Author/Uploaded by Emily Henry
Titles by Emily Henry Happy Place Book Lovers People We Meet on Vacation Beach Read BERKLEY An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2023 by Emily Henry Books, LLC Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels...
Titles by Emily Henry Happy Place Book Lovers People We Meet on Vacation Beach Read BERKLEY An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2023 by Emily Henry Books, LLC Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Export Edition ISBN: 9780593638446 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Henry, Emily, author. Title: Happy place / Emily Henry. Description: New York: Berkley, [2023] Identifiers: LCCN 2022041610 (print) | LCCN 2022041611 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593441275 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593441206 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593638446 (export edition) Classification: LCC PS3608.E5715 H36 2023 (print) | LCC PS3608.E5715 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041610 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041611 Cover design and illustration by Sandra Chiu Book design by Alison Cnockaert, adapted for ebook by Molly Jeszke 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. pid_prh_6.0_143184100_c0_r0 Contents Cover Titles by Emily Henry Title Page Copyright Dedication Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Acknowledgments About the Author _143184100_ For Noosha, who made it safe to be me, and who regularly answers the question “Why not?” with “Because I don’t want to.” I love you, always. 1 Happy Place Knott’s Harbor, Maine A cottage on the rocky shoreline, with knotty pine floorboards and windows that are nearly always open. The smell of evergreens and brine wafting in on the breeze, and white linen drapes lifting in a lazy dance. The burble of a coffee maker, and that first deep pull of cold ocean air as we step out onto the flagstone patio, steaming mugs in hand. My friends: willowy, honey-haired Sabrina and wisp of a waif Cleo, with her tiny silver septum piercing and dip-dyed box braids. My two favorite people on the planet since our freshman year at Mattingly College. It still boggles my mind that we didn’t know one another before that, that a stodgy housing committee in Vermont matched the three of us up. The most important friendships in my life all came down to a decision made by strangers, chance. We used to joke that our living arrangement must be some government-funded experiment. On paper, we made no sense. Sabrina was a born-and-raised Manhattan heiress whose wardrobe was pure Audrey Hepburn and whose bookshelves were stuffed with Stephen King. Cleo was the painter daughter of a semi-famous music producer and an outright famous essayist. She’d grown up in New Orleans and showed up at Mattingly in paint-splattered overalls and vintage Doc Martens. And me, a girl from southern Indiana, the daughter of a teacher and a dentist’s receptionist, at Mattingly because the tiny, prestigious liberal arts school gave me the best financial aid, and that was important for a premed student who planned to spend the next decade in school. By the end of our first night living together, Sabrina had us lined up on her bed watching Clueless on her laptop and eating a well-balanced mix of popcorn and gummy worms. By the end of the next week, she’d had custom shirts made for us, inspired by our very first inside joke. Sabrina’s read Virgin Who Can’t Drive. Mine read Virgin Who CAN Drive. And Cleo’s read Not a Virgin but Great Driver. We wore them all the time, just never outside the dorm. I loved our musty room in the rambling white-clapboard building. I loved wandering the fields and forest around campus with the two of them, loved that first day of fall when we could do our homework with our windows open, drinking spicy chai or decaf laced with maple syrup and smelling the leaves curling up and dropping from branches. I loved the nude painting of Sabrina and me that Cleo made for her final figure drawing class project, which she’d hung over our door so it was the last thing we saw on our way out to class, and the Polaroids we taped on either side of it, the three of us at parties and picnics and coffee shops in town. I loved knowing that Cleo had been lost in her work whenever her braids were pulled into her neon-green scrunchie and her clothes smelled like turpentine. I loved how Sabrina’s head would tip back on an outright cackle whenever she read something particularly terrifying and she’d kick her Grace Kelly loafers against the foot of her bed. I loved poring over my biology textbooks, running out of highlighter as I went because everything seemed so important, breaking to clean the room top to bottom whenever I got stuck on an assignment. Eventually, the silence would always crack, and we’d end up giggling giddily over texts from Cleo’s prospective new girlfriend, or outright shrieking as we hid behind our fingers from the slasher movie Sabrina had put on. We were loud. I’d never