In Five Years

I picked up In Five Years on a rainy weekend when I wanted something light. The cover and the tagline promised a love story with a twist, and I went in expecting a clever romance about fate and choosing the right partner. That expectation stayed with me for the first half and then slowly broke apart, which turned out to be the point. This is a short novel, first published in 2020 by Atria Books at 272 pages, and it reads fast, but it left me thinking about friendship more than dating. I finished it in two sittings and spent a long time afterward sorting out how I felt about the turn it takes.

Dannie Kohan is the kind of narrator who tells you her five year plan before she tells you her favorite food. She is thirty, living in Manhattan, working long hours as a corporate lawyer. She tracks her life in lists and timelines. She has the boyfriend picked out, David, kind and steady and good with her routines. She has the job track picked out, an interview for a top firm position that could lock in the next step. She has the apartment and the habits that keep anxiety at a low hum. Her best friend since childhood is Bella, who is everything Dannie is not. Bella is warm, impulsive, messy with money and time, working as an art buyer or in galleries depending on the month, falling in and out of love, calling at midnight, showing up unannounced. Their friendship is old and close and a little lopsided, with Dannie as the planner and Bella as the spark.

A planner meets a future she did not plan

The opening chapters set up Dannie and David with care. They have been together for a while. David proposes right after Dannie nails the interview for her dream job, and for an evening everything fits the plan. She says yes. They tell Bella. They drink champagne. Dannie falls asleep happy, certain that the next five years will unfold the way she wrote them down.

Serle does a good job making Dannie sympathetic even if you are nothing like her. Dannie is not cold. She is anxious, and planning is how she quiets the fear. She grew up with a mother who left and a father who raised her with steady love but few answers, and she learned early to make life predictable. Law suits her because law rewards preparation. She reads contracts for a living, looking for the clause that could cause trouble later. She applies the same habit to love. David is a good man, she loves him, and on paper he fits. Bella teases her about the spreadsheets in her head, but Bella also relies on her. When Bella needs a place to crash or someone to call a landlord or talk her down after a bad date, Dannie answers.

What I liked here is how specific the New York details feel without slowing the story. Late nights at the office, takeout eaten over files, the subway rush, the small apartment Dannie keeps tidy while Bella leaves sweaters and magazines everywhere. David is drawn as decent rather than dull. He cooks, he listens, he wants kids on roughly the same timeline. There is no villain in this setup, which matters later. The tension is not between a good boyfriend and a bad boyfriend. It is between the life Dannie has arranged and a glimpse of a life she has not.

An hour in 2025

The turn comes on the night of the proposal. Dannie falls asleep in 2020 and wakes up in a different apartment. The date, she slowly works out, is December 15, 2025, exactly five years later. The ring on her finger is different. The apartment is different, messier in some ways, softer in others, with art on the walls she would not have chosen and a smell of cooking she does not recognize. A man she has never met is there with her, and they are clearly intimate, clearly at ease in a way that frightens her. His name is Aaron.

Serle writes this sequence as vivid and strange rather than explanatory. Dannie does not travel with a machine or meet a guide. She simply wakes up there, lives about an hour in that future, and then wakes back up in her own bed in 2020 with David beside her. During that hour she and Aaron talk, they kiss, they act like people with history. She notices small things, his voice, the way he touches her hair, a tattoo, the easy domestic rhythm between them. She also feels grief in that apartment, a heavy sadness sitting under the tenderness, though she cannot name its source yet. Then it ends. She is back. David is asleep. Her engagement ring is the one David gave her.

I found this part effective because Dannie reacts like a lawyer, not like a romantic. She does not swoon. She tries to file the experience away as a stress dream. She tells no one at first, then tells Bella in pieces. She looks for a rational cause, lack of sleep, champagne, pressure from the interview and the proposal. But the details stick. She remembers Aaron's face. She remembers the date. She remembers the other ring. For a planner, an unplanned memory of the future is intolerable. She decides, quietly, to watch for it and also to prevent it, by holding tighter to the plan she already has. If she marries David and stays on track at work, she reasons, then the apartment with Aaron cannot happen.

Bella, David, and the effort to stay on script

The middle of the book follows Dannie as she tries to force life to obey her outline. She throws herself into work. The new job is demanding, with sharp partners and late nights and the constant need to prove she belongs. She and David settle into engaged life, looking at venues, talking about timing, meeting each other's families in more serious ways. Bella drifts in and out, bright and chaotic as ever, dating someone new who she says is different from the others.

That someone turns out to be Aaron. When Bella finally brings him to dinner, Dannie freezes. It is the man from the vision, same face, same voice. Bella is glowing. She says she met him recently and feels something real. She wants Dannie to like him. Dannie tries to smile through dinner while her mind races. She pulls away, finds reasons to dislike him, warns Bella to slow down. Bella, who has always trusted Dannie with everything, feels judged and pulls back a little.

This stretch is uncomfortable on purpose. Dannie behaves badly in small, human ways. She is short with Bella. She overexplains to David why she is distracted without telling him the truth. She starts to treat Aaron as a threat to be managed rather than a person. She even wonders if she should break Bella and Aaron up to protect both her friendship and her own future, which she knows is wrong as soon as she thinks it. David senses distance but cannot name it. He is patient, but patience has limits when one partner keeps a secret about another man, even if the secret is a dream about the future.

What makes this section work is that Serle does not make Dannie cruel, only frightened. Dannie loves Bella fiercely. She also loves being the one who knows what happens next. Losing that control feels like falling. I recognized the impulse to fix things by working harder, staying later, planning the wedding faster, as if speed could outrun the vision. David starts to feel like a safe room she is hiding in rather than a partner she is moving toward. Readers who came for a love triangle may feel impatient here, because Dannie and Aaron share few scenes and almost no flirtation. That distance is deliberate. The book is building something else under the romance setup.

Aaron in daylight

Seen through Bella, Aaron is gentle and attentive in a way that contrasts with Dannie's clipped style. He is not a slick rival to David. He cooks, he remembers details, he treats Bella's scattered career and moods with respect rather than amusement. Bella, who often chooses men who need rescuing or who leave when things get hard, tells Dannie this feels steady. Dannie watches them with dread and envy mixed together, dread because every kind moment between them seems to confirm the vision is coming true, envy because she sees how easily Bella accepts affection she herself has to schedule.

Dannie and Aaron have a few strained conversations in this period. He tries to be friendly because Bella loves Dannie. Dannie is stiff because she knows too much and nothing at all. She knows his face from 2025. She does not know how they get from a dinner where he is Bella's boyfriend to an apartment where he is holding her. She fills the gap with guilt. She wonders if she will betray Bella, if Bella will leave him, if time will simply swap them like names on a lease. The lack of clear rules for the vision makes it worse. There is no mechanism to study, no second trip to gather facts. There is only one hour of memory and a date circled five years out.

I appreciated that Serle resists turning Aaron into a prize. David is not a placeholder either. David has his own disappointments and hopes, and as Dannie withdraws he stops pretending everything is fine. Their talks about the wedding become talks about whether they want the same life. Dannie realizes she has been describing David in terms of fit rather than fire, kind rather than known. That sounds harsh, and she knows it, but she cannot unthink it once the vision plants the comparison. At the same time she hates herself for comparing a real, loyal man to a man she met for an hour in sleep. This is where the book feels most honest about how fantasy can poison a decent relationship, even when the fantasy was not chosen.

What the vision was actually about

About two thirds through, the story shifts from romantic suspense to something heavier. Bella gets sick. What first looks like stomach pain and exhaustion turns out to be cancer, advanced and aggressive. The diagnosis lands hard because Bella has always seemed physically vibrant, the friend who dances too long and eats too fast and recovers quickly. Suddenly she is in scans and waiting rooms, and Dannie is in the role she knows best, the organizer, the driver, the keeper of lists, except now the lists are medications and appointment times and questions for doctors.

Serle handles the illness plot without turning it into inspiration speech. Bella is scared and angry and sometimes funny in the same hour. She loses weight, she loses hair, she argues with Dannie about treatment choices. Dannie, who is used to solving problems with research, learns that research has limits. David tries to help, but Dannie and David are already fraying, and grief exposes the thin places. Eventually they end their engagement, not with a big betrayal but with sad clarity that Dannie is elsewhere, focused on Bella, haunted by the future, unable to give David the full yes he deserves.

The reveal that reframes the whole book is quiet rather than showy. Dannie comes to understand that the apartment in 2025, the tenderness with Aaron, the sadness under it, was never a preview of her stealing Bella's boyfriend. It was a preview of grief. In 2025, Bella is gone. Dannie and Aaron are left, two people who loved Bella most, finding comfort in each other after loss. The different ring, the different home, the intimacy that felt so lived in, all of it makes sense once Bella's death is placed at the center. Dannie was not seeing a romance that would break her friendship. She was seeing the friendship break in the only way no one can prevent, and the bond that would remain with the man who loved her friend.

This turn divided readers, and I understand why. If you were promised a time slip romance, learning that the vision is about a friend dying of cancer can feel like a trick. I felt a flash of that myself. But on reflection the clues were there from the start. The sadness in the future apartment, Dannie's role as caretaker even in the vision, Bella's centrality to every choice Dannie makes. The book was always about Bella and Dannie first, with the men arranged around that core. Aaron matters because Bella loves him and because he will understand Dannie's loss in a way David, kind as he is, cannot share. The future Dannie saw was not a reward for leaving David. It was the cost of loving Bella.

A romance that is not a romance

The last section moves quickly through Bella's decline and the time after. Dannie quits trying to control outcomes and simply shows up. She sits through chemo, she argues with insurance forms, she brings soup Bella cannot eat, she holds Bella's hand when Bella is too tired to talk. Bella, even while ill, pushes Dannie to loosen her grip on plans, to eat slowly, to say what she feels before the moment passes. Their talks in these chapters are the best writing in the book, plain and direct, with jokes that land because they are tired and true. Aaron is there too, steady, devastated, learning how to love someone through dying rather than toward a future.

After Bella dies, Dannie is hollowed out. Work feels distant. The apartment feels too quiet. She drifts from David with mutual sadness rather than anger. She does not immediately run to Aaron, and I was glad Serle avoids that easy swap. Grief needs space. Dannie travels a little, she sees her father, she thinks about her mother leaving and what it means to stay. She starts to allow mess, to leave dishes, to miss a deadline without panic, to let a day unfold without a list. It sounds small, but for Dannie it is a real shift in how she lives.

The book closes near December 15, 2025, the date of the vision. Dannie has a choice about whether to go to Aaron, to let the hour she lived become true in its emotional shape if not every detail. She goes. The meeting is tentative and sad and hopeful at once, two people who share the same missing person. Serle does not promise they will marry or that this fixes anything. She only suggests that Dannie, who once needed to know the whole five year plan, can now walk into a room without knowing what happens next.

That is why the criticism that the book misleads romance readers has weight and also misses the aim. Yes, the cover copy and early chapters set up Aaron as a soulmate Dannie must find, and yes, readers who wanted a love triangle with a clear winner may feel cheated when Bella's cancer takes over and David steps aside without a fight. The legal career that opens the book fades into background, the time slip is never explained, and Aaron remains thinly drawn outside his love for Bella. Those are fair complaints. The mechanics of the vision do not hold up if you poke them. Why one hour, why that date, why no second glimpse. Serle does not care about rules. She cares about the emotional use of foreknowledge, how knowing a date can make you waste the years before it.

For me the trade was worth it once I stopped reading it as a romance. As a story about two women, one who plans and one who feels, and how death rewrites both styles, it rings true. Dannie learns that love is not a contract to be enforced. Bella learns that letting herself be cared for is not weakness. Aaron is less a love interest than proof that Bella was loved well at the end. If you need a traditional romance with banter and a wedding, look elsewhere. If you want a short, sad, readable story about friendship, control, and learning to live with not knowing, In Five Years delivers that with care, even if the path there uses a romantic setup to get you in the door.