Type-A Manhattan lawyer Dannie Kohan has meticulously planned out her five-year plan. After accepting her boyfriend's proposal, she envisions herself in a different apartment engaged to another man five years in the future. When she wakes up, she files the experience in the back of her mind...until she meets the man from her long-ago vision and must figure out how to deter the destiny she didn't plan for.

I really commend Rebecca Serle for the amount of twists she packs into this story. For one, I thought the story would be more sci-fi than drama. That's more on me than her, but still - every couple of chapters, I assumed to know where the story was heading only for the plot to shift gears. She manages to avoid sweeping the rug out from me as a reader that's too jarring, but keep the story going that made me connect with the characters and relationships. That said, I was interested in how Dannie would navigate this vision that could steer her life into another direction but didn't felt like the dots all were connected.

A big hurdle is how the story skips ahead to the date when her vision takes place

Spoiler

and meeting the mystery man she's feared to catch up with - her best friend's boyfriend / fiancee. Serle decides to avoid the love triangle or affair trope, and settles for Dannie's best friend Bella discovering a terminal cancer diagnosis.

Another twist. Where you think the man is the object of the story, Serle aims for Dannie's friendship to take front and center, using Dannie's impending loss to come to terms that nothing in life is really in anyone's control. Though I found myself wrapped up in Dannie and Bella's heartening and heartbreaking friendship, Dannie's methodical approach to life begins to feel way to passive and more of a quirky detail than anything more substantial. As the old saying goes, "Life is what happens to us while we are busy making other plans", the story ends up not really intending for Dannie to use her knowledge of the future to steer her life in a specific direction - but just let it all play out and see where it leads. Her agency to change things that are no longer serving her is supposed to sparked by a tragic subplot, but I felt it was more of a diluted bystander or by-product more than anything else. By the end, that initial premonition that's supposed to spark the whole chain of events doesn't quite add up to a fulfilling full circle moment.