For Cassia Park, believing in destiny and fate is second nature. Her family’s One & Only matchmaking company uses an ancient Korean art form of face reading to visit clients’ past lives and divine their fated, true loves for them—matches the company guarantees will last forever. Cassia’s lifetime investment in her family’s matchmaking business fuels the novel’s explorations of how a belief in destiny might help and inhibit an individual as they move through life.

Cassia’s grandmother, great aunt, and aunt have taught her that once a person learns their destiny, they must follow this path to live a happy, fulfilled life. Cassia particularly clings to this notion because she has firsthand experience of life’s tumultuousness, her mother, Evette, having died suddenly when Cassia was eight: “Believing in true love […] got me through life. I knew my fated was waiting for me at the end of this journey—that even if everything else was unpredictable, this one thing was preordained” (318). Rather than bristling at the idea of a prescribed life path and romantic future, Cassia ardently embraces it. Destiny offers her a sense of stability and assuredness in a world that often feels defined by unpredictable loss and heartbreak.