Underneath the goody-two-shoes persona is damaged goods…but can the bad boy across the street save her?
Bailey Followhill is the perfect daughter.
Sweet. Charitable. Pretty. Control freak.
Not a hair out of place, not an inch out of line, she is everything her troublemaking sister Daria isn’t.
But when her A game turns out to be a lukewarm C- at Juilliard, Bailey’s picture-ready life starts fraying faster than the worn satin ribbons of her pointe shoes.
She’s becoming a piece of gossip.
The Troubled Child. A drug abuser.
No longer the girl her best friend once knew.
Lev Cole is so golden, he’s got the Midas Touch.
Prized quarterback. Football captain. Hottest guy in SoCal. A textbook cliché.
But with a girlfriend he doesn’t love and a career path he doesn’t value, Lev is coasting.
The only two things he cares about―Bailey and becoming a pilot―are out of reach.
But Lev is done being satisfied with the life others have chosen for him. He wants to pick his own cards. To demolish the seamless kingdom of lies his family stitched together on the ruins his mother left behind.
The question is, can he save his best friend and his dream before too much damage is done?
This book was far more of an emotional rollercoaster than I was expecting, but I loved every minute of it. I thought Bailev would be an adorable friends-to-lovers, but I should have known better. These two were inseparable their whole lives, but Bailey blew it up when she was accepted to Juilliard. She felt like she had no choice because if there was any chance at Bailev, she just might abandon her dream to stay close to him, which isn’t acceptable. She knew she’d regret it and might end up resenting Lev, so she had to end it. It tore both of their hearts out, but college kept her too busy to wallow and Lev managed to distract himself with a girl.
Bailey destroyed him when she left, but Lev has other problems, too. His dad and brother want him to go to college on a football scholarship because they think he could go pro and they may be right. But Lev hates football and only plays for his dad. He doesn’t want to play now and certainly doesn’t want to play in college. He wants to be a fighter pilot, so he’s not even interested in the D1 schools courting him. The only place he wants to go is the Air Force Academy, but his family doesn’t want to hear it.
Ballet is hard work and Bailey has the injuries to prove it. So many, in fact, that she’s gotten hooked on painkillers. She’s cruising along popping Xanax and Vicodin to get through the semester when her source gives her pills laced with fentanyl. She barely survived and only because she had the wherewithal to call Lev before passing out. Her parents take her home and beg her to go to rehab, but Bailey doesn’t want to admit she has a problem. Her addiction takes her to the darkest places, and she treats the people she loves terribly.
She and Lev can’t get along at all when they’re together, but neither one can let go, either. They’re both lost and crumbling under pressure and neither one can believe they’re going through all of this without their best friend. Their story broke my heart more than once, but they also put it back together. I couldn’t get enough of Bailev and devoured this book. It’s sad to know the series is truly over now, but this is the story we’ve all been waiting for and it was so worth the wait. Aside from Bailev, we get lots of everyone else so it’s an epilogue of sorts to the seven books that came before it in Sinners of Saint and All Saints High. I’d like to thank the author for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
