I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for romance tropes that feel a little bit too real. Brother’s best friend, forced proximity—the types of romances I dreamed up in my childhood bedroom. After eating up The People We Meet On Vacation (both the book and this year’s adaptation), I’ve been chasing another aching, slow-burning friends-to-lovers romance. In Every Future, It’s Us by Katie Naymon is answering all my prayers. The charming, yearn-filled story follows childhood best friends who reunite every New Year’s Eve to exchange predictions for each other’s year—an idea inspired by a decade-long game Katie Naymon played in real life. While we have to wait until December 1, 2026 for this new friends-to-lovers story, keep reading for an exclusive cover reveal and first look at In Every Future, It’s Us by Katie Naymon.
What In Every Future, It’s Us is about
When childhood neighbors and best friends Florence Parker and Tom Sinclair were on the precipice of graduating college, they made a pact they hoped would link them forever: Every year at their families’ lavish New Year’s Eve party, they’d each write five secret predictions about the other’s year ahead. Whoever got the most guesses correct would make one big life decision for the other.
So it went for nearly a decade—until the final year, when one letter shattered their friendship. Now Tom and Florence are home for the holidays and haven’t spoken in over a year. To keep up appearances, they’re forced to plan the New Year’s Eve party together. But hidden in the tense silences and charged interactions is a wealth of history they can’t escape, and feelings they’ve never spoken aloud. It’s their last opportunity to make amends before Florence moves away, but are they willing to take a chance on a future they can’t predict?
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Exclusive cover reveal of In Every Future, It’s Us
Read an exclusive excerpt of In Every Future, It’s Us
New Year’s Eve
Eight Years Ago
Age 22
My best friend Tom Sinclair is good—no, excellent—at complex and detailed things: baking Michelin star–level pastries, being editor in chief of the college newspaper, swimming butterfly—but tying a tie is not one of them. It’s somehow endearing that the simplest tasks, the ones where overthinking is a disadvantage, are the ones that trip him up most.
We’re in his room—a refuge of dark blues and crisp sheets and eight editions of The Princeton Review SAT Prep Book he’s kept for god knows what reason—hiding from the high-heel clacking and glass-clinking downstairs. The Parker/Sinclair New Year’s Eve party—an annual production hosted by my mom and Tom’s mom Christa—is about to be in full swing.
“Which one?” He holds up three ties as I sit on the edge of the bed, watching.
I tilt my head. “The navy. Makes your eyes pop.”
He nods and carries on—Tom doesn’t have time for compliments. I scroll on my phone while he moves into the walk-in closet to change. I’m already done up in a velvet dress and heels because the pride-and-joy party of our best-friend mothers does have a dress code. He reappears in wool slacks and a white button-down, the tie draped around his neck. And then he props his phone up on his dresser, playing a step-by-step video of a man tying a tie.
“What is that, wikiHow?” I ask.
“I can never get it right. Not like Dad taught me.”
My stomach drops. It’s flat, the way he says it. Not bitter or sad, but in that way, it’s almost worse. Tom’s dad moved out after the divorce, right before we went to high school, only months after we first met.
I migrate from the bed to stand in front of him. Even in my heels, he towers over me, his hands tight around each end of the tie.
“I can be your dad,” I say, and Tom laughs.
Then I grab his phone with its low-budget video and, god, it’s boring, so I set it to a fast speed, only half scanning it. He lets me finagle the silk into some sort of knot, but it’s severely lopsided.
“Hmm. Okay, well, this is more of an interpretive take on a tie, but . . .”
“I’m pretty sure that part goes over—”
He tries to snatch an end from my fingers, but I hold on. So tight, in fact, it pulls him closer to me. His breath coasts along my forehead, his hands almost grabbing my waist to steady himself—almost. I’m eye level with his Adam’s apple. It bobs.
Danger, my body whispers. We don’t do this, remember?
I shake my head. “You know what? What if we just do it like this?”
I tie the tie and turn him so he’s facing the mirror again.
“Florence, this is a bunny ear. Like how you tie your shoes.”
“It’s cool, I think. You don’t want to look like every other guy with a wikiHow video.”
He raises his eyebrows and pulls up the video once more. He gets it right after two tries.
“Do you think next year we’ll do this?” I ask, looking at him in the mirror.
He turns around, amused. “Our usual father-son bonding?”
I huff. “You’re being way too casual. We should be soaking up every last second of this. We should be debating current events or Ryan’s new haircut. I shouldn’t just be watching you getting dressed in silence.”
“There’s this thing I heard about that’ll enable us to talk literally every day. It’s super innovative, really new. It’s called texting.”
“It’s not the same thing and you know it.”
He shrugs. “We’ll have to put more effort in. It’s no big deal.”
It’s a very big deal.
I was never supposed to go to boarding school in New Hampshire, but where Tom leads, I follow. When my parents moved us to Boston from Los Angeles in eighth grade so my mom could take a professorship at Harvard, they put my sister Elise and me in the very good local public school. That’s where I met Tom, and then he announced he would transfer for high school. Faced with the prospect of a long-distance best friend, I begged them to let me follow Tom to Spencer.
After much arguing, they did. They knew how hard I’d taken the move from LA. They knew how badly I needed constancy, and that constancy had come in the form of Tom.
In any case, my relationship with Tom has never been a weekend here and there, sustained by text messages. For the last nine years, it’s been about good old-fashioned quality time.
“I want to enjoy tonight. Let’s not talk about the future. We have plenty of time for that later, and this is a party,” I say. I walk to the mirror and take a lipstick from my pocket, applying a red swath.
“Flor.” Tom’s voice is gentle as he watches me primp. “I can promise you one thing. We’re graduating college, yes, but no matter what happens, I will always come home to be with you on New Year’s Eve, okay? We will always have this party. Nothing needs to change if we don’t let it.”
I look at him in the mirror, the long slope of his shoulders in his jacket, his left-side dimple appearing with his reassuring smile.
“And we won’t let it,” I confirm.
But it’s more to convince myself.
Jenna Piotrowicz, Editorial Assistant
Jenna began working as an Editorial Assistant for The Everygirl in 2024. With her eye for detail, she assists the team with content creation, sourcing products and images, and works behind the scenes to support The Everygirl in uploading and updating content.
Feature graphic image credited to: Madison Skipper | Dupe
