I'M TERRIFIED TO SHARE THIS WITH YOU

Some Secrets and an Exclusive Excerpt

Mar 31, 2025

For years I used to tell people, “The one great thing about books is that if you sell one, you know it will one day exist in the world.” While this might seem obvious, it couldn’t be further from how the entertainment industry works. I’ve sold four TV shows to different networks over the years and they have all died in various stages of development. It is never a sure thing that your show will get made and distributed until it’s actually on the air. And even then it could get canceled mid season. Books, on the other hand, are a much safer medium if you can get over the (huge) hurdle of having a publisher make you an offer. Or so I thought.

I’ve never admitted this publicly before, but my last non-fiction book, I Do (I Think): Conversations About Modern Marriage, was canceled by its original publisher. This came as a huge shock because it disproved a belief I had been hanging onto for dear life. Selling a book didn’t mean you were in the clear. In fact, it might mean you were on the hook for money you’d already been paid. (Thankfully, my agent was able to negotiate that I only owed the original publisher half of my received advance if I sold it somewhere else. Huge win for me and Stacy!)

I’m not going to speculate too much about why this cancelation happened. It was strange circumstances and there had been a changing of the guard while I wrote the first draft. It was not a situation where I went back and forth my with editor and just couldn’t get it right or take the notes. I was cut loose early in the editing process and had to immediately keep rewriting this now rejected book so I could sell it somewhere else and not let down the dozens of people who generously gave their time and expertise for it.

Somehow I managed to keep working on it, but not without a significant blow to my confidence as a writer. Perhaps the only thing that made this possible is that exactly one week before I got the news it was canceled in June 2023, I had been offered an incredible two-book deal by HarperCollins for my first (and second) romance novel.

It is not lost on me what might have happened if the order of those two updates had been reversed. Knowing I had just sold two novels certainly softened the blow of having I Do (I Think) canceled. It meant I didn’t totally fall apart and run screaming into the ocean. But I did begin to question if I had any idea what I was doing as an author. I had sold the novel off a sample and was now terrified that once I turned in the manuscript my editor would come to her senses and cancel this deal too.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. And even more surprisingly, I managed to find a home for I Do (I Think) at an even bigger publisher, where, with the help of my new editor, we turned the book into a much better version of itself. But my relationship toward writing had already been damaged. And now, almost two years later, I am still recovering.

This all brings me to today and why I am so scared to share something that in the past wouldn’t have caused me a second thought. My debut romance novel, Save The Date, is (finally) coming out next week. We decided that it would be a fun idea to exclusively share the first chapter with my Substack community, much like I did for my first non-fiction book, Overthinking About You. But as the date approached for me to release it, I found myself getting really worried.

What if everyone hates it? What if this excerpt deters people from buying it? What if I have no business in this genre at all?

I’ll admit that a lot of this concern is fueled by obsessively reading the novel’s early GoodReads reviews. I KNOW I AM NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THIS. But, despite everyone in my life telling me to stop, I can’t seem to break the cycle or get comments like “it was hard for me to get into it” or “the writing is clunky” out of my head. I can feel myself already mentally distancing myself from the book in case it sucks and people hate it.

And yet…It was’t canceled. And neither was my contract for my second romcom novel that I am currently writing. For all the security I lost by realizing that selling a book doesn’t actually make you safe, I now know that if Save The Date was a bad book, they simply wouldn’t have published it.

So, with that in mind, I am excited/terrified to share the first chapter with you. If you enjoy the read, please consider preordering it! It will arrive next week and do a lot to help the book’s momentum.

And if you don’t like the read, that is also okay. But I don’t need to know.

xoxo,

Allison

CHAPTER ONE
“I just don’t understand what happened.”
Emma Moskowitz lay face down in her parents’ office as they talked above her inert body. The carpet irritated her sensitive cheek, but getting a rash was the least of her worries at the moment. She was used to rashes. What she wasn’t used to—at least not yet—was the staggering pain of betrayal.
“He didn’t explain why he was doing this?” her father, Alan, asked for what had to have been the fifth time in as many minutes. Instead of verbally responding, Emma let out a long groan to signal that she wasn’t yet in the mood to psychoanalyze why her carefully planned life was falling apart. She was still very much in the maybe I could just lie here for a few years and then die stage of grieving. That stage wasn’t talked about nearly enough. It was important.
“What did she say?” Alan looked to Emma’s mother, Debbie, for an interpretation of what could best be described as an animalistic, guttural moan.
“I don’t think she wants to talk about it just yet,” Debbie offered, despite knowing this explanation likely wasn’t going to appease her type-A husband.
“Can I have some water?” Emma interjected, finally moving into a seated position from a full-body sprawl. She wasn’t entirely confident that she was capable of drinking anything yet, but she thought she owed it to her family to try. She knew her mom hated seeing her in pain and her dad hated not having a clear solution to offer. Now that he was retired, Alan wasn’t sure what to do with himself. Emma didn’t want her recent upheaval to become his newest pet project (along with pickleball, online poker and brewing his own root beer). Despite her mother’s endless complaints of being smothered by her loving husband, Alan was the busiest retired person Emma knew. And as a couples therapist, she knew quite a few. Having a recently retired spouse was the new seven-year-itch—except this version of an itch appeared to be an overwhelming desire to be left alone. Emma wished with all her might that she was someone who wanted to be left alone instead of being herself: a person who as a child found a way to play “wedding” at every single playdate.
“Do you want bottled or from the tap with ice?” Debbie asked as though the right form of H₂O could fix a broken heart. “Doesn’t matter.” Emma sighed for effect. “Nothing matters anymore.”
Through a brief exchange of eye contact, Alan and Debbie mutually agreed it wasn’t safe to leave their youngest daughter by herself. So Alan went to retrieve the requested water, while Debbie did her best to sit on the floor, ignoring her numerous knee issues and bad back. Her hand hovered over Emma’s leg; she was unsure if physical touch would cause comfort or alarm. “I am so sorry this is happening to you,” Debbie whispered.
Emma thought about all the other times in her life that her mother had said this. There was the time Emma fell off a chair when she was six and broke her collarbone. The time in her early twenties when her “best friends” planned a weekend trip without informing or inviting her. And there were the far too many times Emma had been unceremoniously dumped by a variety of men.
Although her present situation technically fell into the latter category, Emma felt that having her fiancé walk out on her for no apparent reason warranted its own classification of suffering. This time was different than when her college boyfriend left her to date a high-schooler. Or when her adult boyfriend left her for a college student. This felt like the sort of pain you couldn’t get over with a laugh and a puff of medical-grade marijuana. This felt like the sort of pain that changed you forever. Alan returned with both a cold glass of ice and a plastic water bottle. When Emma didn’t move to take either one, he set them on the side table and declared, “I think I should call him.”
“Call who?” Debbie asked with the cautious optimism of someone who hoped her husband wasn’t a total moron. “Ryan! Maybe I can talk some sense into him. Or at least get some answers.”
Fear overtook Emma’s nervous system at the mere thought of that conversation occurring. She reached out and grasped her father’s ankle to let him know she meant business. “Please do not contact him. He won’t tell you anything useful,” Emma pleaded. “All he told me is something is missing and there is no point in working on it because it can’t be fixed. I just need to move on.”
Debbie and Alan looked at Emma with a mixture of compassion and concern. Emma couldn’t blame them—not after showing up the previous evening crying and shouting “It’s over! He left me!” before abruptly passing out on the couch to avoid her feelings. Emma felt a pang of guilt that she’d left her parents with such confounding uncertainty for almost ten hours. She knew more than most that not knowing was a special form of torture. It was time to fill them in.
“It only lasted twenty minutes.” Emma moaned as the painful memory hit her again. They had been eating dinner in front of the TV when she noticed something was off. As soon as she asked about it—expecting to hear that Ryan’s stomach hurt or his boss was annoying him again—the floodgates opened. Apparently, he’d been having doubts for months but didn’t know how to tell her. Emma tried her best to fight for them, but a switch had been flipped in Ryan’s brain and it was like trying to reason with a concrete wall. Every suggestion she flung out to try to work on their relationship was met with steely resistance. It was obvious that once the words were finally out of Ryan’s mouth, he had no intention of taking them back. He had been set free while Emma was left crushed and disoriented. Their engagement was unceremoniously over in less time than it took to watch a network sitcom.
“What were the doubts? Do you know?” Alan asked in a rather accusatory tone. Despite being retired, he would forever be a lawyer combing through details in search of a win. He didn’t seem to understand that social contracts could be broken far more easily and with fewer repercussions than legal ones.
Emma shook her head. “Unless something is missing is a clarifying answer for you. Because it’s not for me!” She could feel that she was losing control of her emotions. Within a minute or two, any attempt at coherent speech would be usurped by streaming tears and a horrifying amount of snot. She tried to get a handle on herself as her brain went into overdrive, poking and pinching the most vulnerable parts of her psyche, her insecurities finding every possible way to punish her for someone else’s decision.
The entire breakup had felt surreal from start to finish. Emma hadn’t even fully realized she was experiencing a breakup until about halfway through. She’d known things had been off be- tween them for a few months, but it seemed to be more of a Ryan issue than a Ryan-and-Emma issue. He was unhappy with his job. He was struggling with anxiety. He had less interest in his hobbies than normal. To Emma, a licensed marriage and family therapist, it was pretty obvious he was in the midst of a depressive episode. She tried her best to be supportive while her partner was going through a tough time—and she used every ounce of self-esteem that came from her newly earned secure attachment style to not take it personally.
Turns out, she should have taken it personally. Because, according to Ryan, the issues in his life were not related to anxiety or depression after all. He was miserable because he was in the wrong relationship. She was the source of the problem, not him. And once he realized that, he had to end things right away. Or, you know, once Emma dragged it out of him on a random Monday night.
As Emma recounted this to her parents, somehow managing to make it through without dissolving into incoherent sobs, she felt slightly vindicated by the looks of confusion on their faces. This was objectively confusing, right? To ask your live-in partner to marry you and then walk out six months later completely certain that there was nothing to be done to salvage the relationship? Emma was a couples therapist, for Christ’s sake! She made a living salvaging relationships and Ryan wasn’t even willing to try? It was both a personal and a professional slap in the face.
Emma had a bunch of clients in far worse situations than hers who’d been tirelessly working on fixing things for years. One notable client had slept with his wife’s second cousin for three years and they were still together. Yet Ryan—who only a few months ago had cried with happiness as he put an engagement ring on Emma’s finger—insisted there was no point in even attempting to repair whatever he thought was broken. He had too many “concerns,” so it was best to just move on. What those concerns were exactly remained a mystery that would likely haunt Emma until she died in what she anxiously feared would be an untimely and possibly gruesome fashion.
While on the topic of unfortunate demises, Emma briefly considered murdering Ryan before news of her abandonment became public. That way she would be perceived as a grieving fiancée instead of a rejected loser, which felt much more palatable. While murder would never be her first choice when dealing with a crisis, her reputation was on the line. It is one thing to get blindsided by your partner when you’re a civilian. It’s quite another when you have a master’s in clinical psychology and make a living giving relationship advice. It was the professional equivalent of a cardiologist not realizing she was having a heart attack: mortifying. For the first time, Emma regretted her inability to hide in obscurity due to her hard-earned success.
Oh, fuck.
“My book deal!”
Debbie stopped stroking Emma’s back, unsure of what this seemingly random declaration meant. But like any good mom, she remained determined to be supportive. “That’s right. You have a book deal, a YouTube channel, and a thriving private practice. I know your heart is shattered right now, but you have a full life. Ryan was just a part of it, not the whole thing.”
Years of therapy talk had clearly rubbed off on her mother by osmosis, but Emma wasn’t in the position to take any of it in just yet. So instead, she channeled her teenage self and shouted, “No, you don’t get it! He’s ruined my book deal. How can I write a book about the secret to maintaining healthy relationships when mine just imploded? I’m going to have to give the money back and die from shame instead.” She looked at her father pleadingly. “Can I slowly die at home? In my old room? You won’t even notice!”
“I think we would notice if you were slowly dying in the guest room.”
“Guest room? You said it would always be my room! This is even worse than I thought!”
And with that, Emma collapsed once again on the carpet. Face rash be damned.

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