The Wrong Partner: A YA contemporary romance novella about the wrong partner and the right piece

by Calla Finn, Virtual Voice (Narrator)

She had a plan. He wasn't in it. Neither of them expected to build something neither could have made alone. Zoe Park doesn't do chaos. As a ballet-trained dancer with a Hartwell Conservatory application on the line, her winter showcase piece has to be perfect — which means her partner has to be perfect. When Joel Webb tears a ligament at the Halloween carnival, perfect goes out the window. Danny Ortiz transferred to Bayridge High with one don't get attached. He dances — street, freestyle, self-taught — but he wasn't planning on joining the showcase, wasn't planning on being partnered with someone who colour-codes her rehearsal schedule, and definitely wasn't planning on any of this mattering. Mrs. Palmer pairs them by arithmetic. The partnership is not a punishment. It's just logic. Which is almost worse, because neither of them can argue with it. As November turns to December and the showcase gets closer, the piece they're building starts to look less like a compromise and more like something true. But when Danny finds something Zoe wrote about him in the early weeks — before she knew him, before any of this — the distance between who they were and who they've become gets a lot harder to close.

The Wrong Partner is a slow-burn YA contemporary romance about two dancers who couldn't be more different, and the piece they make when they stop fighting it.

Clean romance. No cliffhanger. Book 2 of The Starting Line series.

Audible Audio

Published June 17, 2026