What does it mean to meet the right person at the wrong moment? That quiet, persistent question sits at the heart of The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez, the second book in her Say You’ll Remember Me series. Where the first installment laid the groundwork for this interconnected world of close friendships and complicated feelings, this follow-up plants itself firmly in the territory between loyalty and longing — and somehow makes it one of the most enjoyable places to spend a few hundred pages.
The Setup: A Wrong Turn That Leads Somewhere Right
Larissa is juggling somewhere between five and seven jobs on any given week. She donates plasma, assembles seasonal snackle boxes, sits with an emotional-support pig in a hot tub, and picks up mystery-shopping assignments for fifteen dollars a photograph. She is resourceful, funny, and grinding her way out from under thirty thousand dollars of debt that belongs entirely to her father and not even remotely to her. Chris is a pharmacist who reads three hundred books a year, worries about everyone else before himself, and is grieving in a way he hasn’t quite admitted to anyone yet.
When Mike — Larissa’s boyfriend and Chris’s best friend of twenty-five years — sends Chris to take Larissa and her mother to the hospital one early morning, the plan was always going to be temporary. A favor, a few hours, done. What neither of them expected was a café across the street, a napkin scoreboard rating five kinds of bread, and a conversation about an out-of-print sci-fi novel from 1986 that both of them somehow love. Jimenez builds the foundation of this relationship before you even realize what she’s building, and by the time you do, it’s already load-bearing.
What the Novel Does Brilliantly
Intimacy Built in the Margins
What makes The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez stand apart in a crowded genre is how patiently it earns its emotional weight before asking you to feel anything about it. The chemistry here doesn’t arrive ready-made. It develops in hospital waiting rooms, over soup made from scratch at a sick friend’s place, during an eleven-mile hike nobody consented to, and inside a creaky porta-potty during a Minnesota thunderstorm. Jimenez understands something important: intimacy isn’t built in grand gestures. It accumulates in ordinary moments that quietly become impossible to walk away from — a prescription expiration date checked without being asked, a nut-free restaurant pre-screened and pre-called, a pair of matching Hawaiian shirts with a rescue dog’s face on them purchased entirely by coincidence.
Dual POV Done Right
Jimenez employs alternating chapter narration between Chris and Larissa, and it’s among the novel’s sharpest decisions. Larissa’s chapters are warm and sardonic, always hustling, always noticing things. Chris’s are quieter, more careful, carrying weight he doesn’t offload on anyone. Reading both sides of every glance and every almost-conversation creates a specific, aching tension — not because you don’t know what’s happening, but because you’re watching two people hold themselves back in real time. Crucially, this structure also ensures Mike — the third corner of this triangle — is rendered as a fully realized person with his own fragile interior life, rather than a convenient obstacle.
Woofarine as the True Heart of the Story
It would be a genuine disservice to discuss The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez without proper attention to Woofarine, the rescue Yorkie who functions as the story’s emotional engine. Found near a hospital dumpster eating a turkey leg, this five-pound chaos agent kills snakes, parkours into chip bags, brings home frog carcasses as gifts, and gets run over by a tamale cart without sustaining a single injury. He is comedy relief, narrative glue, and the most effective reason two people have ever needed to see each other again. The shared custody arrangement Chris and Larissa build around him is the novel’s most quietly clever structural choice.
A Financial Reality Portrayed Without Melodrama
One of the book’s most underrated achievements is its depiction of Larissa’s financial precarity. The debt, the identity theft, the apartments with bars on the windows and mattresses on the curb out front — Jimenez neither romanticizes the struggle nor converts it into tragedy for effect. It is simply the water Larissa swims in, and the novel is measurably more honest and interesting for taking that approach.
Where the Book Falls Short
For all its warmth and charm, The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez isn’t a flawless novel. Readers well-versed in the genre’s conventions will recognize the shape of the central love triangle several chapters before the story reveals its hand. The resolution, when it does arrive, is emotionally satisfying but structurally predictable, which somewhat dilutes the tension the dual POV works so hard to create.
Mike’s arc — mental health struggles, panic attacks, a man quietly suffocating under the weight of a life that didn’t go the way he planned — is introduced with real complexity. But as the story progresses, his struggles tilt in a direction that makes the reader’s allegiances increasingly easy to assign. There is nuance here, but not as much as the premise deserves. The novel also loses some of its distinctive, digressive energy in the second half, trading the loose, lived-in conversations of the early chapters for more plot-forward momentum. It doesn’t break the book, but it does make the later sections feel slightly less like themselves.
The Say You’ll Remember Me Series
The Night We Met is the second book in the Say You’ll Remember Me series. First-time readers can enter with this book — the world and its characters are re-introduced with enough generosity that nothing feels like homework — but starting with Book 1, Say You’ll Remember Me, adds meaningful texture to the friendships and histories that shape everything that follows in this follow-up.
Abby Jimenez’s Wider Work
Readers who have followed Abby Jimenez through her earlier novels — The Friend Zone, The Happy Ever After Playlist, Life’s Too Short, Part of Your World, Yours Truly, and Just for the Summer — will find The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez tonally consistent with what she does best. She writes protagonists who carry genuine burdens without being defined by them, and love stories that feel earned rather than convenient.
If You Loved This, Read These Next
- The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas — slow burn, impossible situation, a similar will-they-won’t-they tension built on friendship and history
- Things We Never Got Over by Lucy Score — the same mixture of humor, grounded characters, and class contrast that makes Jimenez’s work land
- Beach Read by Emily Henry — dual POV, real emotional stakes, characters with full lives that don’t pause for falling in love
- Happy Place by Emily Henry — for readers who want a love story that happens in the space around other things, rather than in spite of them
Final Verdict
The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez is exactly what it promises: a book about a split-second decision and everything that blooms and aches in its long, complicated aftermath. Genre veterans may find the road familiar, but the company along the way is genuinely good. The characters linger. The banter lands. Woofarine is a menace and a treasure in equal measure.
And the pumpernickel? A ten out of ten. It was always going to be.
