We have this little inside joke about The Toilet King, that guy in Minnesota with all the billboards everywhere? It’s a long story, but those billboards are how we met. They have sort of a special place in our relationship because of it and we have a rule that we have to kiss when we drive by one. One year she got me a Toilet King birthday cake and then for her birthday I got her a birthday card with the Toilet King jingle. We’ve won Toilet King coasters from a radio giveaway and we have custom Toilet King stockings for Christmas—you get the idea.
Anyway, I’ve been wanting to ask her to marry me for some time now. I currently have custody of my younger siblings and in a few weeks my mom is coming home earlier than expected and taking them back. My girlfriend and I are going to get our own place nearby so we can stay close to the kids and we’ve started looking at properties.
I had this idea to tell her that an apartment in my old building was up for lease and that we should go check it out. This apartment has a Toilet King Billboard directly outside the window and I thought it would be the perfect place to pop the question.
They have a really hard time finding tenants for it so it’s currently empty. I contacted the landlord and he was open to renting it to me for a few days so I could execute this plan. The Toilet King said he’d be willing to replace the poop in the bowl on the billboard with “will you marry me?”
I was going to pretend that we were going to see an apartment, fill the studio with roses and twinkle lights, and then pull the blinds back where the Will You Marry Me? message would be outside on the billboard. Then I was going to drop to one knee and do the whole proposal thing with the ring. Afterwards a caterer would show up and our closest friends and family would come over for appetizers and drinks to celebrate with us.
I think it’s a solid plan, but nobody else likes it. I sent out a survey to get everyone’s opinion. My mom and aunt say it’s disrespectful to ask her to marry me on a sign with poop-smeared toilet paper on it. My two best friends’ wives also hate the idea. My girlfriend’s moms were lukewarm on it, but to be fair I don’t think they really get the whole Toilet King thing since they live out of state. Her best friend gives it two thumbs-up though and her husband Doug also thinks it’s hilarious.
Thoughts? Should I just plan something else? But it won’t have the same special meaning if I change it.
Edit: to answer your questions, yes, it’s the one with the flies circling the bowl, no I won’t make it less gross by taking out the plunger.
Update: I did it. She loved it. She said yes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Sue Lammert, a licensed clinical counselor specializing in trauma; Dr. Julie Patten, licensed psychologist; and Dr. Karen Flood for helping me to depict the mental health aspects of this book with sensitivity and accuracy. As always, my disclaimer that any errors in this book are my own and are no fault of the people who advised me. Thank you to Olivia Kägel, registered practical nurse, and beta readers Kim Kao, Jeanette Theisen Jett, Kristin Curran, Terri Puffer Burrell, Amy Edwards Norman, Dawn Cooper, and sensitivity reader Leigh Kramer. Thank you, Valentina García-Guzio, for correcting the Spanish for me. A big thank-you to my agent who does way more than she has to—I’m very high maintenance, the poor woman’s exhausted lol. Thank you to my editor Leah, who somehow makes sense of my long rambling word vomit on our plot calls. Estelle and Dana, thank you for coordinating all the wonderful media and publicity for my books. So many people discover them because of you. Thank you, Sarah Congdon, for the absolutely gorgeous cover! Thank you to Graham McCarthy, whose viral first-date questionnaire to Katrina Froese was the inspiration for Justin’s surveys in the book. It’s a great video by Katrina, go watch it!
P.S. They’re still together 
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READING GROUP GUIDE
Q & A WITH ABBY JIMENEZ
1. The big question on everyone’s mind—why bring Neil back?
Honestly? I wanted to burn his house down lol. Maddy makes a comment early in the book prophesizing this. It’s fun to catch on a reread.
Both Neil and Amber were in Part of Your World, though Amber was almost completely off page. Neil was Alexis’s ex, and Daniel was dealing with Amber’s toxicity in his own way.
To explain why Neil was here, I need to explain why I brought back Amber.
I knew I wanted to write a book about trauma and the effects it has on relationships. I knew I wanted to feature a woman with a difficult mother, maybe someone a lot like Amber—and then I thought, why can’t it actually be Amber? Daniel escaped so many hardships by being raised by his grandparents. What if there was a child who wasn’t? What if he had a sister who was left to Amber’s devices? What would her childhood be like and how would she have turned out?
Avoidant attachment relationship style is something most of us have encountered in the dating wild, but chances are you didn’t know there was a name for it. It’s the person you hit it off with and everything is going great, you have incredible chemistry—and then they ghost you. Or they pick a fight with you out of nowhere and break up with you. They avoid deeper conversations and other opportunities to get closer to you. Maybe they cheat and sabotage the relationship and you can’t understand why because things between you were so good.
Avoidants’ relationships tend to be superficial and fleeting, because that’s what they’re comfortable with. It stems from childhood trauma, usually relating to an emotionally unavailable caretaker or unstable upbringing. They avoid emotional bonds and romantic relationships, they don’t seek support from those around them, and they withdraw when someone tries to get to know them—which was honestly really difficult to write in a character as an author trying to tell a love story.
Emma was so aloof, it was challenging to create chemistry between her and Justin because she wasn’t fully onboard. She wouldn’t be, that’s her issue. For much of the book Justin, who has a healthy, secure relationship style, is falling in love, while Emma is getting there, almost to her own surprise and against her will. She’s drawn to Minnesota for the curse thing, liking Justin and signing up for the summer for the fun of it. She meets his family on a technicality and ends up getting close to them. Then she’s forced to lean on Justin and confide in him due to the unexpected presence of her mother and a fight with Maddy. She’s pressured to let him care for her when she gets sick and there’s no other choice. Justin makes headway inches at a time until he finally breaks that wall and gets in—but once he’s there, it can’t last, because she hasn’t addressed the trauma that’s made her the person she is.
Enter Amber and Neil.
I wanted Amber to arrive and show us exactly what Emma grew up with.
Amber is not all bad. Almost nobody is. She can be extremely charismatic and charming and at times she was a doting mother. She was fun and eccentric and even protective in her own way. But Amber is prone to getting sucked into her toxic relationships and this started the neglect and abandonment that would shape who Emma becomes.
I wanted to show the progression of Amber’s attachment style. How she gets so immersed in the relationship, it’s all that matters.
I decided to have Amber attach herself to the man the two were renting from, and it was almost immediately obvious to me that the man should be Neil. We now have two antagonists from Part of Your World dating each other, and those who made the connection would spend the book braced for the shoe to drop. I loved this tension. And it made sense that these two would hit it off. Neil is working on himself. I think he was doing it in a very genuine way. But at the end of the day, Neil is still a narcissist, or at the very least still has narcissistic tendencies, and Amber very much feeds into that. Amber shows up showering him with praise and idolatry, and Neil doesn’t even pause to question it because narcissists believe they deserve that kind of worship. He wouldn’t suspect that maybe there’s something wrong with Amber and her desire to attach herself to him so quickly.
Amber seeks male validation. She craves it. She becomes whatever she needs to be to please the man she’s courting—but it can’t last. It’s not sustainable. She hasn’t addressed the things that cause her problematic behaviors.
I purposely never explain what Amber’s issues or diagnoses are—because that’s real life. I know exactly what Amber has. I have to to write her authentically. I talked her over at length with my mental health advisor Karen Flood. But in the real world we don’t always get answers for why people are the way they are. Even when we do get answers, they’re often wrong or only part of the truth.
No two people are made the same. We all have different experiences and brain chemistry and abilities. Amber is complex and can’t be summarized by a mental health condition or personality disorder. Nobody can. These things can overlap and evolve, wane and wax. They can be exacerbated by a multitude of factors, stress, and changing situations. I can say though that abandonment, or perceived abandonment, is very triggering for Amber. And unfortunately Neil is a workaholic with a job that makes him unavailable for long hours, and that was a recipe for disaster for them. Her fear of being left caused her to act out, putting a wedge between them. The wedge made her feel insecure, so she resorted to old habits like stealing since she was financially unstable and was afraid Neil was going to leave her. It also starts her on a mental health spiral that causes Neil to further question the relationship. Ultimately Amber’s behavior creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where she is in fact broken up with. She will repeat this cycle again and again because she won’t seek treatment to learn the skills to change it, because unlike Emma, Amber lacks the self-awareness to admit something is wrong with her.
It’s this same deep-seated fear of abandonment that leads to Amber hiding Emma from her family. Even though Emma ends up separated from Amber for a lot of her childhood, that separation is still on Amber’s terms and it’s less permanent than giving Emma to her parents. Amber can always pluck Emma out of foster care, but her parents would never give her back. Instead of Amber examining why her life is so tumultuous, she continues to chase relationships that will fail, seeking the stability of someone who will never leave her because she draws her self-worth from whatever man she’s dating.
Neil, to his credit, tried to navigate this using the skills he developed in therapy. In an earlier version of the book, I made a mention of Neil being in a healthy relationship at the end with someone after Amber, and my beta readers expressed disappointment that Neil was given a happy ever after, so I took that out. Apparently even putting him through Amber and burning his house down wasn’t enough for readers to forgive Neil for what he did to Alexis in her book—and that’s fine. We don’t necessarily need to see Neil be happy. That wasn’t the point in having him in this book. I needed him as a device to display the behavior Emma grew up seeing from her mother and I also needed someone who could offer Amber every resource she needs to be better, to show that she would turn it down. Emma needed this for her own closure.
2. Why did you choose to have the women stay on the island?
I’d gone on a summer boating trip with a friend and we ended up on Big Island on Lake Minnetonka. I’d never been out there and I was fascinated by it. The summer homes were both novel and sort of impractical. I could absolutely see the draw of owning one, but also the downsides. I loved the thought of Emma being drawn into the romantic idea of it, and then slowly realizing that it’s not all it’s made out to be. That the isolation and seasonal nature of it was less than ideal. I liked that the island was very much a metaphor for her own way of living, and we see the decline in the quality of the experience as the story goes on. The house looks great at first glance. It’s in a beautiful setting, it’s adorable inside. But we begin to realize that it’s poorly maintained and falling apart. It’s uncomfortable and even proves to be a little dangerous when Emma gets sick with no way to get help. And I love that we see Justin get on the island, literally and figuratively, by painstakingly clawing—or paddling—his way there.
The island isn’t the only symbolism in this book. Stuffie the unicorn is the token of Emma’s innocence and childhood. He’s one of the last things she attaches to before she loses the ability to attach at all. Justin cleans up Stuffie as a gift to her because he knows how unsentimental she is about things and he wants to honor the things she cherishes. He also uses a unicorn floatie to get to her when she needs him, a symbol of her vulnerability, to scale the insurmountable challenge of breaching her defenses and finally reaching her.
