🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4.7/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read The Assignment yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Aspen is a care home activities coordinator who gets assigned to chaperone a resident’s grandson on twice weekly outings. The grandson is Troy Serrano. The guy she keyed the car of and fed a laxative doughnut in high school. This is going to be fun.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Setup
Troy has been sneaking his grandfather out of the care home without approval, once to catch a Mets game and once for ice cream because the ice cream was always too melty by the time he could bring it to him. The facility works out a deal: twice a week, scheduled outings, with a chaperone. That chaperone is Aspen.
The history between them is messy. Troy was Aspen’s friend Jasmine’s boyfriend in high school. He cheated on her. Aspen responded by keying his car and slipping him a laxative doughnut, which honestly seems proportionate.
Troy has moved to Meadowbrooke temporarily while his dad is away, filling in to look after his grandfather. He didn’t expect his grandfather’s chaperone to be her.
How It Starts
Their first outing involves ice cream, some snarky back and forth, and Grandpa Serrano doing what Grandpa Serrano does best: wandering off deliberately to give them something to do together. They trade numbers to coordinate the search and then the day ends.
Aspen leaves her phone and wallet in Troy’s car. He finds her ID, looks up her address, and shows up at her door. Her niece Kiki answers. Kiki, being seven and sensible, will not open the door for a stranger because he could shoot them. She offers to open it just a crack. Kiki says no. Aspen hears the commotion, comes to the door, and is deeply appreciative to see Troy standing there with her stuff.
Kiki is Aspen’s sister’s daughter. Her sister died and Kiki splits her time between Aspen’s house and her grandparents’. Aspen carries a lot of guilt around that.
The Dating App
Troy finds Aspen’s profile on a dating app and knows he should have her removed from his matches. He swipes right anyway. Aspen is on the app at Jasmine’s encouragement. She’s scrolling through profiles and comes across Troy’s, which is written as an obituary and ends with something like surprise, he’s actually not dead, so you can date him. She’s cringing at the whole thing when she gets a text, jumps, and accidentally swipes right on him. They match.
Jasmine, who is the same Jasmine that Troy cheated on, tells Aspen she thinks there’s weird tension between them and maybe they should just sleep together and get it out of their systems, which is its own kind of wild given the history.
Getting Closer
Troy sees Aspen on a date one night, gets distracted, and rear-ends a car right in front of the restaurant she’s in. Her date is rude about it. Aspen ditches him and hangs out with Troy instead. It’s almost a date. It’s not officially a date. It feels like one.
He shows up at her work the next day to see her, and slowly starts pushing himself into their lives. When Kiki gets her period for the first time, Troy runs to the store for supplies without being asked. He makes desserts that fit Aspen’s strict autoimmune diet, which requires real attention to what she can and can’t eat. He is quietly paying attention to everything.
Aspen tells him she needs space. She’s worried things are progressing. He agrees to back off. Then she sees him at a bar with his friends, sees a woman talking to him, and he pulls Aspen aside to ask if there’s any reason he shouldn’t leave with this other woman. She says she needs to get back to her friends. He makes it look like he left with the other woman. He was actually waiting outside for Aspen.
She takes him home. They sleep together. He promises they won’t talk about it again. The next morning he shows up with breakfast anyway. They have sex again. He falls asleep. They both wake up at five in the afternoon to find Kiki and Aspen’s mom in the house.
Getting Serious
They start spending a lot of time together. Troy sees a dating app notification on her phone and gets jealous. He disappears for hours and comes back and tells her he has stronger feelings for her than he expected and he wants to be exclusive.
Troy’s backstory comes out in pieces. His mom didn’t die when he was a baby the way he told people. He was angry she’d left, so he said she died, because she was dead to him. She didn’t want to be a parent, signed over her rights, and his dad and grandparents raised him. She’s dead now but he spent his whole life feeling unwanted and undeserving of love because of it.
Jasmine shows up one day while Troy is at Aspen’s. He answers the door without a shirt. It’s awkward. Jasmine tells Aspen that Troy is good for a good time only. Aspen says he’s become more than that.
The Dance
Kiki wants Troy to take her to the father daughter dance at school. Her dad is dead and she doesn’t have anyone to go with. She knows Aspen will say no. But Aspen eventually gives in.
Troy shows up for Kiki with a corsage and everything. At the dance a girl who has been bullying Kiki because she doesn’t have a dad shows up and asks if she rented one for the night. Kiki introduces Troy as her boyfriend. Troy pulls her aside and tells her that’s not appropriate, she can call him anything else but not that.
Kiki goes back to the girl and tells her she lied. He’s not her boyfriend. He’s her aunt’s boy toy.
The girl’s father turns out to be someone who made Troy’s life miserable in high school. Apparently this kind of thing runs in the family.
Kiki decides she wants to leave. Troy convinces her not to let the bully win. They get into a photo booth together and Kiki sticks her middle finger up in the photos. They’re having fun again.
Troy finds the teenager running the DJ booth and explains the situation. The kid says he’s got the perfect song. After the current song ends the DJ calls Troy and Kiki onto the dance floor and dedicates a song to anyone who thinks it’s okay to bully someone without a dad, and the song is basically a string of expletives on repeat. Troy is slightly mortified and then they go get burgers.
It is the best scene in the book by a significant margin.
The Distance
Troy’s dad comes back to Meadowbrooke, which removes the original reason Troy came. Aspen tells him he needs to really think about whether he can stay long term. He agrees instead of fighting her on it, which surprises her, and that’s when she realizes she loves him.
He goes back to Seattle for a work meeting. A couple of weeks becomes over a month. He goes distant, communicating almost exclusively by text. At a holiday party Jasmine’s husband tries to set Aspen up with someone. Kiki has been emailing Troy the whole time and tells him about it. Troy calls Aspen, which is the first time he’s called in weeks, and she immediately knows something is wrong. He tells her not to wait for him. He’s not sure he can be the man she needs.
He ends up at his mother’s old brownstone in the city, just standing outside. Her former boyfriend comes out, recognizes him, and invites him in. The man tells him his mom had a lot of regrets, that she never had other children after Troy because she felt that if she couldn’t be a mother to him she shouldn’t try again. It’s healing in a way Troy didn’t know he needed.
He admits to this stranger that he fell in love with Aspen but he’s been keeping something from her and he doesn’t know if she’ll forgive him.
The Reveal
Troy comes back to Meadowbrooke and tries to avoid Aspen until after Christmas because he doesn’t want to potentially ruin her holiday with what he has to tell her. He runs directly into her at a tree lot while trying to hide from Kiki, ends up helping her family with their Christmas tree, and blurts out that he loves her.
Then, after Christmas, he tells her the thing he’s been keeping. Back in high school, Aspen was caught cheating on a test and lost her Princeton acceptance and her scholarship because of it. That night, derailed from her original path, she ended up drunk and needed her sister and sister’s boyfriend to come pick her up. They died on the way.
Troy is the one who told the teacher she was cheating. He thought it was funny at the time. He has been carrying the weight of what that one decision set in motion ever since she told him why she didn’t go to post-secondary.
Aspen tells him she needs to be left alone. He leaves.
Days later he goes to Jasmine’s house and apologizes to her in person for what he did in high school. Aspen finds out because Jasmine calls her immediately.
When Troy gets home Aspen is waiting outside. She’s been standing there ten minutes.
She tells him she could be mad at him forever. But she’s the one who cheated. She’s the one who made that decision. It could have been anyone who told. She owns that. They move past it.
He basically never leaves after that. They think they’re being sneaky about it until Kiki points out at dinner that maybe Troy should just move in so he doesn’t have to keep sneaking back every night.
They ask him to move in. He says yes.
The epilogue is their wedding, held at the care home because Grandpa Serrano is bed bound by then and they weren’t going to get married without him there.
Best Part of This Book
The father daughter dance. Start to finish, the entire scene from the corsage to the DJ to the burgers afterward. Troy showing up for Kiki the way he did, without making it about anything other than her having a good night, is the moment that tells you everything about who he actually is underneath the history.
Worst Part of This Book
The months of near-silence while he was in Seattle. It’s necessary for the story but it’s genuinely hard to sit through. And Aspen getting angry at Troy for telling on her for cheating when she’s the one who cheated felt a little illogical, even accounting for how complicated all of it is for her given what came after.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥🔥 — Present and consistent without being the main event. The emotional storyline carries this book more than the heat.
The Ending Explained — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Completely satisfied. A wedding at the care home so Grandpa Serrano could be there is the most perfect ending this book could have had.
Would I Reread It?
Yes — already have.
The Twist We Didn’t See Coming
Troy being the one who told on Aspen for cheating. The weight of what that one high school decision set in motion.
Who Is This For
Anyone who loves a second chance romance with real warmth and a found family element. Readers who want a hero who shows up in the small ways that matter and a heroine with genuine complications. And anyone who needs a book that makes them laugh at a DJ dedicating a very explicit song to a bunch of mean kids at a father daughter dance.
Where to Get
📖 Physical Book
Amazon
🎧 Audiobook
Audible
📱 Ebook
Amazon
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