Haley-Grace McCormick wrote the beginning and ending of The Enemy of Time while she was 21 and in love. By the time she reached the second draft, she was 23 and heartbroken. The middle of the book changed completely.
"I was desperately in love with this person and while writing the first draft and then the second draft we broke up," McCormick tells Ponton. "I then finally knew heartbreak and I knew what it was like to love someone so dearly but not be with them." The Enemy of Time is a friends-to-lovers story told over 24 hours at what the reader thinks is a high school reunion but reveals itself to be a funeral. The main character, Alex, spends the book in flashbacks with Jamie, the boy she loved, only to discover at the doors of the venue that he has been dead the entire time. It is the kind of ending that sends readers to their own phones to text everyone they love, which is exactly what Ponton did after finishing the book the night before a shoot in Tampa.
McCormick's method explains why the book lands. She did not write scenes and hope they would resonate. She reverse-engineered feeling. On index cards taped to her kitchen floor for a week, she mapped each scene to an emotion: happiness, grief, anger, secondhand embarrassment. "If a scene doesn't connect the reader to a feeling, then it's not needed," she says. The cards stayed on the tile so long her family ordered DoorDash rather than disturb the grid. At the end of the week, McCormick punched holes in the cards, put them on a ring like high school study notes, and wrote the book one scene at a time.
The breakup draft
The first draft had the structure but not the ache. McCormick knew the plot, the 24-hour countdown, the reveal at the funeral doors. What she did not yet know was what it felt like to let someone go. When the relationship ended, she went back into the manuscript and tore out major sections. "I realized this character would not do this," she says. "It's not accurate to what somebody would be going through in this moment." The rewrite centered on miscommunication and the agony of loving someone but choosing not to hold them back. Jamie breaks up with Alex to let her leave their small town for college, even though he is the reason she would stay. Alex misinterprets the breakup as betrayal, believing Jamie and her friend Kayla hooked up. The truth is they conspired to set her free.
McCormick cried writing that breakup scene more than she cried at the ending. "I understood both of them in that moment," she says. "I was yelling at my own characters and myself for writing it." The scene became the hinge of the book because McCormick had finally lived it. She even jokes about it now with the ex, who remains a friend. "I'm so glad you broke me," she told him. It is the line every artist says when the album is about to be crazy.
The spicy chapter her publisher made her add
McCormick thought she was done when she turned the manuscript in. Her publisher disagreed. "This is an adult love story," the editor said, meaning the book needed a second romantic scene. McCormick, who had never written anything explicit, panicked. She surrounded herself with romance novels and pulled up movie clips on her laptop, studying cinematic moments, the simple hand touch, the build. "How do you properly write a scene that's going to be romantic, also still good, but these characters have been through so much?" she wondered. Her mother walked in, saw the pile of spicy books, and closed the door without a word.
McCormick finished the scene and felt good about it. Then came the mortifying part. Because she is dyslexic, she has her father read her chapters aloud so she can hear the rhythm. He had been reading the whole book with her. She did not warn him about this one. "He starts reading it out loud," McCormick recalls. "He goes, 'Am I... Is this... Oh. I need the wine.'" They poured cabernet and got through it. The scene became her favorite chapter to add, not for the content but for the absurdity of workshopping it with her dad. "It was such a funny moment," she says. "Just being that new writer trying to learn how to write spice."
The short story that became a funeral
The book started as a college assignment. McCormick's professor asked the class: if you could tell your younger self one thing, what would it be? McCormick, who had just moved, tore open boxes to find old journals. She found pages about a boy she had been obsessed with at 13 or 14, pages with dried tears and smudged ink. Reading them as a 20-year-old, she laughed. The contrast between what had felt life-ending and what now felt trivial became the seed of the story. She wrote a short story with the funeral ending already in place. The professor told her the characters had more to say. McCormick expanded it into a novel with One Day and Love, Rosie as models: stories that show how two people can be wrong for each other in one moment and right in another, how time is the real antagonist.
Ponton, who started the book on a flight to Tampa with no idea what was coming, finished it in a hotel room the night before a shoot. She posted a video of herself crying. "I was so emotionally connected to Jamie," she says, though she never meets him alive in the present timeline. The trick is that Alex is an unreliable narrator. She lies to herself for 300 pages, and the reader experiences the truth at the exact moment she does, walking through the doors. McCormick wanted that crumbling feeling, the moment reality smacks you and you can no longer pretend. "Her own enemy of time is facing her right there," McCormick says. "I want people to feel this importance of like, okay, I need to say something to the person that I love when I feel it."
Growing apart without a fight
The subplot Ponton found most relatable was not the romance but the friendship dissolution. Alex and her friends do not have a blowout. They grow apart because life pulls them in different directions, and no one is to blame. McCormick, who moved 15 times by age 23 because of her father's hotel job, knows that fracture intimately. "We're all growing and changing constantly," she says. "You're not going to change and grow at the same rate." She believes people are in your life for a reason but sometimes only for a chapter, not the full book. It is a line Ponton uses to cope with the same guilt.
Ponton tells a story about meeting a guy in Barcelona who introduced her to his stepsister in Tahiti. They ran into each other on a ferry that holds 50 people. They spent two weeks together and then grew apart. "People come into your life for a specific reason," Ponton says, and McCormick agrees. The book does not punish Alex for losing touch with Kayla and Lucas. It just shows her realizing, too late, that she should have called.
McCormick is careful to say it is also okay to reconnect 10 years later and pick up where you left off. "There's something really beautiful about that as well," she says. "These connections don't have to be in your life every single day, but they're going to continually make a difference." The book asks: what if you do not get 10 years? What if the person you meant to call back is already gone?