Eight Ways to Say I Love You

by Amanda Elliot

Genres: General Fiction; Romance; Contemporary Romance; Holiday Romance

Synopsis

A spark of attraction burns brighter each year between childhood friends in this sweeping Hanukkah romance by USA Today bestselling author Amanda Elliot.

This Hanukkah, Shira Levinson is returning home to New Jersey riding the high of achieving major milestones. Though she only just graduated from college, she's got her dream job and a perfect Los Angeles apartment—an actual miracle in the city of dreams.

Life has not been quite as kind to Leo David. Not only did he fail out of college, he was forced to move in with his estranged dad, who he still hates for cheating on his mom years ago. The only silver lining? Getting to see Shira, his childhood friend (and crush, though he’ll never tell her that) while she’s home for her family's holiday party.

But that's just the beginning. Over the next eight years, Shira's and Leo's lives spin them in all sorts of directions as they grow and change, taking them places they never imagined going. Sometimes those paths take them farther away from each other, and other times closer together. If they can only time it right, they might uncover a love that burns forever.

Release date: October 27, 2026

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 384

Sample

1

Year One

Shira would never dare say it to any of her friends in Los Angeles, but she found the holidays in the suburbs superior to the holidays in the city. Or maybe she only found it superior to the way her crowd in particular celebrated the holidays in the city, which consisted mainly of ironic trips to cheesy holiday pop-up bars to make fun of all the decorations and corny drink puns, and visits to art-gallery exhibits of "edgy" holiday fare, like last year's series of paintings exploring a crime scene investigation into the murder of Santa Claus. It turned out the elves had done it in protest of their working conditions, which the artist used as a call for the working class to unionize.

In the suburbs, you can drink eggnog or Manischewitz wine without having to make fun of it. You can express genuine excitement about the first fallen snowflake, because it's not immediately going to turn into a gross gray slush full of fast-food wrappers and needles. You can go for a stroll around your neighborhood with your family to admire the Christmas lights strung on houses or the menorahs beaming proudly from front windows without worrying you're going to get hit by a car when you see Leo for the first time in-

What? She stopped short on the sidewalk in front of Leo's house-well, technically Leo's dad's house; it hadn't been Leo's house in years. It was dark out, and the big front window of the one-story ranch house was bright and uncovered, showing off the glowing electric menorah. Aside from that, it was empty now, except for some ghostly flickering from a TV off to the side.

It took a few seconds for her family to notice she was gone, which she tried not to feel insulted by. "Shira?" her dad called over his shoulder. He and her mom stopped and turned around, their chins hunched down into their coats, their hands in their pockets. Bundled up like this, they could almost pass for twins: shortish, roundish, their glasses glinting beneath shiny black hoods. "Everything okay?"

She nodded and hustled after them. "Yeah." Her breath came in short bursts, puffing clouds into the air. Talia, her sister, didn't even seem to notice anyone had stopped; Shira could barely see her up ahead at the corner, a lanky teenage outline silhouetted against a horde of inflatable glowing reindeer. "Sorry, I just thought I saw Leo from the corner of my eye."

"Oh, you probably did," said her mom, all casually, as if her words didn't leave Shira breathless. "I didn't tell you he moved back?"

"What?" Shira hustled again to get in front of them so she could turn and fix them with an accusing glare. "No, you didn't tell me!"

"Right after Thanksgiving," her mom said.

"Wow," said Shira, turning back to face the empty street, and it was wild that her first instinct was to think I can't believe he didn't tell me. Of course he wouldn't tell her. They hadn't talked in what, seven years? Something like that. They'd never come back from that first year of falling out of touch, of being busy, of making new friends and getting into new activities, the same way Shira had drifted apart from most of her high school friends after they all went to college. Being in proximity had been most of the basis for those friendships, as it turned out, and though they'd promised to keep in touch and visit each other, those promises had kind of rusted and weakened and broken without hurting anyone.

[AQ: On p. 30 and after, it has been eight years. OK? And on p. 40, Shira thinks of how she distinctly remembers exactly how long it has been. OK?]

Shira was twenty-two now, a college graduate. Leo would be, too. She wondered where he'd gone, what he was doing now. She'd tried googling him a couple of years ago one night when she was bored but hadn't turned up much of anything besides his high school track rankings. "Huh. I'll have to go say hi."

"I'm sure he'd like that," said her mom. She leaned in and lowered her voice as if she didn't want anyone to hear her. "Joe said he was having a tough go of it."

"You talk to Leo's dad now?" Shira asked. Her parents had been just as scandalized and appalled by his behavior as she had been back in the day.

Her mom shrugged. "He's my neighbor, and it's been a long time. We don't have to be best friends to say hi when he's walking the dog or giving me his doorbell footage so I can figure out who egged my car."

Okay, fine. "So wait, Leo's having a tough time, he said? Why?"

She shrugged again. "Not sure. I didn't get any details." She sounded vaguely disappointed, which meant she'd tried to get some and failed. When it came to digging for details in her phone conversations with Shira, she was like a star paleontologist, able to piece together an entire ancient organism from shards of bone and fossilized skin, able somehow to tell that Shira had had a disappointing blind date from her purposefully vague hints about how the food at the bar she'd gone to the other night hadn't been great. "I got to tell him all about you. How you're living in LA and how you're working at one of the biggest art galleries in the country and how you're getting interest in your own art. He seemed very impressed."

Shira couldn't help it: Her chest puffed up like a proud pigeon's. At twenty-two, she was already living the dream. She'd worked hard, of course, but she'd also gotten lucky when her senior portfolio got noticed by the right person at the right gallery, a big, fancy one that represented a lot of big, fancy artists and that somehow now also represented her. Maybe by next holiday, she'd have put on her debut show with them, and-dream big, she always told herself-all her work would receive rave reviews and sell to major collectors and maybe even get her featured in a big museum or a world biennale. And the owner of the gallery where she worked-a different one than the one who represented her, because Shira hadn't wanted to make things awkward with her boss asking if he would be interested in her own work (the thought of him declining and then having to work with him every day gave her hives)-would have to take notice and wonder, Why is this extremely talented painter doing my admin work when I should be trying to poach her for my own, even bigger and more impressive, gallery, whose name would get her noticed by even bigger and more impressive collectors and venues? And then-

"I also told him about your terrace," her mom said proudly.

Shira bit back a sigh. Her tiny studio, which hosted a Murphy bed in the combined living room/bedroom and barely had enough space in the kitchen to open the oven, did indeed have a terrace. It was rickety and always covered in bird shit, but it looked great when properly filtered on social media. "Right, okay," she said. "But did you see-"

"Shira, hurry up!" Talia hollered from up ahead. "It's cold!"

Shira sighed. "Coming."

She stole one last glance into Leo's window before moving on. There was a flash of movement in the corner, maybe a curtain fluttering. Probably the dog had run past and stirred it, but she lingered there for an extra second anyway. Just in case.


The next morning, Shira woke up to a bunch of texts in the group chat; they’d been buzzing deep into the night on West Coast time, while Shira, despite the minor jet lag, had passed out at nine thirty, to Talia’s enormous eye roll. She scrolled through the messages she’d missed, knowing that by now it would probably be too late to respond to the political news they were horrified about with anything but an angry emoji, but she was still glad to be included.

Shira had met the three of them shortly after her arrival in LA. Well, that wasn't entirely true; she'd known Danica fairly well in college, where they'd both taken classes in the art department, but they didn't truly become best friends until they realized they were the most talented painters in their art program (what was the point of being modest when you knew the truth?), and then they'd both landed gallery representation around graduation, a major coup. Ellery had interned at the same gallery as Shira over the summer, and then the three of them had chatted with Nora at a networking event and they'd all just vibed. Now they met almost weekly for drinks and bitching about art, and the group chat was always abuzz.

Shira missed the connection a little bit when she was far away. She texted Danica, I've gotten zero work done this break. It's like I revert to blob form as soon as I get home. Booooo

Danica responded immediately, up early, or maybe still up late from last night. Perfect stunning blob

Shira bit back a laugh, then wondered why she was biting back a laugh in the privacy of her own room, where she could show her teeth as much as she wanted, even the crooked ones on the bottom. But by then the moment had passed, so she didn't try to force the laugh. Sometimes she didn't know what she'd do all the way out there on the other side of the country without her best friends.

Speaking of which. She switched over to the group chat. Guys did I ever tell you that I had a guy best friend as a kid? He moved away when we were fourteen and I haven't seen him since. Apparently he just moved back??

Unsurprisingly, Ellery and Nora didn't respond, considering they were likely (hopefully) asleep. Danica was the only one to answer, and she did so immediately. Have you been teleported into a rom-com?

You know perfectly well I don't have time for either romance or comedy, Shira texted back, cracking a smile.

They'd gone over this several weeks ago when the four of them were having brunch at the local English tearoom, the only one in Los Angeles. It was cozy and always warm, full of mismatched tableware and teacups, and while the scones were usually dry, the servers made up for it with buckets of clotted cream and jam. Shira and her friends had been sitting at their table, elbow to elbow with the people beside them, bitching about the art world and how, despite calls for diversity, it was still a white cis man's world, then sipping their tea and making up the notes of flavor that they found, ketchup and cigarette and grass, when Shira stopped for a moment and looked around and smiled-not just a crack of one, but a real one, a big and toothy one she rarely let loose.

"What's so funny?" Danica had asked, her big dark eyes wide. Though Shira wasn't exactly tall or fat, she always felt she was when compared to Danica, who was tiny and slender as a bird.

"Nothing's funny," Shira said. A lump rose in her throat out of nowhere, and she took a sip of her tea so that she wouldn't unexpectedly cry. She didn't even like tea that much, not even this one, which was supposed to taste like roses, but somehow drinking it made her feel more adult than sipping a glass of wine did. "I'm just thinking about how lucky I am, to be here, at this moment."

"To be drinking tea that tastes like roses instead of cigarettes," Danica said, raising her cup.

"No, I'm serious," she said. "I don't know what more I could want."

"How about to get an exhibit at the Whitney?" Ellery suggested.

Nora added, "Or an apartment with more than one room?"

"Some romance?" Danica said, waggling her eyebrows.

Okay, those were all true. But Shira said, "I don't have time for romance right now, really. But I would like to have a show at the Whitney." She nudged Danica with her elbow. "At the same time as you, obviously. Then maybe you'll tell me what your show is about."

"It's too personal," Danica said, nudging Shira right back. She must have misjudged the force of her elbow, because Shira almost dropped her teacup into her lap. "I'll share when it's ready to go. I'm too superstitious."

"Fair," said Nora. "I wish the artist I worked with felt that way." She was the assistant to a famous contemporary artist whose primary claim to fame was a series he'd done of massive, shiny sculptures of various Happy Meal toys from the nineties. "Sometimes he calls in the middle of the night with a burst of inspiration like, 'Should I try knitting something out of pubic hair?' and I'm like, it's three in the morning, I'm half asleep, I do not have the mental capacity to talk you down from your terrible concept while making you think it's all your idea."

They all snorted into their tea, and that led into stories of the most outrageous behavior they'd witnessed working in the art world, which, since it was the art world, was extremely outrageous. They'd talked until their tea went cold, until there was nothing left on their tea tower but crumbs and a few sticky smears of jam, until Shira couldn't imagine ever wanting anything else.

Shira's phone buzzed. Danica had texted back, Idk how you say you don't have time for comedy when your face is hilarious

Shira sent back an emoji with the tongue sticking out, then rolled over in her bed and sighed. She'd definitely go say hi to Leo today. Probably. Maybe. She didn't know why the thought was so intimidating. They'd been best friends once! She used to enter his house without knocking all the time, and vice versa!

Maybe that was it. The thought of knocking at the door to say hi just felt too weird. The thought of feeling each other out, trying to navigate their past intimacy with this new strangerhood, too intimidating.

Shira tipped herself out of bed right into her waiting pair of slippers, tuning out the sound of Talia's white noise machine-more "roar" than "gentle whoosh"-filtering through their shared wall. Shira was the second one up after her mom, who was seated on the living room couch with her morning cup of coffee. Her feet were up on the ottoman as she admired the view of the leafless woods through the sliding glass door. "What are you doing up so early?" she said in lieu of good morning.