The Rules of You and Me all started with a shirt.
I was driving home from my office job about two years ago, kind of in that zoned out state you get in when you drive the same road every day and see the same things you always see. Except that on this day, something caught my eye and snapped me out of that zoned state. At a house down the road from mine, there was a big tree in the front yard. And hanging from that tree, on one of the lower branches, was a plaid shirt on a clothes hanger.
I don’t see many shirts hanging in trees, so I thought it was a little strange and kept on going home. The next day, the shirt was still there. The shirt stayed there for a few weeks, until finally it fell out of the tree. I never did find out why that shirt was in the tree–most likely, it was leftover from a yard sale or something–but the image of the shirt hanging in the tree every day stuck with me. I started to wonder why someone would hang a shirt from a tree and keep it there.
When I wrote The Boyfriend Thief, I never really had a plan to write a separate book about Hannah. She was just the antagonist from TBT, Avery’s ex-best friend turned competition. But once TBT was out there, I started to realize that Hannah had more to her story than what Avery knew. Why exactly did she hire Avery to steal Zac? Why didn’t she just break up with him herself? What was Hannah hiding in her life?
Again, the image of the shirt in the tree kept sticking in my mind and I knew the two stories were somehow connected. So I sat down and began to figure it all out, discovering Hannah’s family life and meeting Jude, the guy with the shirt in the tree, and finding out how their stories intertwined.
I told people as I wrote this book that the characters were breaking my heart. Zac and Avery had wrapped themselves around me and I wasn’t sure if another couple could challenge them for that place in me, but Jude and Hannah took me by surprise. I fell in love with them as their story unfolded. I hope that you enjoy reading about them and I hope that I’ve managed to do justice to these two people in my head.
Will there be more about Hannah, Avery, and Zac in the future? I don’t have plans to write more books with Hannah or Avery as narrators (I won’t rule out short stories!), but I playing around with ideas for new books in the companion series with new characters you haven’t met yet.
Today The Rules of You and Me is officially available in ebook format! If you haven’t read The Boyfriend Thief, you can read The Rules of You and Me on its own. But if you have read TBT, you’ll see familiar names pop up through the story.
The Rules of You and Me by Shana Norris
Hannah Cohen has always lived her life by a set of carefully constructed rules to maintain the image of perfection. But now, the rules aren’t helping control the chaos that is quickly taking over.
Opting out of spending the summer in Paris with her mom, Hannah instead heads to the mountains of North Carolina to stay with her aunt. The Blue Ridge Mountains provide a barrier between Hannah and the rest of the world, a safe haven where her secrets can be forgotten.
When Hannah crosses paths with Jude Westmore, a guy who hangs a different shirt from the tree in his front yard every day, she finds herself breaking out of the comfort of her rules and doing things she had never dared before. As the summer passes, Hannah and Jude grow closer and make up their own rules for dealing with life.
But when the secret Hannah has tried to forget is finally revealed, even the new rules can’t save her from possibly losing everything–including Jude.
The Rules of You and Me is a standalone companion novel to The Boyfriend Thief.
Available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords