{Release Day Review} Always by Sarah Jio (@SarahJio @RandomHouse)

From the New York Times bestselling author of Blackberry Winterand The Violets of March comes a gripping, poignant novel about the kind of love that never lets go, and the heart's capacity to remember. 

While enjoying a romantic candlelit dinner with her fiance, Ryan, at one of Seattle's chicest restaurants, Kailey Crane can't believe her good fortune: She has a great job as a writer for the Herald and is now engaged to a guy who is perfect in nearly every way. As they leave the restaurant, Kailey spies a thin, bearded homeless man on the sidewalk. She approaches him to offer up her bag of leftovers, and is stunned when their eyes meet, then stricken to her very core: The man is the love of her life, Cade McAllister. 

When Kailey met Cade ten years ago, their attraction was immediate and intense everything connected and felt "right." But it all ended suddenly, leaving Kailey devastated. Now the poor soul on the street is a faded version of her former beloved: His weathered and weary face is as handsome as Kailey remembers, but his mind has suffered in the intervening years. Over the next few weeks, Kailey helps Cade begin to piece his life together, something she initially keeps from Ryan. As she revisits her long-ago relationship, Kailey realizes that she must decide exactly what and whom she wants. 

Alternating between the past and the present, Always is a beautifully unfolding exploration of a woman faced with an impossible choice, a woman who discovers what she's willing to save and what she will sacrifice for true love.

Kailey Crane has just returned to Seattle to try to find happiness again. The last time she called the city home, the man she loved simply disappeared taking her heart with him.
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Now years later with a new job, a new home and a new fiancé – Kailey is finally starting to live.  And all it takes is recognizing the man who once meant more to her than life itself in the eyes of a homeless man to turn her life upside down once more. 

​​I may not have had closure, but I have tasted wisdom. Anyone who has ever had their heart broken, or even just bruised, has learned that there’s finality in the facts. He left. And I’ve realized that when someone wants to leave, you let him go.

​Cade McAllister used to be larger than life.  As the founder of Element Records, he was a driving force in Seattle’s cutting edge music scene.  He was passionate, driven and absolutely beautiful. 
 
Falling in love with him was effortless and it doesn’t matter to Kailey how far that he’s fallen from grace – she can’t just walk away.  She’s going to help him reclaim what was taken from him.  But will remembering the past with Cade destroy her perfect future?

“Do you love him?” Cade says suddenly.
“Yes,” I say. It’s the complicated truth.
He nods. “I was so lucky.” “What do you mean?”
“To have had you in my life,” he replies earnestly, regretfully.
“But you still have me in your life. And you always will. That will never change.”
"I wish…”
​I wish, too. So much.

“Magic hour,” Cade says, gazing up to the sky. The sun has just set, and an orange glow lingers on the horizon. It’s not yet night and no longer day, but some whimsical in-between, which I suppose is where Cade and I are. Suspended between two places.

​I don’t quite know why this book resonated so much with me.  Maybe it was because of the love that I have for the city of Seattle or because it helped me remember the music that shaped so much of my youth.  And maybe - just maybe - it was the powerful way that Sarah mixed heartbreak with hope to remind me of what’s truly essential to life.  I like to think that it was always just meant to be...

For Cade and Kailey - 

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