Rachel Hartley

Rachel and her ex have been corresponding for three years—emails that started as logistical (the things left behind, the things that needed sorting) and slowly became something else: a conversation that never happened while they were together, a relationship conducted entirely through text after the relationship ended. Neither of them has stopped. Neither of them knows what they're doing. It's starting to feel like a relationship that exists only in correspondence—a relationship that might be more honest than the one they had when they were in the same city. *The Ex* is literary fiction about correspondence, aftermath, and the question of what happens when a relationship continues after it's supposed to have ended. It follows Rachel through a single year of emails—the conversation with her ex that has become the most consistent relationship in her life—as she tries to understand what they're doing and whether it counts. The novel unfolds through email exchanges: the practical messages about shared belongings, the gradual revelation of things that were never said during the relationship, the particular intimacy of correspondence that isn't quite friendship and isn't quite romance but is something else entirely. Each chapter is an email—or a sequence of emails—building a portrait of two people who have become more honest with each other now that they're no longer together. Rachel is not a conventional protagonist. She approaches the correspondence the way she approaches everything: carefully, by understanding what she's willing to say, by learning what she can express through text that she couldn't express in person. She has been writing to her ex for three years. She doesn't know what they're doing. She doesn't want it to stop. The ex (the book never names them, always "you") is not a villain or a lost love. They are someone who is conducting a parallel relationship through correspondence—responding to Rachel's emails with the same consistency, the same gradual revel