realize that one life decision might have taken them away from the person they’re meant to be with. Below, Abby chats with us about second-chance romances, following the rules of romance, and how authors still have us root for these characters even when times get tough.

Everyone loves a meet-cute, but The Night We Met gives us what I’ll call a remeet-cute between characters Larissa and Chris.

This book was very different for me. The characters have met before (in the bonus epilogue of a special edition of Say You’ll Remember Me), but it didn’t go the way it should have. Choices were made. The wrong choices. I really enjoyed giving them their second meet-cute here because Chris didn’t get a fair shot the first time.

While this is a sequel to Say You’ll Remember Me, you’ve mentioned it can also be read as a standalone. How do you balance writing for fans eager for book two with bringing in totally new readers?

I always focus on the main characters of the current book I’m writing, but I weave in these other past characters with just enough depth so that anyone can understand and relate to them, even if you’ve never met them before. This is a good book for people to start with, but then I think that with all my books. I’m writing unique characters, unique plots. I’m not repeating what you’ve already read.

The book comes out in March 2026, but it was originally supposed to be published before Say You’ll Remember Me. Why did you end up swapping the order?

I realized I needed to spend more time with these characters. They’d been living rent-free in my head for years. It’s such a challenging love story, and I just didn’t feel that I was a strong enough writer yet to take on this sort of nuanced plot. It needed so much care in the development of the story because I wanted everyone to root for both Larissa and Chris.

Did any changes have to happen to still allow it to work in this new order?

It was a bit of a rewrite, for sure. Xavier was single when I was writing Chris’s story. Then I just realized I needed to spend more time with these characters. I already knew what Xavier story was going to be, so it was definitely a bit of a rewrite to extract single Xavier out of the book and insert married Xavier into The Night We Met. But it didn't really change too much the dynamic of the friends.

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Time is often the one thing that writers don’t get, but you had that advantage here with these characters. However, was there ever a moment you felt like it was a disadvantage?

I feel like every book at some point has me in a dark place. I'm wondering what I'm doing and and it's so hard. This book was probably one of the most challenging books I've ever written, but I never wanted to give up on it. I always knew this was a story I wanted to write, because I love yearning. I love tension, I love slow burn, and this is just all of those things times a million.

You explain in your annotations (on the next page) that the book’s central relationship is...complicated. How did you set romantic boundaries for the characters?

I look inward at my own relationship and how I would feel if these things happened to me. Or to a friend—how would I want them to behave? I try to keep it as respectful as possible.

The romance genre’s big rule is that its books must have a “happily ever after.” What are the rules for an Abby Jimenez book?

There always has to be an interesting meet-cute. There have to be strong friendships, preferably for both characters. Those really help get things out of their brains and onto the page via dialogue. There has to be great tension. There doesn’t have to be spice—you can have yearning and tension with zero spice, which is one of the things that I love about romance. It’s such a varied genre with so many different manifestations. But you’ve got to make the reader believe in the story.

How do you do that?

At the end of the book, I like to sit back and ask myself, Could I see these two together in 20 years? If I can’t, then I haven’t done my job.