Maybe in Another Life

What's inside (8 sections)

1. A Woman Out Of Road
2. Midnight At The Bar
3. The Life Where She Leaves With Gabby
4. The Life Where She Stays With Ethan
5. The Echoes Reid Plants In Both Threads
6. What Holds Up And What Wobbles
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked this one up because I had read Reid's bigger books first and wanted to see what she did before all that attention. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and The Six are loud books, full of fame and incident. This one is quieter. It starts with a woman at an airport holding everything she owns, hoping her best friend still wants her around. That image stuck with me more than any red carpet scene.

What surprised me is how little the book cares about which life is better. Most stories with two timelines want you to pick a winner. Reid does not play it that way. She follows both versions of Hannah Martin with the same patience, and she lets both hurt in different places. By the end I cared less about fate as an idea and more about Gabby, who shows up in both threads and never phones it in.

This summary retells the full setup and both storylines in order, then looks at the patterns Reid plants across them and where the book strains.

A Woman Out Of Road

Hannah Martin is twenty nine and tired of starting over. Since college she has lived in six different cities and held a string of jobs that never added up to anything. The last stop was New York, which ended badly enough that she leaves town with her tail between her legs. Her parents and sister have lived in London since she was sixteen, so home for Hannah has been a shifting thing for a long time.

She flies back to Los Angeles, her hometown, with no plan beyond asking her oldest friend for a couch. On the plane she sits beside a woman who is frightened of flying, and Hannah talks to distract her, running through her own scattered work history to fill the minutes before landing. It is a small scene but it tells you who Hannah is. Chatty. Warm. Quick to take care of someone else. Slow to decide anything for herself.

Gabby meets her at the gate holding a handmade sign that reads Hannah Marie Martin, complete with a little drawing of Hannah beside the name. I love that detail because it lands the whole friendship in one picture. These two grew up close. Hannah practically lived at Gabby's house as a kid. Now Gabby is married to Mark, a dentist, steady and clean cut, and working as a vice president at a nonprofit. She and Mark bought a townhouse on a steep hill street, and Hannah moves into the guest room with her suitcases and her doubts.

Reid takes her time with the homecoming. There is a welcome party. Old friends circle through. And there, across the room, is Ethan, Hannah's high school boyfriend and first love. He is the one she never fully got over. They were serious young, then life pulled them apart, and she has carried a soft spot for him for years. Seeing him again after a messy exit from New York, including an affair with a married man that left her ashamed, scrambles her. Ethan looks good. He seems glad to see her. The past suddenly feels close enough to touch.

Hannah is also famously bad at choosing. Early on Reid shows this in small ways. Hannah stalls in front of a vending machine, unable to pick a snack, turning a tiny decision into a long debate. Friends tease her about it. Her mother has a line about Hannah that comes back later, something to the effect that even when Hannah seems to have made a mess of things, life finds a way to work out for her. Whether that is luck or love carrying her is the question the rest of the book chews on.

Midnight At The Bar

The hinge of the novel arrives on an ordinary night out. Hannah goes to a bar with Gabby and her circle, and Ethan is there. The group drinks and talks. Old jokes return. Ethan pays Hannah the kind of attention that makes everyone else at the table go a little quiet.

Just after midnight Gabby says she is ready to head home. A moment later Ethan says Hannah is welcome to stay, that he can give her a ride later if she wants to keep hanging out. Hannah hesitates. It is not a dramatic pause. It is the everyday kind, the half second where you weigh leaving with your friend against staying with the guy you used to love.

Reid freezes that half second and splits the book in two. From here the chapters alternate between the two outcomes. In one thread Hannah leaves with Gabby. In the other she stays with Ethan. Each chapter picks up its own thread without big signs or labels. You always know which life you are in because the details carry you. One version of Hannah is icing her wounds. The other is texting Ethan the next morning.

The structure sounds like a trick, and in weaker hands it would be. Reid keeps it readable by giving each timeline its own weather. One moves slowly at first, full of rest and healing. The other moves fast, full of dates and momentum. Both feel complete rather than sketched. Neither reads like a draft of the other.

A note on how to read it. If you try to line up every event across threads, you will drive yourself crazy. Reid is not building a puzzle where each scene has a mirror. She is running two lives side by side and letting some moments rhyme while others go entirely their own way. The fun is in the rhymes, and the ache is in the divergences.

The Life Where She Leaves With Gabby

In this thread Hannah says goodnight to Ethan and climbs into the car with Gabby and Mark. On the way home they stop near an art installation to take photos. Hannah steps into the road to frame a shot of the couple, and a car hits her and keeps driving.

She wakes in the hospital three days later, broken and foggy. Her parents fly in from London, worried and hovering, and Hannah talks them into going back, saying she wants quiet to heal. Gabby barely leaves her side. Mark, noticeably, never comes by. That absence sits there without much comment at first, and it tells you plenty about where that marriage stands.

Recovery is slow. Physical therapy. Pain. Boredom. The one bright spot is Henry, her night nurse, kind and funny in the tired hours when the ward is dark. Hannah develops a crush she tries to hide and fails to hide. When another nurse notices the warmth between them, Henry gets moved to the day shift, which effectively ends the contact. Hannah gets discharged still thinking about him. She even goes looking for him in the hospital later and gets scolded for wandering where she should not. It is embarrassing and very human, the kind of thing you do when you are lonely and a little high on painkillers and hope.

Life after the hospital is unglamorous. Hannah lives with Gabby while her body mends, and the two women fall into a close domestic rhythm. Cooking. Talking late. Gabby's marriage to Mark keeps fraying. Eventually Gabby separates from him, and the guest room arrangement turns from temporary crash pad into something more like sisters riding out a storm together.

Months pass. Then, on an ordinary morning at her favorite bakery, Hannah runs into Henry. They are both there buying cinnamon rolls, her favorite. It plays like a small miracle but Reid writes it plainly, two people reaching for the same familiar comfort and laughing about it. They start talking. They start dating. The relationship builds the way healthy ones do, with care rather than fireworks.

Three years on, they are married and expecting a child. Hannah has work she finds steadier. Her family has settled into a new pattern with her. Gabby remains central, the person who carried her through the worst weeks. The accident that looked like the worst luck of Hannah's life becomes, in this thread, the door everything else walked through.

The Life Where She Stays With Ethan

In the other thread Hannah stays at the bar. Ethan gives her a ride. They talk the way old loves talk when no time seems to have passed, finishing stories, apologizing for nothing in particular, remembering who they were at seventeen. Within days they are seeing each other properly.

This version of the romance is sweet at first in a way that feels earned. Ethan knows Hannah's history. He knew her before the drifting years, before New York, before she learned to introduce herself with an apology. With him she feels legible. They fall back into each other with speed, and for a stretch it looks like the high school story getting its adult ending.

Reid does not let it stay simple. Living a relationship is different from remembering one. Ethan has his own work pressures and habits. Hannah has her own restlessness and her past, including the New York affair that damaged her trust in herself. Questions that never came up at seventeen start to matter. How do they fight. How do they spend money. What do they want from a shared home. Who gives up what when jobs pull in different directions.

Meanwhile the people around them move through their own changes. Gabby and Mark hit rough ground here too, though along a different path and at a different pace. Hannah sees her best friend's marriage from the outside in this thread, sometimes clearly and sometimes through the haze of her own new love. Work stays unsettled for Hannah for a while. She tries things. Some fit and some do not. Los Angeles looks different when you are building a coupled life versus healing in a guest room.

I will not map every turn because the pleasure of this thread is watching small choices pile up. A dinner goes well. A trip goes badly. Someone says the wrong thing at the wrong time and it lingers. Ethan is decent and loving, and Hannah loves him, and still the question hangs there. Is first love enough when both people have grown into strangers in some ways. Reid gives this storyline real heat without making Ethan a villain or a saint. He is a man Hannah loved young, met again at a tender moment, and chose with an open heart.

What gives this thread weight is how seriously Reid takes it. She could have made the Ethan life the fantasy and the Gabby life the lesson. She does not. The Ethan life has consequences that feel permanent. People get hurt. People also get loved well. Hannah grows here just as she does in the other thread, only the lessons arrive through coupledom rather than convalescence.

The Echoes Reid Plants In Both Threads

Once both lives are moving, Reid starts rhyming them, and this is my favorite part of the book. Certain things surface no matter which ride Hannah took home.

Gabby is the clearest constant. In both threads she is loyal past the point of convenience. She feeds Hannah. She tells her hard truths. She makes room in her house and her days. Reid also gives Gabby her own arc rather than keeping her as a prop. Her marriage, her work, her hopes for a family, all of it moves. The friendship never reads as one sided charity. These women have loved each other since childhood, and the book treats that bond as the spine holding both timelines upright.

Food is another echo. Cinnamon rolls follow Hannah everywhere. People bring them to her when she is low. She seeks them out when she needs comfort. It could be cute and nothing more, but Reid uses it as shorthand for being known. To love Hannah in this book is to know about the cinnamon rolls and to show up with them without being asked.

Hannah herself stays recognizably Hannah. Indecisive about small things, brave about big ones once she commits. Funny in a self deprecating way. Prone to guilt about New York and about needing help. Quick to blame a bad outcome on her own choice, slow to credit herself when things go right. Reid's point seems to be that personality travels with you. Change the road and you still bring the same walker.

The theme talk stays light on its feet. Gabby believes in soul mates with an open heart. Hannah is more skeptical. At one point Hannah frames belief in fate as a kind of cruise control, a way of coasting instead of steering. I found that image honest. The book never settles the argument. Disasters bring strange gifts in both threads. Gifts bring strange costs. A character can do everything right and still get hurt, or everything wrong and still land someplace kind. Reid lets both truths sit side by side without forcing them to agree.

Even the city behaves like a mirror. Los Angeles in one thread is hospitals and quiet streets and bakery mornings. In the other it is bars and apartments and weekend plans. Same sun, same traffic, different life. That doubling kept pulling me back to the opening question. How much of a life is the choice, and how much is the person choosing.

What Holds Up And What Wobbles

The alternating chapters are the engine, and mostly they hum. Short sections keep the pages turning. Just as one timeline hits a tender or tense beat, Reid cuts to the other, and the contrast sharpens both. Readers who like momentum will finish this fast. It took me two sittings, and I resented errands in between.

The friendship is the best thing here. Gabby could have been wallpaper, the supportive pal who exists to cheer. Instead she has opinions, needs, and a temper. Her scenes with Hannah have the ease of long history, teasing that never curdles, honesty that stings and then heals. When Gabby's marriage cracks, it hurts in both threads because Reid made the marriage specific rather than generic. Mark is not a monster. He is a particular man who wants particular things, and those things stop matching what Gabby wants.

The romances work unevenly, which feels fair to say. Henry arrives gently and earns his place through patience and small kindnesses. Ethan arrives with history, which is powerful but also does some of the work for him. Readers who adore second chance romance will melt for the Ethan thread. Readers who prefer slow burns will favor Henry. I found myself wishing for a few more scenes of Hannah alone with her work and her thoughts, because both romances are strong enough to crowd out her interior life at times.

Two criticisms are worth naming. First, the middle repeats some beats. Because both timelines must establish daily life, you get parallel stretches of job hunting, friend dinners, and family calls that blur together. Any one scene is fine. Back to back they can feel like the same week happening twice. Second, the endings lean hopeful in a way that may strike some readers as too neat. Reid wants to argue that happiness is possible on either road, and she bends events to prove it. I bought the emotion and still noticed the bending.

Who should pick this up. If you like romance that asks questions without turning cold, this fits. If you enjoy structure play but want it wrapped in warmth rather than puzzles, this fits. If you need messy realism where nobody learns anything, look elsewhere. Reid is tender toward her people. She wants them to grow and be loved. That generosity is the book's signature, and its limit.

I closed it thinking about my own version of the bar, the small choice that rerouted a year. Reid does not promise that every road leads home. She suggests something humbler, that wherever you land, the work is the same. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Bring the cinnamon rolls.

FAQ

How do the two timelines in Maybe in Another Life work?

After Hannah hesitates between leaving the bar with Gabby or staying with Ethan, alternating chapters follow each outcome as its own complete life.

Is Maybe in Another Life part of a series?

No. It is a standalone novel published in 2015 by Washington Square Press, so you can read it without any earlier Reid book.

Does Hannah find love in both timelines?

Yes. She builds a lasting bond with Henry in one life and rekindles things with Ethan in the other, which feeds the book's question about soul mates.