Again, But Better meets Maybe in Another Life in this love story with a magical twist!
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Molly Morris’s Rewind To Us, which releases on June 17th 2025.
Dixie Mulligan only has one plan for her annual California vacation this summer – to tell her best friend Sawyer that she’s in love with him.
It doesn’t matter that things between them technically fell apart over spring break, and they haven’t spoken since – until Dixie arrives and realizes Sawyer has moved on (a fact made very apparent when she sees him kissing, um, someone else).
Luckily, Dixie and her family have each been gifted with a Rewind. All Dixie has to do is go back and redo the moment she thinks doomed hers and Sawyer’s relationship before it even began.
But when family secrets start pouring out, Dixie’s not so sure even her Rewind will be enough to save what she and Sawyer had. Is the damage already done, or can she turn back the clock and give them one more chance?
From Rewind to Us by Molly Morris. Copyright © 2025 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
CHAPTER ONE
The fundamental rule of Rewinds is that each member of the Mulligan family gets only one. The purpose of allowing just a single chance to redo a moment from the last 365 days is meant to encourage careful consideration, though some argue it’s down to stinginess.
—EXCERPT FROM “REWINDS 101” BY FRANK MULLIGAN
Today is the day I’m going to tell Sawyer Cook that I love him.
Something I’ve wanted to do for months.
Something I should’ve done a year—maybe even years—ago.
I’m finally going to do it. I’m going to tell my best friend how I feel.
Today …
… the day I decided to dye my hair highlighter orange.
I blink at my reflection in the mirror that hangs above the bus station bathroom’s avocado-green sink. “I look,” I say numbly, swallowing, “like a Troll doll.”
I pluck up the empty box of hair dye tipped sideways on the sink’s edge so I can double-check the color for the eightieth time since I finished drying my hair underneath the hand dryer. Yes, the dye is officially named “Tangerine Scream,” but where the girl on the box has hair woven with warm streaks of auburn and gold, mine is an eye-watering shade of candy-corn orange. Dying your hair any color of the rainbow is always going to be a risk, especially when you do it in a bus station bathroom, but it’s not like I haven’t done this before. It’s been my ritual ever since I started spending my summers at my aunt’s place in Cielo Springs, separating myself from my home in New York, marking myself as California Dixie. So how did the thought that I might look like the Cheeto Cheetah not occur to me when I agonized over the boxes of hair dye in Duane Reade for over an hour yesterday? That, even though I dye my hair a different shade of neon every summer, this time it might be smarter to go for something softer, like lavender, or a really pretty, delicate blue? Something that won’t make Sawyer have to shield his eyes from me like I’m a supernova as I pour my heart out to him?
As I throw the hair dye box into the trash, my phone buzzes from my pocket. My heart immediately launches into my throat, but it’s not Sawyer telling me he’s outside, or even that he’s on his way. I haven’t heard from him since I sent him a copy of my bus ticket to Cielo Springs a couple weeks ago, and he responded with a thumbs-up emoji. This time, it’s an email from my grandma. Or, more accurately, it’s my grandma’s newsletter. I know Sawyer will be here soon and I should be getting ready, but I’ll take any distraction from my panic, especially if it means I don’t have to look at my hair.
THE MULLIGAN FAMILY NEWS
Greetings from Puerto Vallarta!
Carol and I are having a fabulous time at the hotel. Two-for-one piña coladas! We lost the limbo contest, but our spirits remain high. Carol thinks it might have something to do with the two-for-one piña coladas. Who can say?!
Due to the recent hack of Frank’s email account, all Rewind-related paperwork will now be sent via fax. Apparently, the hacking has come from somewhere in Australia. I’ve tried to contact their local authorities, but the call waiting times are impossibly long. Five hours!! Due to popular demand, Frank has written a new series of informative blobs for the website about the Rewind, including a list of all the Rewinds our little clan has enacted over time (a little Mulligan family history, if you will!!), so have a look when you get a chance. If you have any questions, just email, call, or comment on the blob post and I will respond ASAP.
Carol and I will be back Stateside in a couple of days. Pat, did the doctor ever call you back? The hotel front desk said you tried to call, but I was taking a nap. In the meantime, I hope you’re all having a great summer so far, or as they say here in Mexico, ¡Que tengan un buen verano!
Love, Lois (Grandma, Mom, Auntie Lolo, Great-Aunt Lo, Sis, etc.)
My grandma’s newsletter is accompanied by a picture of her and my great-aunt Carol sitting by their hotel’s pool in Mexico, each holding two yellow cocktails topped with fat pineapple wedges. Somehow my grandma can write a surprisingly engaging email newsletter but still can’t remember it’s “blog” and not “blob.”
When I glance up again and catch my reflection in the mirror, Grandma’s newsletter still open on my phone, it only now occurs to me that I could technically take my hair color choice back. Use my Rewind to pick cotton-candy pink, or a sleek silver. But just as quickly as the idea enters my head, I toss it out again. Each member of our family only gets one Rewind in their entire lifetime, so enacting it is a really big deal. Plus, do I really want my family to see that I used mine to change my hair color from disgusting orange to pastel purple? Even if it is just on a post on my grandma’s “blob,” sandwiched between pictures of her video store’s Christmas window display and her favorite Spanish-inspired breakfast recipes.
“Good afternoon,” a bored voice says over the bus station’s intercom, the sound ricocheting off the bathroom’s yellowing tiles. “The Cielo Springs bus station will be closing in five minutes. Anyone waiting for the six fifty-eight bus to San Diego is advised—”
Five minutes. Sawyer will be here in five minutes.
With a brush I pluck out of my backpack, I scrape my hair into a high bun, hoping the fact that it’s tight against my head means it won’t catch the light as much. The fact that I didn’t really sleep last night is alive on my face, in the dark circles under my eyes and the grayish tinge to my skin. Staring at myself in the mirror, I scrub my hands down my cheeks to give them some semblance of life, but now I only look like I’ve been slapped.
The lobby of the Cielo Springs bus station isn’t much bigger or busier than the women’s bathroom. The three wooden benches lining the walls are occupied by a sleeping man and a couple eating from the same bag of trail mix. Nobody seems concerned about the bus station’s imminent closure. The walls are decked with 1920s-style tourism posters for Cielo Springs, the “Gem of the Anza Borrego Desert,” speckled with cartoon cacti and adobe-colored hills. In the corner are two half-empty vending machines and a small ticket office, at which sits the owner of the bored intercom voice reading a NASCAR magazine. Like always, I wait for everyone in the lobby to turn to me as one, the people of this city that’s not even big enough to be a speck of dust on a map of California to somehow see straight through my neon mask, their pitying cringes at my ugly hair becoming open-mouthed stares. But when nobody does, relief trickles through me. I’m just a girl who made a poor hair-color choice. Nothing special.
Goose bumps prickle my arms as the air-conditioning vent above me sends down a frigid breeze. But the moment I shove open the glass door leading to the bus station parking lot, the cold evaporates, replaced by a blanket of hot air so heavy, it almost feels like water. Even though the sunlight is fading, heat clings to every inch of my exposed skin. I can already feel the sweat forming along my shoulders, under my armpits, and across my top lip. It has to be at least a hundred degrees, probably more, not a breeze or coastline for miles.
I shut my eyes and breathe in deep, the boiling air heating my lungs. Home.
* * *
From the way I see it, I’ve got two options as to when I can tell Sawyer that I am deliriously in love with him:
Immediately. As in, the moment I see him. With this option, I can use the sort of nervous mania I’ve built up over my day of traveling to propel me into getting it over with. Plus, if he laughs in my face, I’m already at the bus station, which means it won’t take as long for me to flee the state.In a few hours, after we’ve had time to settle in. Even under normal circumstances, when Sawyer and I have spent the last year in almost constant communication, the first five minutes of seeing each other again IRL are always awkward, both of us so giddy to be reunited that we mostly swing between talking over each other and repeating the same questions before eventually relaxing into our usual, easy banter. Now that we’ve barely spoken since April, I don’t know how things’ll be. This way, I can give us some time to get back into us before threatening to ruin everything. Again. But on the other hand, the longer I wait, the higher the chance that I’ll chicken out.The unmistakable sound of the Datsun approaching cuts through my thoughts. The engine has this way of sounding like it’s filled with marbles, but that Sawyer’s uncle claims is completely normal for a car made in the ’80s. It noses into the parking lot, its windshield caught in the sun so that I can’t see the driver’s face. All day, I’ve wondered what this moment will look like. Whether Sawyer will be cold, whether or not he’ll pretend nothing happened between us. If I’ll even recognize him. But when the Datsun stops in front of me and the driver’s-side door swings open, I’d know that mop of dirty-blond hair anywhere.
“You’re here,” I say, too quiet for him to hear.
Only now that I can see him, here, in the flesh, do I even let myself admit to the other possibility that’s been circling my head all day—that he wouldn’t show up at all. That no matter how much him picking me up from the Cielo Springs bus station at the start of summer has become a tradition for us, this would be the first year where I had to call my aunt instead, or get an Uber. Sawyer had never even said he would pick me up this time, not technically; I just couldn’t acknowledge the possibility that he wouldn’t. Because that would mean things between us were officially over.
But he’s here. At the sight of him, a knot of tension loosens in my chest.
“Sorry I’m kinda late,” Sawyer calls. He has this way of cutting through the niceties, as though his greetings are just implied. “Bubblemania ran out of passion fruit bubble tea, so I spent, like, twenty minutes trying to decide between mango and honeydew.” He waves his arms, shooing the thought away. “It was all very stressful.”
