If He Had Been With Me

Autumn Davis and Finny Smith were born a week apart to mothers who have been best friends since childhood. They grew up next door to one another and were inseparable, until a kiss at the end of eighth grade broke something neither of them knew how to name. By high school they had stopped speaking: Finny to the soccer team and the popular crowd, Autumn to a group of outsiders and a long relationship with Jamie, while Finny dated Sylvie.

Narrated by Autumn across four years, Laura Nowlin's debut is the story of everything that kept the two of them apart and of the single rainy August night that made it permanent. Finny and Sylvie were arguing as he drove down a slick road, and Autumn was not with him. What that argument was about — the story that lurks between the facts — is what she has to tell.

First published by Sourcebooks Fire on 1 April 2013, the novel later reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Nowlin returned to the same events in the companion novel If Only I Had Told Her (2024), which retells them from Finny's, Jack's and Autumn's perspectives.