The Four Engagement Rings of Sybil Rain

by Hannah Brown

Genres: Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

Forgetting Sarah Marshall meets Anyone But You in this novel from New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and The Bachelorette star Hannah Brown. 

Starling Ranch Inn promises to be a tropical paradise, and Sybil can’t wait to escape there, all expenses paid. Well technically the expenses were paid—last year, when she was supposed to go to Hawaii for her honeymoon with her then-fiancé Jamie. But the wedding didn’t go as planned (or at all), and now she’s decided to use those hotel vouchers alone, before they expire.

Sybil’s expecting mai tais, med spas and me-time, so she nearly plunges backwards into the infinity pool when she sees that Jamie has had the same idea! His family business is thinking of buying the resort, so he’s here with a gorgeous, tangerine bikini-clad “colleague” to give the property a once-over.

Desperate to save face in front of the ex who broke her heart at the altar, Sybil accidentally-on-purpose blurts out that she’s here with her boyfriend. But what starts as a harmless lie to spare her dignity soon spirals into an ex-fiancé fiasco when Sebastian—the second of Sybil’s three failed engagements—pops by fresh off a photography gig. Seb’s always up for a good time, and happy to play along …sparking unexpected jealousy in Jamie. 

From snorkeling snafus to stunning vistas to staff parties at the beach, Sybil does her best to juggle two ex-fiancés, but it’s becoming clear that her past of broken promises must be reckoned with once and for all—including that first fiancé, Liam, the one she never talks about…

Is the notorious free-spirit, life-of-the-party, runaway bride Sybil Rain ready to heal from her three past engagements and make room in her heart for a fourth and final chance at love?

Release date: June 24, 2025

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

I’VE ALWAYS LOVED AIRPORTS. IF YOU’RE AT AN AIRPORT, IT MEANS something in your life is about to change. And there’s no better glass of wine than an airport glass of wine: the first sip of adventure. Even if it’s just a Kim Crawford from the Chili’s at Gate 42.

Once I’m through security at LAX, I send a text to Nikki.

Good news: made it thru security in record time. Bad news: hot security guard nowhere to be seen.

Nikki hearts my text. Good news: made it home just now. Bad news: I somehow drove in a circle through long term parking—twice.

I laugh at her message. Thanks again for the ride! Love you!

Duh, happy to. Text me when you land!

I pop in my earbuds and weave my way through the crowded concourse toward my gate at the other end of the terminal with a smile on my face. It was actually at an airport that my best friends—the Core Four, as we call ourselves—all met each other for the first time.

The summer after freshman year of college, Nikki, Willow, Emma, and I went on an epic backpacking trip abroad. I’ve known Willow since I was a baby, and Emma since elementary school, but Nikki, as my college roommate, hadn’t met the other two girls before. We were a bit of an eclectic mix. There was Nikki, in her Lululemon matching legging set, honey-blond hair pulled into a tight ponytail. Willow, with her handmade statement earrings and tousled brunette waves thrown into a heap on top of her head. Emma nervously twisting her red hair around her finger and covertly swallowing a couple of anxiety pills—though whether to ward off her fear of flying or the potential awkwardness of that first meeting, I couldn’t be sure. I was also a little nervous about how everyone would mesh. I felt responsible as the group’s connector to make sure everyone got along. But by the time we were cramming our overstuffed hiking backpacks into overhead bins, laughing about whether customs was going to have a problem with Willow’s travel lube, I could tell everything was going to be okay.

The trip was even more magical than I could have dreamed: we started in Paris and spent most of the summer at Willow’s family chateau in southern France, making trips to Milan, Salzburg, Budapest, and finally Istanbul. And somewhere between the midnight trains, bottles of Chianti, and hot Swedish guys in sketchy hostels, we became the Core Four.

When my boarding group is called, I unplug my phone from the outlet where I’ve been charging it and join the queue. Last year, I accidentally left my cell in a Vegas cab, prompting Emma and my other friend Finn to go on a multistate manhunt for me. Ever since then, I’ve been mildly obsessive about not losing my phone.

Once I’m settled into my window seat, I make small talk with the couple sitting next to me (Diane and Andrew from Santa Barbara, on their way to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary), then close my eyes for takeoff. The engines rumble beneath me, the cabin shaking back and forth as we pick up speed. Instinctively, I reach for the fourth finger of my left hand, rubbing at a ring that’s not there.

We hurtle ahead, faster and faster, until finally, we lift off the ground, and the weightless feeling of being airborne settles my nerves. As we continue to climb to our cruising altitude, I let myself imagine I’m flying away from all my problems. From everything that happened last year.

Maybe my friends are right that this trip is going to be good for me. Maybe getting away from it all is exactly what I need.

THE IDEA FOR THE trip originated just a couple weeks ago, when the Core Four found ourselves all gathered in my little bungalow in Mar Vista for a celebration.

Or rather, the Core Five.

There’s a new chick on the scene. I’ve known Nora for a little less than a year, and she’s definitely shifted our dynamic. Her communication can get dicey, and she did throw up on me once, but I can already tell she’s going to be a phenomenal addition to the friend group. (Besides, Nikki also threw up on me one night at a Phi Delt frat party, and I’ve never held that against her.) The birthday girl was currently cruising around my coffee table, a party hat with a number one on it cocked at a jaunty angle over her peach-fuzz head. Nora’s actual first birthday was not until September, and it was only mid-June, but any excuse for a party, right?

Anyway, it was while we feasted on cupcakes and champagne—and a bottle of breast milk for Nora, which Willow dared me to try and Nikki begged me not to—that the idea for this trip came up. I wanted it to be all of us; in the end, though, it ended up just being me.

Willow had been talking about the nightmare of trying to find affordable day care for Nora, and Nikki told us about the producer who was hounding her to appear on the next season of LovedBy, the dating reality show she’d been the lead of a few years back. Emma was filling us in on her latest high-maintenance design client, and I could see she was physically struggling to rein in her impulse to redecorate my entire one-bedroom. (When we lived together in New York, she’d move pieces of furniture in and out of my room at whim. One time, I came home from a weekend in the Hamptons, and my whole bed had been lofted. So the fact that she didn’t immediately start styling my bookcases the second she walked into my place was evidence of real personal growth.)

And then it was my turn to update everyone. It felt weird; we used to spend so much time together, with so few gaps, that updates weren’t really required, but as I looked around, I had this sudden fear that if we weren’t careful, getting older—getting busier with our careers, falling in love—could cause us to drift apart. Or rather, could cause them to drift away from me. Emma was engaged, Nikki was basically a celebrity influencer now… I mean, Willow had an actual, real-life child to take care of. Sometimes it felt like they had all achieved a level of adulthood that I was still grasping for.

“Honestly, there is nothing to catch you guys up on,” I told them. “You know everything, I promise.”

Willow picked Nora up and plopped onto my couch. “No good Meredith stories lately?”

Meredith is my boss at Flowies, LA’s hottest women-owned period underwear start-up. I’ve been running their socials for the past ten months. The founder is amazing but definitely has her… quirks.

“Actually, there was the Flowies-by-Buzzworthy collab launch party,” I told the girls.

“What’s Buzzworthy?” Emma asked.

“Vibrators,” Willow and I answered in unison.

“Right,” I continued, “and this was, like, a two-hundred-person event with all the board members, and long story short, we found out the hard way that Meredith was wearing the product at the party.”

Emma threw a hand over her mouth as Willow laughed and demanded to know, “What do you mean you ‘found out the hard way’?”

“I truly do not need to hear the answer to that,” Nikki declared, swigging her champagne.

But of course, I was going to tell them anyway. I was in my element. “Okay, so the creative director at Buzzworthy is this girl Christina, right? So Christina takes the mic, and she’s about to start talking, and the room goes quiet, and that’s when all of a sudden, we all hear this, you know, buzzing sound. I’m not joking, like, everyone in the vicinity turns around, and we all realize at the same time that the sound is coming from Meredith’s pants.”

Nikki spat out her champagne, and Willow started laughing so hard I was briefly concerned she was going to drop Nora into a bowl of tortilla chips.

“Anyway,” I went on, “we have since been talking to them about an updated model that doesn’t make so much noise. So, you know, in the end, it was useful market research.”

Emma shook her head, red hair swishing like a shampoo commercial. “Sybil, for real, you have to get the LovedBy producers to do a show about your office. It’s such a good idea.”

I sip my drink. “Ha. I would definitely watch that, if it wasn’t, like, my life.”

“But it sounds like things are going… okay? Generally, I mean,” Emma said.

“Yeah, everything’s great!” I assured her. But from the way she was looking at me, it seemed like she didn’t quite believe me. I turned to the other girls, and they, too, had quieted.

“You should tell her,” Nikki said to Emma. She then exchanged a glance with Willow, who in turn raised an eyebrow at Emma. None of them said a word.

“Tell me what?” I asked. “You guys, what is this, some kind of intervention?” I gave an awkward laugh.

“No!” Nikki exclaimed at the same time Emma said, “Not at all!” and Willow, more quietly, said, “Well, sort of.”

Finally, Emma came out with it. “Sybil, tomorrow, it will have been exactly one year.”

The words hung in the air like she’d uttered a curse.

I knew what she was talking about, of course. I’d had the date mentally circled on my calendar for weeks now. On June 18, it would be exactly one year since my wedding.

Well—my almost wedding.

My friends would be the first to tell you that my life is full of epic, sometimes charming and sometimes horrifically mortifying catastrophes, but that one really took the (three-tiered, strawberry bagatelle with Bavarian cream) cake.

I swallowed, trying to push down the lump in my throat that bobbed up every time I thought about what happened with Jamie. My stupid Runaway Bride routine. His callous coldness when I returned, finally ready to bare my soul to him. Our fight at the altar. The shocked look on all the guests’ faces. The chaotic, messy tears. My girls helping me stuff my gown into the back seat of an Uber as I fled the Malibu wedding venue. I’ve tried to tell myself that things falling apart between us was inevitable. That a failed engagement is better than a failed marriage. But that doesn’t mean remembering that day doesn’t still tear my heart to shreds. Especially since it wasn’t even my first broken engagement but my third. Two had always just seemed like bad luck, but three? It was starting to seem like some sort of jinx.

“We just want you to be happy, Sybil,” Nikki said. “And it feels like you haven’t quite been the same since… since then.”

In that moment, it suddenly became clear to me why the girls had all converged upon LA for this “impromptu, early first birthday” celebration. I was simultaneously annoyed that Emma and Willow had lied to me about “just happening to be in town” and immensely grateful that they all wanted to be here with me on the anniversary.

Emma tucked her hair behind her ear. “Also, I got an alert that those refund vouchers for the hotel and flights are going to expire at the end of June if you don’t book something.” She glanced at Nikki and then back at me. “We really think you should use them and take a trip.”

A trip. The idea wasn’t unappealing. I’d been working like a dog for months, developing a new Flowies social marketing campaign and training the Spring interns. I hadn’t even made it home to Dallas for Easter, much to my mother’s disappointment. Spending a week lying on a beach—okay, a different beach than the ones that surrounded me on the west side of LA—sounded pretty great, actually. Except…

“Wait, are you saying I should go to Halia Falls—as in, my honeymoon destination—alone? Now? After everything?”

“Totally!” Nikki nodded emphatically. “It would be such a waste not to.”

“I would love to go with you, Sybs, but, you know—baby.” Willow shrugged, bouncing a cooing Nora on her hip.

“And I think Mrs. Perry might literally murder me if I don’t get her kitchen remodel done on time,” Emma said with a cringe.

“Niks?” I turned back to her with desperation in my eyes.

“My filming schedule is unpredictable,” she said apologetically, before plastering on a megawatt smile honed from many years on the pageant circuit. “But I think this could be so good for you, Sybs! You love to travel, and it’s been ages since you got out of town. I actually started looking, and it seems like the resort has availability the first week of July—”

“That’s in two weeks!” I protested. “I know my office is a little less formal than some, but I still have to get approval if I’m going to take vacation.”

“Maybe it could be a working trip!” Nikki said.

Emma smiled encouragingly. “Yeah, Sybs, you do content creation—can’t you do that from anywhere? If you’re going to be working, you might as well be working from Hawaii.”

I felt a prickle of defensiveness. It’s one thing to admit to yourself that your life hasn’t been that great lately. It’s another to have that fact unceremoniously thrown in your face by your best friends. “Why are you guys doing this? Do I really seem so depressed that you needed to stage a coup to get me on vacation?”

Once again, they all responded at the same time.

Emma: “This is so not a coup!”

Willow: “Because you deserve it?”

Nikki: “We just want the old Sybil back.”

I USED THAT SAME argument—the one about this being a working trip—with Meredith when I pitched the idea to her the following Monday. To my surprise, she was immediately on board—once I confirmed that the company wouldn’t have to pay for my hotel or flights.

“Really?” I asked, sitting across from her in our offices on Wilshire Boulevard. “I do have lots of ideas for content. I saw there’s supposed to be this eclipse thing happening while I’m there. They call it a ‘blood moon.’ I was thinking maybe we could lean into that? Do a post about femininity and the moon, maybe even do a live stream during the eclipse? We could connect it back to the fertility campaign we did—”

Meredith held up a hand to stop my rambling.

“Sorry,” I said meekly. “I used to be really into space as a kid; it was kind of my thing.”

Meredith smiled. “Sybil, that all sounds great. I trust you.”

I let those words wash over me. Honestly, it’s something I’m still learning to accept. That my boss trusts me to do my job well. That I am actually good at this. Before Flowies, most of my jobs were a bit more… shall we say, eclectic? I was a temp receptionist at an art gallery for a while. I was briefly a barista at a bespoke coffee shop. I even served as a personal assistant for a D-list soap star, which mostly entailed bringing her beloved dog to regular grooming appointments. (With all those treatments, Gigi the cocker spaniel definitely had healthier hair than me—better natural highlights too.) Flowies isn’t a Fortune 500 company or anything, but my role with them is the most legit, most stable job I’ve ever had. And I desperately want to do well.

“Go ahead on the trip, and try to have some fun while you’re there too,” Meredith said.

So that night, I pulled up the website for the Halia Falls Resort. The photos were as gorgeous as I remembered—plunge pools and natural hot-spring spas, five-star restaurants and fun tiki bars. I clicked through to the page that described their adventure excursions, trying to get myself excited about horseback riding and sea kayaking.

This is good, I told myself. This is proof that you’re moving on.

And with a few clicks, it was done. The confirmation email from the hotel and the airline made it official.

So now, two weeks later, I’m finally going on my honeymoon.

I just happen to be going alone.

GOLDEN LIGHT STREAMS THROUGH THE AIRPLANE WINDOW. BELOW US, emerald mountains rise up from the turquoise sea. Even from thirty-thousand feet up, the view is stunning. I watch as the landscape grows more detailed with little winding roads and palm trees as we descend toward an airstrip along the shore. Then there’s a rumbling beneath us as the wheels emerge and a shuddering jolt as we touch down. I hear the pilot’s voice over the intercom, welcoming us to Kahului Airport, Maui.

The resort has sent someone to greet me. A friendly man holding a sign with my name takes my luggage and directs me to an enormous black SUV. As we drive along the coast, I can see the dramatic peaks of the neighboring islands set against the bright blue morning sky. With the time difference, it’s only ten a.m. here, and I feel refreshed and energized as I roll down my window to the humid island air, trying to capture some footage of the scenery on my phone.

The road is curvy; palm trees bend and sway in the breeze. After leaving the airport behind, we drive along the stunning Maui coast. The west side of the island has some of its most famous beaches, and a bunch of the big-name hotels line Wailea Beach to the south, but Halia Falls is on the east side, one of the more remote resorts on the island, surrounded by a national park and forest reserve. At one point, the driver directs my attention away from the beaches to a waterfall cascading over the side of a mountain. “This road is iconic,” he tells me. “One of the most wondrous drives you’ll ever experience.”

I lean out the window and grab some more video for the Flowies feed. Forty minutes into the trip, and I’m already crushing this content.

The road slips away from the coastal views, in and out of rustic little towns, and then twists through miles of lush rainforest, crossing over narrow bridges and weaving between mountains. I’ve never experienced anything like this rolling sea of greens. It’s breathtaking, just as the driver promised.

Eventually we turn off the narrow road and wind through a secluded dirt pathway. As we crest the top of a hill, the ocean appears before us again, its clear green water breaking against a white sand beach. A small wooden sign welcomes us to Halia Falls Resort.

The car slows to a stop beside an estate nestled into the cliffside with plumeria shrubs lining the entrance, heavy with hot pink blossoms. The scents of fresh flowers and ocean air greet me as I step out of the car. I take a deep breath, the warm breeze making me feel slightly more human after my long flight, and the dappled sparkling of the sun through palm trees giving everything a magical, slightly surreal look.

A beautiful woman who looks about my age, with light brown skin and a lemon-yellow flower tucked into her long, dark hair, welcomes me. The two men beside her are both holding silver platters: one piled high with purple flowers, the other holding a lowball glass. The woman grabs a handful of flowers, which tumbles down to reveal a lei.

“Aloha. Welcome to Halia Falls.” She walks toward me and places the lei over my head. “I’m Ash. I’ll be your personal concierge throughout your stay. I’m here to make your time with us unforgettable, so if there’s anything you need, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

She pulls a tablet from the inside pocket of her suit jacket and scrolls until she finds something on the screen. “I’ve got your info right here. Sybil Rain, right?”

I nod, still taking in the views from every direction, itching to snap photos of it all.

“A beautiful name. We have more than two hundred words for rain here in Hawaii,” she says. “We see it as a blessing. And it always brings rainbows.” Then she turns toward the man behind her holding the drink tray. Ice clinks as she plucks the glass from his platter. “This is the hotel’s signature cocktail: a passion fruit mai tai. Welcome to island time.” She winks, handing me the drink.

I lift the glass to her in a mock “cheers,” then take a sip. It’s tart and bright, the bitter bite of alcohol stinging my tongue before breaking open into sweetness. I let out an indecent groan. This drink tastes like vacation in a glass.

“If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you to your room.” She nods to one of the men behind her, who takes my suitcase. “We’ll make sure your bag meets you there.”

The hotel’s even more beautiful once I’ve stepped inside. The lobby, lined in creamy marble, has a view straight to the ocean. The tableau is framed by potted palm trees that sway gently as a warm breeze blows through the open-air atrium. I trail behind Ash, past an infinity pool lined with private cabanas and through an archway that leads us to an elevator bank.

When we reach the third floor, Ash leads me to a door at the end of the hallway. There’s a soft beep as she unlocks the door with a smile. “Welcome to your room.”

It’s easily the most stunning hotel room I’ve ever been in. The walls are clad in a light blond wood that makes the space feel like it’s glowing from within. There’s a king-size bed piled high with plush white pillows, its four posts draped in a gauzy fabric that flutters as the breeze wafts in through the open balcony doors. I take a deep breath and inhale the scent I’m already beginning to associate with Halia Falls—fresh basil and mandarin orange—sweet, but with enough sharpness to give the impression of sophistication and finery.

Ash leaves, and my bag is delivered only a few moments later. A bellhop lifts my bright, lime-green BÉIS roller from his cart, and I notice there’s a second bag—a navy Away suitcase—waiting to be delivered to its owner.

A shiver travels up my spine. Jamie ha. . .