Anywhere With You - Softcover

Palmer, Ellie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593714326 ISBN 13: 9780593714324

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2025

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Tiny van. Enormous feelings.

Charley Beekman is thriving . . . if you overlook that she's financially strapped, stuck in a dull legal career, and the youngest divorcee at the Ruth's Chris Steak House. After being left by a man she was sure was too boring to ever leave, she's figured out that the key to true happiness is protecting yourself from surprises. So when her free-spirited sister announces she's eloping with an on-again, off-again childhood sweetheart, Charley knows she has to stop the wedding before her sister makes the biggest mistake of her life. Conveniently, Charley's best friend, Ethan, who's as gorgeous as he is chronically unreliable, has an extra seat in his camper van. 

As Charley and Ethan embark on a wild road trip through the enchanting northern woods of Minnesota, Charley starts to feel something she's ignored for years—a spark that threatens to turn into a full-blown bonfire. But after crashing and burning at marriage despite her best-laid plans, the last thing Charley needs is a fling with a noncommittal, irresistible, nomadic musician . . . right?

Hilarious, witty, and teeming with heart, Anywhere With You is the perfect escape for anyone who believes that sometimes the best destinations are the ones you never planned.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ellie Palmer is the author of Four Weekends and a Funeral and Anywhere With You, and is a prototypical Midwesterner who routinely apologizes to inanimate objects when she bumps into them. When she's not writing romantic comedies featuring delightfully messy characters, she's at home in Minnesota, eating breakfast food, watching too much reality television, and triple texting her husband about their son.

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Prologue: My Husband Left Me for The Rowing Machine Fourteen Months Ago

Years from now, when I think back to the moment my husband left me for my rowing machine, I hope I forget I was holding the penis straw.
If I’d known where the conversation was headed, I might’ve set it down. He was just being so casual about the whole thing, explaining that he was ending our marriage the way one might mention a particularly filling soup they’d had for lunch.
When he’d first said the words “I’m leaving,” I hadn’t believed him.
“Is this a prank?” I’d asked. Or maybe I’d only thought it, which is absurd because Rich doesn’t “believe” in pranks the way other people don’t “believe” in social media or fabric softener. But what other explanation could there be? This wasn’t supposed to go this way. Rich isn’t this kind of man. We weren’t supposed to be this kind of couple.
But this is real. He’s leaving me for a rowing machine, or---rather---the new lease on life it represents. And I’m left holding the phallic party straw.
“Life is a current, Charley,” he’s telling me as he scrambles around our (former) marital bedroom. “We can’t fight it. If we drag our oars in the water, too scared of where we might go, we won’t stand still, but drift off course from our destiny.”
“Off course from our destiny.” I don’t why I keep repeating everything he’s saying as though he’ll hear how ridiculous he sounds if I manually rewind the tapes. But how else should I respond to the motivational gobbly-gook he’s parroting back from this morning’s Sunrise EDM Bootcamp? How should I react when the man I chose to build a life with decides to dismantle it brick by brick because a fitness influencer named Tinsley reminded him of the mere possibility of more? The idea of someone, anyone, better than me.
I pinch the straw penis between my forefinger and thumb. “We were going to finish Oppenheimer tonight.”
He does his stiff shouldered inhale thing. As a confrontation-averse Midwesterner, it’s the closest he approaches an eyeroll.
The vibration of the phone in my pants pocket interrupts Rich’s performative exhale and cuts into the gesture’s overall effectiveness. The tiny buzz wears out his last shred of patience and empathy for me as the woman he’s actively abandoning based on his tea leaf reading of scripted exercise affirmations.
“Get it. It might be work,” he dares me. Is that what this mid-life crisis is really about? I take the bait and check my phone---it very well could be work---but I send the call to voicemail when I see it’s my sister, Laurel.
“What’s so wrong with caring about my job?”
“You hate your job, Charley.”
“Everyone hates their job.”
“And still, you love it more than me.” He lays the statement down like a pair of twos he knows will win him the game.
I don’t dignify his statement with a response. Instead, I lean back on what I know to be true. “We just got married, Rich. We haven’t even gotten around to adding each other to our life insurance policies.” I’m blatantly bargaining at this point.
“Exactly,” he says excitedly and a little dark brown curl falls onto his forehead. His Clark Kent curl. I liked that curl. Now, I hate it.
“We’ve only been married one year, and we’re already glorified roommates. How long are we supposed to go through the motions?” he asks.
The motions. The words sear into my skin. The way he says it, it’s almost as though we’re partners—active participants in a ruse to fool our friends, our families, and the state of Minnesota. Only I didn’t know we were going through the motions. I thought we were in love.
Sure, we aren’t a passionate couple, but we’re something better: stable. Compatible. We want similar lives and like the same shows. Some of the same shows. Not all the same shows. I can’t invest in every Walking Dead spin-off AMC feels compelled to produce, but it’s important to have separate interests.
Passion is unpredictable. Volatile. Passionate people are driven by impulses and whims. Rich has never done anything on a whim. He calls Rock, Paper, Scissors an “unsophisticated game of chance.” His favorite hobby is meal prep!
“Can you honestly tell me you loved me? Even in the beginning?” he asks me, voice low.
I shake my head, tamping down the hot frustration burning beneath my ears. “That’s not how love works.” I know what it feels like to be collateral damage to someone’s doomed love story. I’ve never wanted that. I want what Rich and I have. The love of a nice, steady man that starts as a tiny seed and grows on you like vines. Though I suppose vines have a way of rotting the wood they wrap around.
“It should,” he says, almost kind. Optimistic. Delusional. “Don’t you want that too? Don’t you want someone you can’t live without? Someone you have to text to tell them you love them, even if they’re only in the other room?”
“You’re leaving me because I don’t text you when you’re in the other room? I can text you more.”
“But we never want to.” Rich stands up straighter, emboldened by whatever he’s about to say next. “It’s time for me to go off on my own adventures. Like your friend Nathan—though I doubt I’ll be so performative about it.”
“Who’s Nathan?” I ask, genuinely confused.
He shrugs. “Your shoeless friend. The one who lives in his car.”
It takes me a second to connect the dots. “Do you mean Ethan?” I cross my arms, defensive. What makes him think now is the appropriate time to bring up the best friend I lost because my husband couldn’t get along with him?
“Ethan lives in a van,” I bite out as a kindling of rage catches fire under my skin. Looks like I’m entering the anger phase of mourning this relationship with every loud, open-mouthed breath from Rich’s punchable, congested face. Now that he’s leaving me, I can finally take exception to the way he refuses to take his allergy medication and then complains about every symptom as though he’s being personally victimized by the planet without recourse.
He only stares back at me, slack jawed, because he doesn’t care where my friend lives or whether I’ll text him more. His mind is already made up. He’s already gone.
“I’m sick of being lonely in my own marriage, Charley. I need adventure and passion and the spontaneity of the tides.”
Again with the boats!
“I deserve to have someone fall for me, and I don’t know if you could ever let yourself do that. Or if you’re even capable of it. You’re too…” I watch him weigh his words before settling on, “...guarded.”
“Guarded,” I say, processing the word.
In my mind, I eviscerate him. I call him every name. I tell him that I’ve been lying about his second toe and it does look like a witch’s knuckle. I insult his appearance with jabs so specific, they’ll stealthily attack his psyche like self-esteem termites until he collapses into nothing but an insecure husk of his confident former self. I scream that I never loved him, not because I’m incapable of it, but because loving him was an impossible task.
But...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593714326
• ISBN 13: 9780593714324
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 369
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: G.P. Putnam's Sons; https://www.penguin.com/putnam/; ; 1745 BROADWAY Attn: Madison Forsander; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland