She gave him the song that made him famous. He gave her a name the world would never forget. Neither of them ever truly moved on.

In the sticky heat of a 1995 London summer, Nelly Griffin, a sharp-tongued Australian ex-pat with a broken filter and a soft heart, meets Tim Chaucher, a floppy-haired nobody busking outside a Camden pub. He can’t tune a guitar to save his life, but when he sings, something in her unravels. They fall, messily, ferociously, completely.

Two years later, Tim is on the brink of Britpop superstardom. Nelly is pregnant, terrified, and gone.

Back home in rural Australia, she buries their stillborn son beneath an oak tree and builds a quiet life with a steady man who’ll never ask too many questions. But the song follows her: Oh Nelly, Tim’s breakout hit, a raw, aching anthem for the girl who disappeared. Everyone knows it. No one knows it’s about her.

Twenty-eight years later, Nelly is fifty-five, bored, married, and still ducking the past. Until Tim announces a tour. Until her name is in lights again. Until they’re face to face, older, rawer, and still burning.

What happens when the muse comes back to life? When the man you left behind turns your heartbreak into legend? And when the truth finally claws its way out, do you run again, or finally sing?

The Part of You I Look For in Everyone I Meet is a whip-smart, gut-punching love story about music, memory, missed chances, and the messy art of letting go. For anyone who’s ever haunted a love song… or been haunted by one.