The sacred pact between romance writ­ers and their read­ers requires that there be a hap­py end­ing by the end of the book. No mat­ter how per­ilous or emo­tion­al­ly fraught the sit­u­a­tion becomes, read­ers go in with the secu­ri­ty of know­ing that the cou­ple will emerge out the oth­er side intact — which is why the focus on grief in Rachel Run­ya Katz’s lat­est adult Sap­ph­ic romance, When­ev­er You’re Ready, might at first seem counterintuitive.

Three years before the book opens, best friends Nia and Jade lose their third friend, Michal, who intro­duced them when they were ten. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, in the after­math of Michal’s bat­tle with brain can­cer, Nia and Jade also seem to have lost each oth­er. For rea­sons that are not made clear to the read­er at the begin­ning of the book, their once-vibrant rela­tion­ship has dwin­dled to a spo­radic series of texts.

Michal has left a series of let­ters for Nia and Jade to open on their birth­days. When Nia hits twen­ty-nine, she is firm­ly instruct­ed to take Jade on the South­ern Jew­ish his­to­ry tour they had all been plan­ning before Michal died. Read­ers famil­iar with South­ern Jew­ish his­to­ry will under­stand that this road trip is not full of joy­ous dis­cov­er­ies. South­ern Jewry’s lega­cy in the US is mul­ti­lay­ered, and it leaves Jade reel­ing with the com­pli­cat­ed knowl­edge that she is the descen­dant of both oppres­sors and the oppressed. Nia and Jade sup­port each through this heavy process, round­ing out their char­ac­ters and demon­strat­ing the depth of their rela­tion­ship. We see how well they under­stand one another’s emo­tion­al make­up, which makes it all the more frus­trat­ing that they are unable to express the roman­tic feel­ings they’ve har­bored for each oth­er since high school.

Nia and Jade’s rela­tion­ship is real and raw. Their pin­ing is the life­line that pulls read­ers through the tougher top­ics. We must con­front the real­i­ties of the Jew­ish South, and the romance at the book’s core encour­ages us to do so with open hearts. The knowl­edge that these two will find love also allows us to bear the grief caused by Michal’s death.

Key por­tions of Nia and Jade’s rela­tion­ships are revealed through a series of flash­backs, many of which relate to Michal. Her absence is pal­pa­ble through­out the book and often serves as an obsta­cle, because there is no way to repair mis­un­der­stand­ings with the dead. In this way, per­son­al rela­tion­ships mir­ror soci­etal ones. There is no way to fix the wrongs that occurred in the past, but through deep exam­i­na­tion, it is pos­si­ble to find a way to move for­ward into a bet­ter future. Jade and Nia must dis­cov­er this bal­ance for them­selves. In the end, it is that emo­tion­al work that leaves read­ers with a hap­py end­ing and hope for a more healed society.