This post is from Devora Gray. Devora writes erotic thrillers and spicy paranormal romance. When not reaching for the tissue box, she’s baking near a Las Vegas pool or hiking with her Wheaten terrier, Pumba.

Please note that this post contains mild spoilers for older books.

Some endings heal you. Some endings haunt you. And some just piss you off.

My heart feels waterlogged. A vat of upheaval—sticky and black as tar—sits heavy in my chest. If I could have a good cry in the shower, I’d be fine, but I’m not ready to let go. This isn’t just anger. It’s betrayal.

I’ve just finished reading Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, and here’s the spoiler:

The novel wasn’t my pick; it was my book club’s. Every month we choose from a leading literary chart to study what makes a bestseller. So far, we’ve covered The God of the Woods, The Favorites, and Death of the Author. Each deserved its spot on the New York Times list—strong characters, fascinating premises, sharp twists. Each, in its own way, asked the question: what is true love?

Having cut my teeth on romance at twelve, I know no genre delivers emotional punches like those with romantic arcs.

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy—with a romance.

Wuthering Heights is a gothic horror—with a romance.

The Fault in Our Stars is YA fiction—with a romance.

Wild Dark Shore is literary fiction—with a romance. A woman washes up on a remote island off the Australian coast, half-drowned. She should be dead. A family of four—father and three kids—rescue her, and suddenly the story brims with questions: Why is she here? What are they hiding? Should I even care how this ends?

I do, thanks to the combustible chemistry between the woman and the father. Add in multiple POVs and time jumps, which McConaghy threads together with arachnean grace, and you’ve got five voices exploring five versions of love. The potential payoff feels enormous.

But here’s the catch with romance outside the genre proper: there are no guarantees.

Traditional romance offers a bulletproof contract: the happily-ever-after.

It’s a promise: Hey, life is short and hard. You deserve to believe that true love exists—and you deserve to have it, if only in these pages. Who doesn’t want that?

Apparently, a decent chunk of readers.

In my book club, a handful of us shared outrage. The rest weren’t bothered by a knife-twist ending—they welcomed the sledgehammer to the chest. Which makes me wonder: is devastation sometimes the point? And if so, when does it feel cathartic, and when does it just infuriate?

To answer, I think back on my timeline of literary heartbreak. At thirteen, I read Jude Deveraux’s A Knight in Shining Armor, where a modern woman falls for a 16th-century knight. I adored Nicholas Stafford.

Other stories still hurt, but the pain felt earned.

The Princess Bride: the book skips the movie’s tidy conclusion, yet the love still glows.

The Time Traveler’s Wife: death was inevitable, but layered with tenderness.

The Notebook: two lovers holding on until the last breath—worth it.

These endings devastate, yes, but they honor the love they built.

Back to Wild Dark Shore. I can’t quite name what bugs me. My husband, trying to help, suggests I imagine my own ending. Sweet man—never once asking why I’m gutted by fiction, but re-writing an author’s story is out of the question. I hear myself defending McConaghy. She wrote the right ending for her story. The breadcrumbs were all there. Given the characters’ motivations, the ending made sense.

So maybe my frustration lies not with the death itself, but with what comes after.

In Romeo and Juliet, the families stop feuding.

In The Princess Bride, Buttercup and Westley escape, Humperdinck defeated—even if the future is uncertain. I don’t need a Disney ending. I just need balance restored.

In Wild Dark Shore, not so much.

Because I loved every sentence. I wanted to recommend the book to fellow prose-lovers. The deeper I sank into McConaghy’s world, the more intimate our bond felt. I trusted her to deliver me to some shore of peace, believing the final page would offer closure. Why? Because true love is supposed to conquer all.

Maybe to McConaghy, it did. But in my tantrum, I’m only thinking about myself and lived trauma. I have loved and lost, as have all of the people I call friends. We understand heartbreak as a drowning, the kind that strips us bare, makes us prod at our own innards in awe and horror: That’s a human? All that meaning inside this fragile sack of meat?

Such loss makes us compassionate to suffering, but it’s not an emotion we seek out willingly.

It’s also why, when the world gets too real, I read romance. Love—in all its forms—is the tie that binds. It delivers me into impossible scenarios and into the arms of solace. The beauty of HEA is the belief that true love not only exists, it lasts. I can close the book and return to carving out my own definitions, bolstered by the illusion that I might die hand-in-hand with our soulmate. That illusion matters. It’s a stranger giving shape to our rawest emotions.

But each of us has our own definition of what catharsis requires. That’s the thing about a book that breaks your heart: the reading is over, but the experience isn’t.

Sometimes I feel like Veruca Salt: “But Daddy! I want a happy ending NOW!” I replay scenes, argue with characters who will never answer. And I realize the real ache isn’t about the author or the novel. It’s about the promises I’ve whispered to my child and my hubby—I will love you until the end. At the best of times, this promise is easy to deliver. At the worst, it’s impossible to decipher.

I’m not done with McConaghy. Her prose is too good, her characters too alive. But it will be a long time before I can risk Wild Dark Shore again.

What’s the last book that broke your heart? And have you forgiven it?