The Seven Year Slip


 
 
 
 Praise for The Seven Year Slip
 “I ADORED this book. Ashley is such a talent. The worlds she creates are so warm and specific and beautifully rendered. The Seven Year Slip is a gorgeous love story from one of the finest romance writers out there. I laughed, I cried, I didn’t want it to end. Consider me Ashley Poston’s greatest admirer!”
 —Carley Fortune, New York Times bestselling author of Every Summer After
 “Ashley Poston has again created a world that is off-kilter, romantic, and irresistible. If you love The Lake House but also want some top notch make out scenes, this is the book for you.”
 —Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow
 “Warm, funny and heartbreakingly hopeful, The Seven Year Slip is a magical love story, a devastating portrait of grief, and a loving ode to what it means to grow, evolve and blossom.”
 —Sangu Mandanna, bestselling author of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
 Praise for The Dead Romantics
 “It’s While You Were Sleeping meets Six Feet Under, and I need to yell to everyone about how good it is. . . . The result is an antidote for despair, a romance that is frank about the fact that life ends and time marches on but that nevertheless insists: We aren’t a gothic horror novel. We’re a love story. This is a book to make you laugh during the funeral scene and cry when the dance party begins.”
 —The New York Times
 “We could all use a good summer ghost story, and you can’t get much better than Ashley Poston’s adult fiction debut.”
 —Entertainment Weekly
 
 
 Other titles by Ashley Poston
 
 The Dead Romantics
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 BERKLEY ROMANCE
 Published by Berkley
 An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
 penguinrandomhouse.com
 
 Copyright © 2023 by Ashley Poston
 Readers Guide copyright © 2023 by Ashley Poston
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 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Poston, Ashley, author.
 Title: The seven year slip / Ashley Poston.
 Description: First edition. | New York : Berkley Romance, 2023.
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022054539 (print) | LCCN 2022054540 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593336502 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593336526 (ebook)
 Classification: LCC PS3616.O8388 S48 2023 (print) | LCC PS3616.O8388 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054539
 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054540
 Cover design and illustration by Vi-An Nguyen
 Book design by Daniel Brount, adapted for ebook by Eric Tessen
 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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 For all the food lovers out there who burn popcorn in the microwave:
 we’d be too strong if we could cook, too
 
 
 
 A BEGINNING
 My Darling Clementine
 “This apartment is magical,” Aunt Analea once said, sitting in her wingback chair the color of a robin’s egg, her hair twisted up with a silver dagger hairpin. She told me with mischief in her eyes, as if daring me to ask her what she meant. I had just turned eight and thought I knew everything.
 Of course this apartment was magical. My aunt lived in a century-old building on the Upper East Side, with stone lions on the eaves, half broken and clinging to the corners. Everything about it was magical—the way the light poured into the kitchen in 
 1
 Publishers Lunch
 My aunt used to say, if you don’t fit in, fool everyone until you do.
 She also said to keep your passport renewed, to pair red wines with meats and whites with everything else, to find work that is fulfilling to your heart as well as your head, to never forget to fall in love whenever you can find it because love is nothing if not a matter of timing, and to chase the moon.
 Always, always chase the moon.
 It must have worked for her, because it never mattered where she was in the world, she was home. She waltzed through