At Date 41, Nora Bennett — now at the exact center of her thirtieth year, sword down, drawer full,
attention calibrated — walks into an unremarkable bar on an unremarkable Tuesday in April and meets
a man named Oliver. He is a veterinarian. He smells faintly of the animal shelter
where he volunteers on Sundays. He suggests first dates before noon. He orders his own coffee
without being told. And when Nora tells him, at minute eleven, that he is date number forty-two
of one hundred — he doesn't flinch. He simply says: take Saturday, take Sunday, take Tuesday
if you need it.

They fall slowly, seriously, with their eyes open — and they fall, also, toward the specific
almost that this volume is named for. Oliver has a two-year research fellowship in Edinburgh.
He leaves in August. The calendar is finite from the first morning, and both of them know it.

Alongside the Oliver arc, The Almost contains: a panic attack at Date 41 that teaches Nora
more about care than any date before it; an airport scene at the halfway mark of the project she will
spend the rest of her life remembering; a journalist named Nathan; an editor named
Mara who changes the shape of her professional life in a single afternoon; and the
unexpected return of a vascular surgeon Volume Two readers will recognize by his three-line message.

The Almost is the romantic volume, and also the grief volume. It is the volume in which Nora
meets the love she most wanted — at the wrong angle, for the wrong amount of time — and lives through
the specific adult project of surviving the almost, intact, unbittered, and still writing it down.
By the end, sixty dates are done. Forty remain. And the drawer holds eighty-three slips,
two letters, and one eleven-sentence list.