From the author:
This brief excerpt comes from an early chapter. I think the only spoiler is what color Eve decides to paint a room. That's already pretty obvious from the cover, and I'm going to talk about how I made the decision on the exact shade right here.
The first handwritten draft of this scene has Eve say that she has chosen Sunny Yellow, with a question mark over the word Sunny. This is standard notation for when I don't like a word but prefer not to pause my writing to think of something better. The first draft is going to be far from perfect anyway. I don't know why Eve likes yellow, but I thought she'd pick a cheerful shade of if for her paint. Sunny was the first cheerful word that popped into my head. But if I was picking out paint, I'd expect something called Sunny to be much brighter and darker than I was picturing.
When I began to type and edit that section of the book, I thought way longer than I like to admit on what to call the paint. I browsed paint chips from several brands (and confirmed in the process that ones called sunny or sunshine were too saturated for my imaginary room). The shades that most closely matched what I wanted had names I didn't like. None of them said cheerful to me. And then I may have done a literal facepalm when I realized I could just call it Cheerful Yellow.
By the way, there is some variation on the cover to make that more visually pleasing (I hope), but the bit across the top most closely matches what you should imagine is appearing on Eve's walls.
From the book:
Eve claimed a chair by putting her coat on the back of it. She straightened her sweater as she sat to watch the others arriving. Ben Shannon came in almost as soon as her eyes faced the door. He wore a black coat and something else black was wadded up in his hand. He smiled when he saw her, which made her heart stutter. As he moved to take the seat next to her, she noticed his hair was darker and shinier than usual.
“Is your hair wet?” she asked.
“We pulled out some really old carpet today,” he said. “I needed a shower.”
“Are you trying to freeze to death going outside like that?”
He unwadded the black thing to show her a hat. “That’s what this is for. To not freeze to death.”
Eve didn’t blush easily, but she felt a bit of embarrassment at not recognizing a hat. In her defense, his hair didn’t look as though it’d been recently plastered to his head. It still bounced lightly off his forehead. She had also been distracted from anything in his hand by the way his eyes seemed to light up at the sight of her. There was no way she could voice her defense. She said only, “Good idea.”
“Have you had any ideas?” He unzipped his coat but left it on. “About the room you told me about?”
“Sort of. I still don’t really know, but… I’m going to take your advice and do one thing at a time.”
He nodded. “Have you decided on a first thing?”
“Paint,” she said. “The walls are scuffed and marked up from Simon’s stuff. I think I’ll want to paint it no matter what else I do so I’m going to start there. I bought paint this afternoon.” She smiled, feeling oddly proud of having bought a can of paint.
“What color?” Ben asked.
“I found a shade called Cheerful Yellow. I thought that sounded pretty cheerful.”