The Things We Leave Unfinished

The Things We Leave Unfinished was published by Entangled: Amara in 2021, before Rebecca Yarros became widely known for the Empyrean fantasy series. The novel is a dual-timeline romance: one strand follows Georgia and Noah in the present day as they assemble a book out of notes, letters and drafts, and the other follows Scarlett, the grandmother whose unfinished manuscript they are chasing.

The two plots are designed to answer each other. Georgia has grown up in the shadow of a grandmother whose romances were famous and whose actual life was a subject nobody in the family discussed, and the work of editing the manuscript makes her the person who finds out. Noah, who writes the kind of endings readers want, is the outsider who has to work out what Scarlett was doing with hers. The manuscript's version of the war keeps the book's emotional scale at a distance from the domestic story, which is where the tension between the two timelines comes from.

Yarros structures the novel so that the historical chapters are read as documents rather than narrated in the past tense, and the question running underneath both stories is whether a romance has to end well to be worth writing. It is a standalone, and it sits on the shelf between contemporary romance and the historical romances that Scarlett herself writes.