My Favorite Half-Night Stand

Millie Morris has spent years perfecting the art of keeping people at arm's length — easier when you study serial killers for a living and your closest friends are all men who've never pushed past her deflections. When she and her friend group make a pact to find dates for a university gala through an online dating app, it seems straightforward enough. Except Millie has just slept with one of them, Reid, and they've agreed to pretend it never happened. What follows is a romantic comedy about the gap between who we perform ourselves to be and who we actually are — and the terrifying vulnerability of letting someone see both.

Christina Lauren splits the narrative between Millie's real-life interactions with Reid and the anonymous online persona she creates to talk to him, and that structural tension is where the book earns its keep. The back-and-forth between digital candor and in-person deflection captures something genuinely true about modern intimacy — how much easier it is to be honest with a stranger than with someone who already knows you. The writing is breezy but not shallow, and Millie's voice has a self-aware wit that makes her emotional blind spots land with real weight rather than frustration.