An intimate and deeply moving coming-of-age novel about second chances and the inextricable bonds between lovers and friends.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Just Want You Here by Meredith Turits, which is out March 11th 2025.
The only love Ari has known is Morgan. Engaged and planning a life with him in New York, Ari is shocked when Morgan sits her down one rainy afternoon and tells her their decade-long relationship is over. They’ve been over for a long time now, he says―and Ari knows he’s right.
Twenty-eight years old and suddenly alone, Ari throws herself into a new job in Boston, as assistant to a tech CEO. Wells is British, twelve years her senior, a devoted husband and father. He’s also captivated by Ari, in a way neither of them can explain. Ignoring every warning signal from friends and their own instincts, they dive into a fiery affair, which becomes more dangerous as Ari finds herself intricately tangled with his wife, Leah.
Nothing can prepare Ari for the choices she must make as she tries to uncover what’s right for herself, and for the people she can’t let go. As a new path opens―a journey of lies and the twisted calculus of protecting them―Ari’s second chance at happiness forces her to consider who she really is. Can you love someone without dragging them under? What does it take to start over again?
ARI
When Morgan closes the bedroom door behind him, Ari knows it’s over. It’s been over for a while, he’s argued. And maybe he is right.
Still, it doesn’t soften the blow. Ari leans forward on the tattered green couch, drops her head between her knees. Her hair falls in front of her eyes like a blackout curtain. The blood rushing to her brain until the pressure makes her sick. She would ask herself how they got to this place, but there’s no point. They’ve arrived—and, soon, Morgan will depart without her. It’s like nothing that happened before matters. It’s like a decade has gone up in smoke.
We need to figure out who we are on our own. You have to see it, too, he’d said, barely able to make eye contact with her. No, Ari had replied, she did not. He’d seemed to be parroting a self-help book, the kind he would never read. She had simply stared at him, mouth agape—she couldn’t believe he had the balls to even sit her at the kitchen table, f loat the idea. That’s never been Morgan. He’s constantly needed her to push him down the road, give him the map in the first place. We can leave New York. I can give you time or space. We can go to couples’ therapy. Anything, she’d bargained. He’d shaken his head. Ari, I love you. But it all just feels so stuck.
After the longest ten minutes, Morgan pads gently out of the bed room, easing open the moaning door. Despite everything, he’s checking on her. His short, black-coffee hair is sticking up in the back, mussed like he’s just woken up. He looks shattered, too.
“Sorry,” he says as he returns to her, a gruffness that doesn’t fit him. It’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for. Ruining her life, getting on with his? “I just . . .”
He joins her on the couch, but he can’t possibly sit farther away.
“Ari,” he says. He palms his knees, spreads his broad shoulders until she hears his back crack. “Please.”
Her throat closes as she swallows dry. What can she do but stare at the ground? She can’t face him, and, looking around the apartment, a rain-drenched Saturday evening in early May, she sees only the life they’ve shared for ten years. There are no his things and her things. This couch they pooled meager savings to buy off Craigslist, the pictures they chose to frame of the places they visited together. The forks, the sheets, the dish detergent. Everything they have is just one thing. They are just one thing.
Except now, Morgan sees himself in a life outside the one he’s so precisely, joyfully built with Ari—living on his own, keeping the minutiae of his days to himself, anxiously waiting outside a fussy cocktail bar for a first date, standing at the altar with a woman whose face he hasn’t seen yet. Betting there’s something out there for him that’ll make this all worth it, a risk Ari can’t possibly fathom. The idea that he spent months turning over these rich, alternative lives while he was in bed beside her makes her feel like she has to spit blood.
“Ari,” Morgan says again.
For as much as she’s still pleading with him to change his mind, she’s also aware they have stagnated. Gotten stuck. When he said it felt like they’d lost steam and he was not sure how to find it again, she’d hated to hear it, mostly because she knew it was true. It’s why she’s here, crying on a couch, twisting an engagement ring around her finger without a wedding band beside it.
“Morgan,” she says. Carefully. She feels like she has only a few times left to say his name, has to ration them.
“I don’t know what to say,” he says.
“Then don’t say anything.”
“That’s exactly the problem.”
He puts on a bright-red windbreaker and threadbare Hartford Whalers hat, tells Ari he’ll pick up Thai food, as if nothing has changed.
~~~
With empty take-out containers littering the particleboard coffee table, they spend three silent hours watching a TV series. Too many episodes remain for them to finish it together now. At eleven thirty, Morgan gets up to put his beer cans in the sink. He sighs, looks back at Ari with a chilling combination of affection and death. She never imagined he could make a face she’d never seen. Next, Morgan braces himself on the counter, slowly breathes out. The muscles beneath his white undershirt shift. How well Ari knows his form: the way it’s changed, grown stronger, become the body of an adult. She can still see the way he looked years ago—a man with a lither body running toward the high school field with a lacrosse stick in his hand. A boy, really. She, too, was lighter, longer, leaner. A girl.
Still in front of the television, Ari fixates on the screen saver. The photo slideshow tells the story of their life together: under the weeping willows in Savannah, where Morgan’s mom sent them to celebrate their engagement; scorching days at Jones Beach over the years, since they couldn’t afford to go anywhere for real; even their grainy senior-prom photo, in all its low-resolution glory. Who has that kind of history? Who is willing to let it go?
“I’ll take the couch,” Morgan says, returning to Ari. His wide hazel eyes look exhausted, face pale. He apologizes he has nowhere else to stay for now.
She shakes her head. “I will.” She can’t remember the last time they slept in separate beds.
Through the door to the small bathroom, Ari can hear Morgan pee, run his electric toothbrush, fumble in the medicine cabinet for his contact-lens solution. Mundanity that doesn’t have shape or meaning to anyone but her: sounds of a life in progress. Ari wonders what she’ll miss most. Morgan’s companionship, or the way his heartbeat sounds when her head rests against his chest? Maybe these whispers of little habits.
Morgan leaves the bedroom door cracked, a sliver of light from his bedside lamp slipping through. The apartment is quieter than New York has ever been. Nothing’s ever unsettled her this way. She wants the sounds that keep her up at night—the blare of car horns, shrill wail of ambulances. Morgan’s gentle wheeze in her ear.
“You can sleep in here,” he calls. “It’s not like we hate each other.”
Crawling into bed beside him is the only thing Ari wants. She says nothing, turns over and buries her head in the cushions, waits until he switches off his light, then silently cries so hard she’s not sure she’ll ever breathe again.
~~~
Morgan is usually the first one up, yet Ari wakes early and sits at the small table that juts awkwardly into the middle of their one-bedroom apartment. She’s poured herself a bowl of Morgan’s cereal. There’s a swirl of sugar skimming the top of the milk, a trail like a comet. For as long as she’s known him, Morgan has always eaten this awful children’s cereal. In high school, when she’d go over to his house, he’d shovel it into his mouth by the handful, straight from the box. The crinkle of the bag reminds her of his childhood basement, with the cloud-comfort able, dog-clawed leather couch; the low ceiling with the wooden beams, which Morgan had to duck starting their junior year; the television, always on while they were doing their homework or talking or covertly having sex, which started senior year. Sugared flakes or rainbow loops all over the floor, crunching beneath Ari’s heels when she’d get up to reluctantly walk the ten minutes back to her place, leaving a home to arrive at a house.
Sunday-morning light snakes into the kitchen. Everything about the space already feels different. She pictures the books Morgan will take from their shelf near the front door, the empty spaces like pock marks; that photograph he snapped from the Weeks Bridge in Boston pulled from the wall behind the couch, the discolored space behind it reminding her that he’s gone.
As Ari struggles to keep her eyes open, Morgan lowers himself into the seat across from her, dropping his own bowl to the table, reaching for the milk and cereal.
“Morning,” he says, bowing his head. The chocolate puffs tinkle as they hit the bowl. “I think I probably have to go to the library today.”
He says it like his accountability matters anymore. He keeps talking as if last night hasn’t happened: goes on about his last final on Tuesday before he wraps his MBA; the baseball game he wants to watch later, checking with Ari if he can monopolize the TV at seven. He sucks the milk from the spoon. Crosses his legs, tenses and releases his calf muscles in a nervous figure four.
“You should keep the apartment,” he says.
“I can’t afford it.”
At twenty-eight years old, she makes next to nothing. Tedious copywriting on pharmaceutical accounts for an ad agency, sixty-four thousand dollars a year, which hardly goes far in New York. She’d taken her first job offer so she could provide enough financial stability for Morgan to get through his program. Ari decided it was prudent to make sure one of them had a steady income. She’d figure out her own grad school plans or embrace the instability of a writing career once he was in a solid job. As for Morgan, he is living off stipends and scholarships and student loans; the job he held before business school, operations at his uncle’s construction company in Queens, paid a nominal salary. Together, they have enough. Alone, they don’t.
“I can help. For a little while, at least,” he says, even though he can’t.
His spoon drops. He interlaces his hands, wiggles his thumbs. It makes Ari want to laugh, love him.
“I’ll find something,” she says instead.
First, she’ll go to Summer’s in Murray Hill. Ari will sleep on her best friend’s couch until she figures out what’s next, make herself scarce when Luke comes up from Philadelphia. Summer will help her muck through where to live, how to pay for it, how to get by when she’s alone at night. Perhaps Summer will push Ari to go far, become exceptional. Perhaps Ari will.
“Where are you going to go?” Ari asks.
“I’m going down to Luke’s on Wednesday.”
“They know, then.”
“Luke knows, yes.”
“If Luke knows, Summer knows.”
“I guess,” Morgan concedes.
Ari’s face is probably as blue as the wall behind her. She and Morgan painted it the day after they moved in, living together for the first time. Cross-legged on a two-dollar black plastic drop cloth, they’d drunk beer and eaten a bag of stale pretzels, their arms covered in paint. Water’s Edge Blue. She’d laughed at Morgan for choosing an eighties rock playlist they both hated. It’s painting music, he’d argued. What the hell is painting music? Ari had replied. Morgan had leaned in, kissed her.
How long have you planned this? It’s the only thing she wants to ask, but she doesn’t want the answer. Yet he reads her mind, like always.
“It’s not like I’ve been scheming for a long time. I just . . .”
“Okay,” Ari says. She wants to be slashed with Water’s Edge Blue. She wants him to kiss her.
“Do you hate me?”
The sugar slick has formed on the top of his cereal, too.
She shakes her head.
“I wouldn’t blame you,” he says.
“No.” The words are leaden. “I can’t hate you.”
~~~
“I’m so sorry,” Summer says before Ari even says hello. “I’m just so sorry.”
Just like she assumed, her best friend has already heard. Ari doesn’t reply, just lets her breath pollute the line with static. She loops her Alphabet City neighborhood. She left before Morgan went to the library—couldn’t bear to see him leave, even if he’d be coming back, for now. People move with brisk steps; the sky is a criminally bright cerulean, sunbeams blinding. The first Italian ices cart of the year rolls past. She can taste the sweet cherry on her tongue.
“Come to me whenever you need,” Summer says, her honeyed lilt.
Ari pictures Summer in her nice apartment, accented in pale pink, dusted often. Her couch is as white as the day she bought it, a blush throw blanket folded neatly across the arm. Everything there is right— peaceful, safe. Even the spines shine on her old med-school textbooks, alphabetized on the shelf below the television.
“Next week, I guess,” Ari replies, though the exchange is unnecessary at best. She will go to Summer not only because she doesn’t have an alternative but also because she might die anywhere else.
It’s amazing how Summer still feels as close to Ari as she did growing up. Their houses, side by side. Windows facing one another, friends waving before they went to sleep, watching the other’s lights go off. August nights on Summer’s porch, counting stars and pinkie-swearing to be there for each other forever. So much of Summer’s light shines for Ari. She’s never been so grateful, now that everything’s falling apart.
“Did you see it coming?” Ari asks.
“What?”
“Before Luke even told you. Did you see it coming?”
“You were engaged for two years, and you never moved on it. You had to know something wasn’t right.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Summer pauses. “Luke and I saw it. But it was never our place to say anything.”
“If it was anyone’s place, it was yours.”
“I wasn’t going to push you one way or the other,” Summer says. “I wasn’t going to meddle. It’s your life, Ar.”
“Which way would you have pushed me?”
Summer is quiet, probably chewing at her fingernails—the one bad habit she can’t shake.
Maybe Ari did know this was coming. Maybe she and Morgan were a time bomb that took too long to go off. But they’d wanted to spend forever together, hadn’t they? Why would he have proposed otherwise, so spontaneously; why would she have said yes? They’d been in Boston when he asked her to marry him. When they’d gotten back to New York the next day, everyone went to dinner together: Ari and Morgan, Summer and Luke, who’d found cover for his residency at the Philadelphia hospital to come up and celebrate. Morgan kept reaching for Ari’s hand under the table. They’d all talked about how strange, how amazing it was that they still existed like this: friends who’d taken first-period history together in sixth grade, then couples who’d gone to prom together, now spending their full, real lives with each other. Ari and Morgan were officially engaged. It was just a matter of time before Summer and Luke would follow.
“How are you holding up?” Summer says.
Ari doesn’t answer.
Summer exhales forcefully. “If there were ever a time for wine.” She laughs, the way she does: pin-straight dyed-red hair swinging; wide, brown-gray eyes blinking under thick-rimmed black glasses.
Ari knows Summer wants to get her out of her apartment, give her time away from the home now inextricably linked with the day that ruined her life. But as much as Summer sympathizes, she doesn’t under stand Ari only wants to be home. That she has to stay before Morgan leaves, drink him in before her throat goes dry.
~~~
As Morgan promised, he finds the money to break their lease. He’s been slowly packing, taking down little things Ari doesn’t notice at first, until there are enough gone that she does. Each time she hears the snap of the tape gun sealing another cardboard box, she disappears into the bathroom, takes a scalding shower, studies herself as the mirror’s steam clears. Her brown eyes barely open now; her olive-tinted skin, always blessedly clear, is marred by anxiety blemishes on her chin. She squints, studies the arch of her dark eyebrows. Picks herself apart, pushing up the pointed tip of her nose to see if she’d be more appealing with different features; labors to singe her hair straight, which she hasn’t done since high school, to see if maybe it suits her. It doesn’t.
Ari has returned to their bed. They sleep next to each other like always, though now they don’t touch. As they silently scroll their phones, she wants to run her fingertips across Morgan’s strong jaw, angular nose, unbelievably soft hair. Those tense calves. She knows he wants to touch her, too. Inhabit again the electricity of their bodies against each other, the feeling that sex wasn’t just pleasure, but also an affirmation of who they were and would always be. But her mouth against his would make everything worse. It’d take them back in time. And the future would lead to the same place.
Wednesday morning, Ari calls in sick to work when she wakes up to three huge duffels by the front door. She drops to the couch again, head in her hands. Isn’t she supposed to have processed this by now, made an iota of peace? Morgan touches her damp back with his fingertips. She slips the ring off her finger. Pictures him in a shop in the Diamond District, a sleazy man giving him a fifth of what he paid for it, walking away with a few hundred-dollar bills in his wallet.
“I really am sorry,” he says as the jewelry clinks on the tabletop.
He scoops the ring into his hand, sticks it in his pocket. He kisses the top of Ari’s head, tilts his temple into hers. Morgan stands, drops his key to the kitchen counter, walks to the door. Pauses. Closes it behind him.
Ari jets to the living-room window. She can see him emerge from their building, boxes on the building’s dolly, bags slung over him like a mule. He heaves everything into an idling cab, disappears inside. Doesn’t look back.
Excerpted from Just Want You Here: A Novel by Meredith Turits. © 2025 Published by Little A, March 11, 2025. All Rights Reserved.
