This review was first published March 22, 2026 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Rick Springfield sang about wanting Jessie’s girl in 1981 in the now-famous lyrics: “Jessie is a friend / Yeah, I know he’s been a good friend of mine / But lately something’s changed / That ain’t hard to define / Jessie’s got himself a girl / And I wanna make her mine.”

That desire has always existed – and it’s always been taboo. Now, in “The Night We Met,” Abby Jimenez has given us a story about what happens when a man likes his best friend’s girlfriend a bit too much. 

Jimenez introduces us to a dual point-of-view with protagonists Chris and Larissa. As readers bounce between the two leads’ heads, they learn that Larissa met Chris one night when she needed a ride home after a rare night out. She thought Chris was grumpy, though, and opted instead to ride with his friend Mike, who became her boyfriend.

The book begins about four months later – and readers might cringe when Mike tells Larissa he loves her and she says, “OK … Thanks.” Mike is easy to root for early on, but he has some demons, and eventually readers will find themselves rooting for him in another way.

Jimenez writes dialog that is so real you might swear you overheard the conversations yourself. She is particularly good at girl gab, and the real talk feels just like something you might overhear if you dropped into a women’s restroom. Like this gem, from Larissa’s best friend and confidant Lexi, talking about pharmacist Chris and his clean bedroom:

“He seems meticulous. Isn’t it funny how you can just tell when a guy has a dirty refrigerator door? Like, you don’t even need to go over there, he’s just giving dirty refrigerator door energy?” 

Lexi and Larissa take on multiple jobs to make ends meet. Jimenez takes on serious issues like poverty, but not in a demeaning way, rather in a factual, this-is-how-some-people live, demonstrative way, as we watch these women navigate and try to climb out of their circumstances.

The writing, in this vain, is why readers flock to Jimenez’s books and keep coming back. When Lexi mentions some sexual-kink jobs she takes on, it’s matter-of-fact, and readers realize that she holds the power in these transactions. 

“The Night We Met,” the second in the “Say You’ll Remember Me” series, mimics its predecessor by throwing the protagonists into unusual circumstances, forcing them to spend time together.

In this book, Chris and Larissa get lost in the woods on what should have been an hour-and-a-half hike, but soon devolves into an 11-mile and a daylong adventure. Yet it’s here that readers will see that spark between Chris and Larissa, even before they realize what’s happening. Later, they adopt and co-parent a slightly unhinged rescue Yorkie, Woofarine, which brings them closer. Woofarine’s antics will have readers in stitches.

Jimenez excels at boiling down her characters’ struggles into nuggets of written wisdom, and this book is no exception, highlighting the laughter, camaraderie and the tangled decisions life hurls at us.

“Life buries us,” she writes. “We get heavier and heavier as time goes on and we labor under the layers we’ve collected. Sometimes the layers make us who we are and sometimes they make us someone else entirely.”

For readers who like their books’ endings tied up in a bow, Jimenez does something even better: She honors the messiness and chaos of life by weaving it with humor, heartbreak and the deep ties of friendship. She shows readers that life happens in the small, seemingly insignificant moments, which turn out to be not so small after all.

Or as Rick Springfield might put it, “Ain’t that the way love’s supposed to be?”