REVIEW: Still the One by Aimee Brown
Dear Aimee Brown,
Eve Cassidy is an ER nurse in Portland. A Facebook memory pops up to remind her that five years earlier, she married Guy Foster (who goes by Fost or Foster). They married after a whirlwind romance of only 30 days and split after three months. Every year she gets one comment and every year she likes that comment and that’s the only contact the couple have had since she left him a note and left their Florida home.
Foster is a Freestyle Motocross (FMX) rider on the professional circuit. He makes a lot of money doing what he loves. It also means he travels a lot. When he and Eve got married, he had preexisting commitments he had to keep and Eve spent too much time alone. She ended up leaving. After she left, he never contacted her so it’s fair to say both have some baggage left over from their relationship.
Then a man comes into the ER with serious injuries and it’s her ex-husband. Fost, in Portland for a competition, was distracted thinking about Eve on their anniversary and didn’t land a particularly tricky stunt. He is in an extremely serious condition when he’s brought in. He has surgery and then is in the ICU for a period of time. Despite everything, Eve finds herself caring deeply about Foster’s state of health. And, it turns out, she is still listed as his next of kin.
After Foster is well enough to leave the hospital he is still not able to fly and needs a lot of physical therapy so he ends up going home to stay with Eve as his personal nurse for a couple more weeks.
It’s clear both Eve and Foster were pretty immature five years earlier when they met and married so quickly. Neither had a proper conversation about what they wanted and how they could make things work; they just gave up.
Foster has been in love with Eve since the day they met and it’s clear there is still a connection and strong bond between them now. As they spend time together while he recovers, each starts to wonder if maybe there is a way for them.
But then Foster drops a bombshell which threatens everything.
I didn’t really have a problem with the set up; it wasn’t unbelievable to me that a couple would be immature and foolish and not talk to each other about what wasn’t working in their relationship. It wasn’t unbelievable to me that Foster’s chosen profession – both something very dangerous and also something that keeps him away from home often – would be an issue between them. So, in terms of what went wrong back then, well, I was prepared to go with it.It’s a second chance romance: something had to go wrong in the first place or there wouldn’t need to be a second chance. But I would have liked to have seen exactly how they planned to fix it. There was an epilogue five years after the events of the story which shows that they did make it work but I didn’t really see them doing the work. I wanted to see them having some of those difficult conversations and compromising rather than just the end result.
I liked the characters well enough for the most part but I wasn’t really moved by the story.
Grade: C
regards,
Kaetrin
