“[Gemma] follows me through the office, past our brass plaque that reads: We have a 100% success rate for true love. Guaranteed. We’ve had this guarantee since the business opened and it’s one of the reasons why our reputation is so solid. Because it’s true—everyone we match stays together.”

Cassia Park’s work at her family’s business, One & Only Matchmaking, shapes both her life and character. In this passage of world-building, the narrative introduces the importance of destiny and fate to Cassia’s sense of self. She holds her business’s central tenet as a tenet of her experience, too, because she sees fate as something to cling to in an unreliable world—a point that introduces the theme of Belief in Destiny as Both Comfort and Limitation. The passage reinforces the absolutism of Cassia’s stance via sentence structure; the fragment “Guaranteed” punctuates the preceding claim about the infallibility of the business (and fate itself).

“My grandparents raised me after my mom died. When people would remind me that I was not an orphan because I lost both my parents, I would always bristle. Because in my mind, I only ever had one parent. My dad was a nonentity. He left us when I was only two, and while my mother raised me alone in this house, I had never felt the absence of a parent until she died.”

Appearing at the start of Cassia’s narrative, this passage provides important background information about Cassia’s character. She lost both of her parents when she was young but only associates loss and grief with her mother’s death. These details from her childhood explain why Cassia is so attached to her grandparents and aunts and help establish the significance of the anniversary of her mother’s death.