One & Only

**Author:** Maurene Goo **Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The weight of family legacy, the courage required to choose love over destiny, and the quiet devastation of discovering that the stories we build our lives around may not be true.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who love romance with emotional depth, stories about Korean American family life, and anyone who has ever wondered whether the life they were told they should want is the life they actually need.

Cassia Park has spent a decade running One & Only, a Beverly Hills matchmaking agency with a perfect success rate. The secret behind that record is not an algorithm or a personality test. It is a gift passed down through the women of her family: the ability to see past lives and read the red thread of fate that connects two people across centuries. When Cassia looks into a client's face, she enters their history and watches their destined love unfold. A piece of ancestral jade transfers the match's name onto handmade paper, which is then kept in a centuries-old cupboard. The system works. It has always worked. Except for Cassia herself. At thirty, her grandmother Halmoni read her face and produced a name: Daniel Nam. For ten years, Cassia has searched for him. Private investigators have found nothing. Every lead has evaporated. The drawer holding her own match contains only a scrap of paper and a question that grows heavier with each passing year. She is approaching forty, watching clients find their soulmates while her own fated love remains a ghost. Then a bicycle accident on the L.A. River introduces her to Ellis Yang-Cohen, a twenty-eight-year-old river restoration worker with dimples and an unnerving ability to see through her defenses. He is twelve years younger, entirely off-script, and absolutely not the man whose name sits in her family's cupboard. But he keeps showing up, planting geraniums in her garden and asking questions she has spent a decade avoiding. The novel that follows is a romance in the truest sense: a story about love, yes, but also about the stories we inherit and the courage it takes to question them. Maurene Goo, known for her young adult novels, makes her adult fiction debut with a book that carries the warmth and wit of her earlier work while reaching for something deeper. The Los Angeles setting is rendered with affectionate specificity, from the bike paths along the river to the kitschy pink glory of the Madonna Inn. The Park family, with its crowded dinners and whispered arguments and fierce loyalty, feels lived-in and real. The central question of One & Only is deceptively simple: what do you do when…