A Fitting Conclusion to an Extraordinary Series!
Last Chance Love, the third and final novel in the Fallout series by Heather Young-Nichols, ties up all storylines from the first two books and tells the story of Zac and Maddie from her perspective. It's a winner!
Those who have read Last Good Thing (book 1 in the series) will recall that Laney, who left East Branch, Michigan, before her senior year of high school to live with her newly divorced mother in Chicago, returned four years later to clear out her father's house after his sudden death. Zac, her best friend and secret crush, still lived next door--and had a nearly four-year-old son with their other best friend, Maddie. Being dropped by her best friends now made sense; they knew about the pregnancy before she left and didn't want her to know. She felt betrayed but easily forgave Zac; her friendship with Maddie, however, remained strained for a while.
Last First Kiss (book 2), which chronicled the romance between Laney's college best friend Rhian and Zac's best guy friend Porter, added some depth to boisterous Rhian and good-time guy Porter, but its biggest contribution to the series was to introduce Rhian's older brother, Tegan, to the East Branch gang.
Last Chance Love, narrated by Maddie, tells the Zac baby-mama story from her point of view. They truly never saw each other as anything beyond best friends. Heartbroken at Laney's imminent departure and very drunk, they conceived Dylan in a one-night stand and continued being best friends--with a co-parenting arrangement added to the mix. Maddie still doesn't consider Zac any more than the father of Dylan and her best friend. In fact, she barely remembers the encounter that conceived their son and shudders at the thought of kissing her best friend, much less sleeping with him! Laney had nothing to worry about with regard to Zac, and the women repaired their friendship almost to the level it was before Laney moved away.
At the start of Last Chance Love, Tegan has moved in with his sister at her insistence, placing him next door to Zac and Laney, who are living together in his place. Being part of the gang that includes Zac, Laney, Rhian, and Porter, Tegan meets Maddie at a group gathering and asks her out. Gun-shy after dumping an ex who wanted her to surrender custody of Dylan to Zac full-time, she refuses. Laney and Rhian conspire to get her to say yes, but Rhian can't resist telling Maddie a bunch of nonsense about her brother's quirks and almost ruins it for them! Many awkwardly funny moments in the rest of the book are part of an ongoing game of sibling retribution.
Date after date, night after night, Maddie and Tegan grow closer and seem destined for a happy ending. Then Tegan unwittingly makes a near-fatal mistake.
As a joke, Tegan says that Maddie would make a great trophy wife. It's a trigger for her because her crummy ex used to criticize her and say the only thing she could do well was be a trophy wife. As she puts it, her head is warning her to leave before he turns into a man like her ex was, but her heart wants to stay, and she's not sure how long it will take for one to catch up to the other. She's not sure if she's really seeing a red flag or if she's just paranoid from the scars left by her critical ex.
She thinks she's taking time to figure it out. He thinks she's avoiding him on purpose. When Dylan gets sick and needs to go to the hospital, Tegan's the PA who treats him, and he dismisses Maddie as coldly as he thinks she dismissed him.
But a romance novel won't allow these two--a devoted mom and a PA who loves her child as much as her ex hated him--to remain estranged. At the next group gathering, Zac announces his engagement to Laney, and she reveals that he got Dylan to ask her. The series concludes with a reflection by Maddie about the wonderful way her life has turned out--friends who love her and Zac's son, restoration of her friendship with Laney despite being with Zac before Laney even left, and finding a prince in Tegan after so many frogs. The editor in me loves such a poetic, fulfilling conclusion.
Highly recommended!