What Emotional Stakes Does The Me Before You Book Blurb Set Up?

Natalie Hale spent five years loving a man who never learned to look at her. When Ethan Cole's first love returns and he asks for a divorce, Natalie doesn't beg. She doesn't break. She asks for one month, thirty days for him to fulfill every promise he made and never kept. A candlelit dinner, a drive-in movie, an amusement park in autumn, Small things. The things that were supposed to mean us. He agrees, then he cancels and then he lies. Then she waits alone, again and again, learning in real time what she already knew in her bones, she was never his priority. But something shifts during that month. He begins to see her: her beauty, her grace, the way a room moves when she enters it. Too late, too slow, and far too little. On the thirtieth day, Natalie signs the papers, leaves a cup of coffee on the counter made exactly to his taste, and walks out the door. Three years later, she walks back in not to him, but into the same room. Radiant, accomplished and accompanied by a man who has never once made her wait. And Ethan Cole finally understands the difference between losing someone and letting them go. He let her go. She lost nothing.

Love does not always look like salvation, sometimes, it looks like ruination. For six years, Sara has lived in the shadows of her own marriage. Hidden, humiliated and disgraced, over and over again. Her husband's hatred of her has striped away every layer of her identity. She is empty, she has given and given. Now, there's nothing left to give. Sara has had enough. She is filing for a divorce and needs separation from her husband. She is determined to make something good out of her life, and leave Derek Marshall behind. Just when she is almost free, she stumbles on a devastating secret, a secret that unravels her life. Now, Sara has to chose between the man who has broken her heart, lied to her, broke her trust over and over again, and, the promise of a better, simpler, easier life. Sara and Derek find themselves, stuck between a bullet and a heartbreak. Quite literally.

Love isn't everything to Zoe. Love only shackles human beings' freedom from one another. She just wanted to have fun with the guys she'd been dating for a long time. She does not want to be bound. Because love only serves to remind her of major events that have ruined her life. Then, one day, in the name of fate, Zoe is confronted with a reckless young man who openly pursues her and doesn't know how to stop. She met him while spending the rest of her summer vacation in Scotland. When Zoe realizes she's falling in love with him, the universe reveals the truth: he's the link between her and the past she despises. What is Zoe going to do? Hold on to her ideals and flee once more, or stand tall and face everything that remains unresolved? Find me on Instagram @Dianro55

When I was seventeen, Cesare Cassano, the youngest son of the Cassano Family, saw me once—and that was it. He was hooked. At nineteen, he fought his way up and became the Don's chosen successor. At twenty-one, in front of the whole city, I said yes to Cesare's over-the-top proposal. Overnight, I became the woman every girl in Naples envied. Everybody knew the Cassano Don would do anything for me—anything—just to see me smile. And then three days later, at the billion-dollar wedding Cesare threw for me, livestreamed to the whole world, I fell off a cliff. Just like that, I was dead. Gone without a trace.

For seventeen years, Josie Callahan and Grayson Locke have been inseparable. Best friends. Neighbors. Each other's first call, first choice, and safest place. The summer before senior year, after years of hiding their feelings, they finally admit the truth. They fall in love. For one perfect summer, everything feels possible. Then, on the first day of school, Josie hears the one word that changes everything. Leukemia. With only months left to live, she makes an impossible choice. Instead of letting Gray watch her die the same way he watched cancer steal his mother two years earlier, she destroys their relationship herself. She rejects him. Breaks his heart. Pretends she never loved him. She'd rather have him hate her forever than mourn her forever. But some lies are impossible to keep. As cruel rumors spread through Cedar Bluff High, old friendships begin to fracture, jealousy turns dangerous, and Josie's secret becomes harder to hide with every passing day. Cast opposite each other as Romeo and Juliet in the school's final production before graduation, Josie and Gray are forced back into each other's lives, even as she fights to keep him at arm's length. The closer Gray gets to discovering the truth, the more desperate Josie becomes to protect him from it. But love doesn't disappear because someone asks it to. And neither does heartbreak. When time is running out, how do you convince the only person you've ever loved to let you go? Especially when he's still fighting for a forever you'll never live long enough to see.

His songs were better when he had a broken heart. That sentence would change my life after my dream job was dished to me on a shiny, silver platter. All I had to do? Hurt Nash Pierce enough to get him writing good music again. The pop icon’s songs were no longer the phenomena they used to be. His team needed another breakthrough album—like the first he’d penned, using his heartbreak as fuel. The plan was simple: I’d go on tour with him as a backup dancer…and make him fall in love with me. I was hired to inspire—to become embedded into every lyric he wrote. Then, I was to set fire to it all—to destroy every feeling we hoped he’d develop for me. It seemed simple enough. Easy, even. I didn’t expect to be consumed myself—to see so much in the man displayed in the tabloids. I didn’t foresee falling for him. It didn’t occur to me that, while attempting to break his heart, I might just shatter my own. Most of all, I never thought I’d fight so hard to hold on to a relationship that had always been founded on goodbye.