THE LONG TABLE

Delia Fontaine has been running the Long Table for nine years — a chosen-family Thanksgiving dinner in Providence, Rhode Island, that started with eleven people who had nowhere to go and became the fixed point in forty-two people’s Novembers. She manages the guest list, the borrowed chairs, the seating chart, the social architecture of making sure everyone belongs somewhere. She is very good at this.

Then Nico Faraday tells her he’s moving to Portland in December. He tells her in the tone he uses to discuss the turkey.

Before Delia can give the Long Table a proper ending and let him go gracefully — there’s the annual shopping trip through the Federal Hill markets where two vendors congratulate him on Portland and he looks like a person going somewhere he wants to go, a pie crust session where she teaches herself to ask if he’s excited and gets an honest answer that breaks something open, a cooking disaster that the two of them manage together with the ease of nine years without saying a word to coordinate, and the Saturday afternoon she spreads all nine seating charts across the kitchen table and discovers she has put herself next to him every single year. Without once noticing she did it.

She’s spent nine years building everyone a place to belong and never asked for one herself. He’s spent nine years waiting for her to say something, and finally made a decision that would force the question — except the decision is real, and the opportunity is real, and he is genuinely going unless she asks.

A Friendsgiving romance set in the city, about chosen family and what it costs to finally ask for what you want. The kind of book you stay up too late finishing because you need to hear her say it.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Holiday sits at 5.1 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 180–260 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — and the Friendsgiving/Thanksgiving lane is genuinely thin, extending the fall shelf’s selling life a full month past Halloween

→ Dual-category play with Romance > Contemporary (friends-to-lovers at 4.7 sales-to-comp, Hot Mainstream) positions this title in two Hot Mainstream categories simultaneously

→ City setting differentiates hard in a small-town-dominated lane — Providence is the only urban Friendsgiving romance on the fall shelf, capturing readers who have been specifically looking for it

→ Found-family ensemble crosses into women’s fiction and gifting readership — expanding the addressable market beyond core romance buyers in the November selling window

→ “One of them is leaving” adds a four-week countdown clock that drives through-the-night reads and review motivation — the structural urgency slow burns without a deadline can lack

TROPES:
• Friends to Lovers
• Found Family
• Slow Burn
• One of Them Is Leaving
• Mutual Pining
• The Thing That Was a Relationship All Along
• Chosen-Family Holiday
• City Setting
• The Seating Chart That Said It Before She Did
• HEA

HEAT LEVEL: Moderate / Open Door 

Perfect for fans of: Emily Henry, Abby Jimenez, Susan Mallery, and Christina Lauren