Elle Cook

Is it possible to love someone you've never met? A young woman finds out in this sweeping will-they-or-won't-they love story that begins with a chance wrong number dial. . . . When Hannah picks up a call from an unknown number, she doesn't imagine it will change her life. After all, it's just an easygoing American named Davey who misdialed her while calling into a job interview. And when Hannah jokingly wishes him luck after clearing up the confusion, she never actually expects to hear from him again. Then she gets a text saying he got the job and he'll be moving to London, and she can't help but smile. As they continue to message and their texts become phone calls that become video calls, their friendship becomes a relationship that they can't wait to start in earnest as soon as Davey lands in London in a month's time. But when Hannah goes to the airport to meet him, she finds herself standing alone in the terminal, Davey nowhere to be found. Then comes another life-changing phone call--Davey won't be able to move to London anytime soon, if ever. And it's for a reason neither of them could ever have anticipated. With their future so uncertain, they don't know what else to do but try to move on from each other, even if nothing feels right anymore. Even as months go by and their love seems lost forever, neither is ever far from the other's thoughts. Will fate intervene one last time to finally bring them together, or will Davey always be the man that Hannah never met?

A Novel

The Man I Never Met

nanafark

An actual phone call? No. Who does that? Text only, surely. Isn’t that how we all communicate now?

Ugh, no! I’m going to have to go and put on a lot of makeup if you pursue this idea.”

I really do. It takes a lot of makeup to look as if I’m wearing no makeup.

I still feel strange about ringing him out of the blue. I always feel I should issue a little notice first, which in part is what my text was.

Part of me wants to be retired, so that I can go on month-long cruises. The other part of me doesn’t even know how I’m going to get through the week. 

“Time you enjoy wasting isn’t wasted”

God, I bloody hate kale. No matter what you do to it, it still tastes like kale.

I love Davey. This man I’ve never met. This man who took a piece of my heart with him when he announced he was going to spare me and go it alone.

I try to fathom how, in general, people can sometimes forget other people so easily. And how some of us can’t, no matter how hard we try.

I may be many things, but I am not the kind of guy who muscles in on someone else’s girl, who breaks up couples, even if Hannah was once—in some loose definition of the word—mine.

“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans”

The Man I Never Met quotes

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