If you're super into CoHo you won't like this review. Fair warning.

Sometimes I remember I read this and am just filled with instant regret. The 3 stars aren't because it was good, it was because it was easy to read this quickly enough that I could ignore the worst of the issues.

WHY the fuck were the two leads hooking up. Absolutely zero chemistry with the most boring people ever. I was rooting for Verity the entire time. Not to mention it being the most cringe-worthy sex scenes I've ever had the misfortune of reading. Removing this would have made the entire novel infinitely better.

This book REALLY feels like CoHo couldn't think of a more evil thing for a woman to be, than to not want kids. Like, literally everything Verity wrote was fine until it came to the kids. It was so over-the-top I thought it HAD to have been fake. It not being fake was honestly a bigger plot twist than anything else that happened in the book. Legitimately it almost felt like a Chick tract on women who aren't doing their "Godly duties" or something, I just figured there was absolutely no way this was intended at face value because it was so badly done.

I thought the twist was going to be that Lorell or whoever was secretly adding in the "evil I killed my children" parts to the "novel" and that's why it was taking her so goddamn long to read it. You mean to tell me that someone who is SUPPOSEDLY an author, can't read 19 fucking measly chapters when they're supposedly telling you that the comatose wife of the guy you're hooking up with is actually evil?? What the fuck.

OR I thought that the husband had planted the novel himself, because that guy was a creep the entire novel. I never trusted him once, and the fact that he was supposedly "innocent" and only driven to literal vehicular manslaughter because of his "evil wife"? Nonsense. He was so covered in red flags I thought it was exaggerated to make me notice (reading reviews of other CoHo books lets me know she just habitually writes the creepiest and worst men ever and then calls it a romance for some godawful reason).

You mean to tell me, that he had just HAPPENED to read this novel by this literal no-name and so he chose her to finish the books after he attempted to murder his wife, and them being together at the end is a ROMANTIC ENDING??

I was absolutely waiting for the twist to either be,
a) the Lauren or whoever person was implanting the "evil" parts to the wife's novels to turn her husband against her so she could take him for herself, and had somehow orchestrated him choosing her as the writer fill-in and/or him finding the original edited copy which drove him to attempt to murder his wife as well as her planning on integrating herself into his life later;
b) the husband orchestrated the "evil" wife parts into her diary and attempted to kill her, and was stalking our main lead and this was him using all his manipulations to get her to choose him by planting the "evil wife vs good husband" narrative in the fake diary; or
c) both of those are true but they were working together and the reason it took her so long to "read" them was because the rest of the novel was a written log of her "reading" the novel so she'd have plausible deniability when they murdered the wife or set her up to take the blame or whatever.

Unfortunately for me, this was the first CoHo book I've ever read and I wasn't aware she wrote for people who never moved past their "Wattpad One Direction during the Purge" phase and so I thought it was intended to be this badly done to set up an obvious twist of one or both of the main leads being secretly behind it all, and not a legitimate thriller with the only twist being "lol was Verity actually evil????". This is the "thriller" for people who don't read thriller or horror I guess, lmao. I mean, you do you, but I'll never get over my coworker suggesting this book to me and then acting like her hating her kids to this cartoonishly evil was, like, the worst thing she's ever read.