Leeds Gabriel is an aimless musician playing in a wedding band when he meets Layla at her sister's wedding, and the two fall for each other over a single weekend. Months later, Leeds's obsessive ex-girlfriend shoots Layla, and she spends the better part of a year in and out of consciousness. The woman who eventually comes home is not quite the woman Leeds fell in love with: her temperament has shifted, and she remembers things she should not and forgets things she should.
Hoping to recover something of what they had, Leeds takes her back to the bed-and-breakfast where they first met. Instead of healing her, the house unsettles her further — and Leeds begins to sense a second presence there, a woman who calls herself Willow. Willow knows things about the house, about Layla and eventually about Leeds himself that no stranger could know, and Leeds finds himself drawn to her in a way that sets him against the woman he came here to save.
Layla is Colleen Hoover's first paranormal romance and a marked departure from her contemporary realist fiction. It keeps genuine ambiguity for much of its length about whether Leeds is experiencing something supernatural or simply losing his grip, and it resolves toward a choice that decides what happens to all three of them. Readers who come to Hoover for emotional contemporary romance should expect a genre shift; the supernatural premise is literal rather than metaphorical, and the novel asks to be taken on those terms.