One & Only

Ten years finding soulmates for everyone but herself

Cassia Park runs One & Only, a Beverly Hills matchmaking agency built on a family secret: every Park woman can see past lives.

Ten years finding soulmates for everyone but herself

Cassia Park runs One & Only, a Beverly Hills matchmaking agency built on a family secret: every Park woman can see past lives. When Cassia reads a client's face—a celebrity actress, a finance bro, a grieving widow—she enters their past and watches the red thread of fate connect them to their destined love. A piece of ancestral jade transfers the match's name onto handmade paper kept in a centuries-old cupboard. The agency's hundred-percent success rate has held for decades. But Cassia, approaching forty, has spent ten years searching for her own fated match—Daniel Nam, a name revealed when her grandmother Halmoni read her face at thirty. Private investigators find nothing. Every lead fizzles. The drawer with her name holds only a scrap of paper and an increasingly heavy question.

A bike crash introduces a rescuer twelve years her junior

On a Saturday ride with her bike group—co-founded with her best friend Marcella—Cassia swerves to avoid another cyclist along the L.A. River. She overcorrects and tumbles down the concrete bank. A young man working on a river restoration project jogs over, calm and perceptive, with dimples that crater when he laughs. Ellis Yang-Cohen, twenty-eight, calls 911 and keeps her talking until medics arrive. Days later he tracks her to the office, having asked the bike club where she works. The Park women swarm him with gratitude while Cassia hides her interest. He asks her out; she deflects, citing the eleven-year gap. But Ellis is undeterred in a way that feels less like pressure and more like conviction. When he walks away, she watches longer than she should.

Ellis plants geraniums in Cassia's garden and roots in her life

Buoyed by wine and Marcella's encouragement at her pre-birthday family dinner, Cassia DMs Ellis and invites him over. What begins as a hookup stretches into three days. The sex is extraordinary—playful and intense by turns—but what blindsides her is the rest: Ellis feeding Betty the cockatoo, making coffee in her kitchen, kneeling in her garden bed with bare hands while she protests about soil quality. He identifies the yellow flowers on her hillside as Feathery Cassia, her mother's favorite plant and her own namesake. They eat tacos from a truck at the bottom of her hill, drink Modelos on the porch, and talk until the canyon goes dark. Every hour she means to end it. Every hour she doesn't. Something unnamed and inconvenient takes root alongside the geraniums.