by: Betty Corrello
Genre: Women’s Fiction/Romantic Comedy
Release Date: May 13, 2025
Publisher: Avon
Nadia Fabiola wants to lose herself in Evergreen—the Jersey Shore town where she grew up vacationing with her family—and never look back at her glamorous, gainfully employed former self. After a shocking lupus diagnosis turned her life upside down, she’s desperate for a sense of control over her body, her life, and her mental health. Nadia plans on keeping her life small and boring, while continuing to ignore her sister’s relentless questioning.
Nadia’s sister isn’t the only person worried about her. When her rheumatologist not-so-subtly sets her up with his infamous former-actor cousin, Marco Antoniou, Nadia is skeptical. But Marco is gorgeous—despite carrying his own baggage from a very public burnout. After a messy (but fun) first date, they decide that a May-long fling could be just what the doctor ordered: no commitment, no strings, just one month of escape.
Their undeniable chemistry starts to feel a lot like something more and while Marco pulls Nadia deeper into his life, she is dead set on keeping her diagnosis from him. But there are only so many days in May, and only so much pretending she can do. As the stress of their whirlwind romance takes its toll on Nadia’s health, she’s forced to decide if a chance at love is worth the risk of trusting someone new.
From Avon Books:
Discover love, vulnerability, and the perfect summer read in 32 DAYS IN MAY, a heartwarming and witty new romance by Betty Corrello, author of Summertime Punchline. Betty masterfully combines humor and emotional depth to explore complex themes that are sure to strike a chord with readers.
With its vivid descriptions and whirlwind romance, 32 DAYS IN MAY will take you from the jersey Shore to Rome, crying and laughing as you soak up the sun with these characters.
Doctor’s appointment.
I have to drive on to the mainland from Evergreen. I’m currently living in my parents’ Shore house. Generational wealth in the form of a duplex next to a sandwich shop. Privilege in the form of a robust savings account accumulated after eight years in advertising. I’m unemployed, unmoored, and next to a body of water. I’m basically a Kennedy.
The doctor’s office is freezing.
I pull my cardigan on and make a comment to the empty room about how I shouldn’t have worn sandals, then I feel ancient. Gone are the days of being goose-pimpled and silent. Thirty hits and you’re chasing down every manager, leaving one-star reviews on Yelp, begging the world to care about you the same way they did when you were twenty-two and fine with freezing your nipples off.
“Nadia, my dear. How’s the hydroxychloroquine?”
“It’s not doing anything.”
“It can take some time to kick in.” Dr. Antoniou folds his large hands and rests them on an equally large knee. “I can increase your dose. But you are looking a lot better.”
I scoff to keep from blushing. Sebastian is handsome and Greek, both visually and emotionally. He loves his family. There are photos of his beautiful Mediterranean wife plastered all over the place. She has long, artisanal hair extensions and the most luminous fake tan. Together, they’re bronzed and perfect. I imagine their chiseled, strong bodies clanging together while they fuck. Nothing but their hitched breath and the knocking of marble against marble.
“Can you imagine if I took some time to do anything? Four weeks to kick in at my job? Six months to kick in and pay my phone bill?” I swing my freezing feet back and forth from where I’m pouting on the table, the world’s most enormous baby.
“That’s a very funny observation.”
Thanks, I’m a writer.
I want to say it so badly. But I’ve actually forsaken that title. Have I written anything of note in the last week? The last month?
Okay, wait. On Sunday I texted stay clam to Soph instead of stay calm and we laughed and laughed, for at least three minutes.
I used to write everyone’s favorite commercials. It was a bit formulaic but what isn’t? It went something like: peculiar animal with funny name + oblivious white guy. I used to write things like Int. Day. Beach Bungalow. WIFE walks in on NAKED HUSBAND and get the types of laughs Joan Rivers could only dream of.
Am I looking better? He can’t just say that, can he? God, I want to feel better. Yesterday, I managed to bike three blocks (one and a half in each direction) to pick up sushi for dinner. Afterward, I had an epic energy crash. Today, I woke up feeling like I’d gone a few rounds through one of those old-school washing machines. Ridden hard, put away wet.
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Let’s just do it. Let’s increase my dose. What’s the worst that can happen?”
“I’m sorry. I know you hate being on so many medications.” He flashes me a mournful, sweet smile. Dr. Sebastian Antoniou puts the bed in bedside manner.
“How’s your urine?” he asks with a gentle sincerity I find simultaneously arousing and degrading.
“Normal,” I say, defensive. Then I shrug. “Sort of a . . . mustard yellow?”
“Any foam or froth?”
What am I, a cappuccino machine? “Everything’s better. I told you,” I lie. I love to lie. It’s the only rush I get these days. “I think it—the, uh, foam and you know . . . blood . . . was just a onetime thing.”
Dr. Antoniou works a hand over his chin. “I know that’s what you want. And I know your situation is a rough one. Your dad and I”—I always forget that my father and Dr. Antoniou both frequent the same country club, where Sebastian, no doubt, enjoys the tennis court and pool while my father stuffs as much of the free breakfast buffet into the pockets of his supermarket jeans as possible, then drains the bunghole of cucumber water at record-breaking speed—“have discussed your work ethic. Your passion. He calls you his bull.” Dr. Antoniou clenches one of his enormous hands in a fist and holds it up between our faces.
“Jeez. Dramatic.”
Doc laughs and nods. “Given your symptoms and that your urinary protein levels were elevated, we’ll need to seriously monitor your kidneys for the next six months. Lupus nephritis is a frequent progression of systemic lupus erythematosus, and we do not want that for you, okay? We need to protect your internal organs as much as we can. If we don’t keep this disease under our thumb, you’re going to start to feel it”—Sebastian raises an inky brow at me—“more than you already do.” He taps an uncapped pen against his clipboard, waiting for me to say something.
I don’t. What’s there to say?
“I’ll order another round of labs for you.” Scribble, scribble. “By the way, my cousin’s coming into town for a month.”
“From Eretria?” I’m desperate for a topic change. Enough of the piss talk. Enough of the organ talk. Ask me about the goddamn weather for once, won’t you?
Dr. Antoniou’s face lights up. He loves that I’ve remembered Greece, something Americans so often forget to do. “No. He lives in New York. Is it okay if I give him your number? Talia and I are headed out of town for a little while, and you know all the cool, hip spots in Evergreen.”
“It’s like, five streets and a boardwalk.”
Dr. Antoniou crosses the room and places a heavy hand on my shoulder. Only for a moment before pulling away. “You really need to make an effort to get out more.”
There it is.
Out. Everyone’s obsessed with out.
“Or what? I’ll get sick?”
“Nadia.” He says my name so sweetly I almost fall in love. “Self-care is healthcare.” Jesus. I grimace. Never mind. “Lupus is not a death sentence. As long as you wear a hat and your SPF—don’t roll your eyes at me. You Italians think you’re invincible!” Classic Southern European diaspora banter. I laugh to show I’m good-natured, but instead I show that it is possible to sound humorless and vacant, even while your mouth is producing a ha ha ha sound.
“Fine.” I hop down off the table, angling to make a quick exit through the door Antoniou has propped open with a long, leather-clad foot. “I’d be happy to. Just don’t tell him about . . .” I gesture vaguely at my body.
Sebastian laughs, the hardest he has yet. “That would be a HIPAA violation. As far as he’ll know, you are one hundred percent healthy. Oh, and . . .” He waves a hand around his head. “Love the haircut.”
A nurse leads me to another room, where he takes an ungodly amount of blood from my left arm. I make a joke about him being an extremely hungry vampire.
Neither of us laughs.
“Jimmy Timmon’s been committed.”
This is how my sister responds to Hello?
I set my knife down on the kitchen counter.
I’ve been cutting up apples for a pie I promised Allie for her birthday; she turned thirty nearly two weeks ago, so timing-wise, I’m actually doing very well. I only answered my older sister’s phone call because I was feeling too good about myself.
“Olivia. I don’t think you can say that anymore.”
Liv is completely unfazed by my reaction. “His mom’s heartbroken. She came in to pick up two pounds of braciole and she could barely hold it, her hands were shaking so badly. Terrible.”
Before my diagnosis, Liv only ever called me when she was absolutely desperate for some entertainment. If her fiancé, Mike, was out of town and our mom unreachable, I was her last resort. Now, we talk on the phone so frequently I can picture exactly what she’s doing as she yammers. I can picture her car keys jangling and swinging from her wrist and the ice in her latte clanking as she crosses the four-way intersection from our parents’ butcher shop to the opposite corner where she parks her car illegally, every day. I can almost smell the sunshine on the black-topped Philly street, can almost imagine how the cherry blossoms cushion each of her steps, their last petals shed and having given way to wide, shining leaves.
“No fucking shit!” I pick up my knife again, going back to hacking up a particularly large Pink Lady. “That’s her kid!”
Jimmy grew up around the corner from us, on a side street that always smelled like sulfur and dryer sheets. He’d been a scrawny, irritating kid with knobby knees and crooked teeth, cruising around on his bike or on the back of someone else’s, standing on their back pegs like a captain at his hull. Most of us grew up, moved away, moved on. But Jimmy hung around, still cruising on his bicycle. A living ghost.
A shiver runs down my spine.
“Sad stuff.” Liv sighs, but this feels like the beginning of a longer sentence she’s still working her way up to. Silence settles over the phone line until I can’t even hear the wind anymore.
“Thanks for letting me know,” I say to fill the space, dragging out the oh in know so it sounds like a question.
“Yeah, well, I wanted to tell you, just in case you had any ideas . . . about . . . you know . . .”
“Oh my God. Are you serious right now? How many times do I have to tell you—”
“Hey,” she cuts me off sharply. “Don’t sass me, sister. I’m the eldest daughter. I’m the parentified one here. Mom and Dad are worried sick, and that means I have to—”
“What, threaten me with a grippy sock vacation?” I let out a biting, incredulous laugh. “Is this Jimmy news really your best attempt at talking to me about mental health?”
“Yeah, and it scared you, didn’t it? Shocked you?”
Kinda. “You’re sick, bitch,” I say.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!” she cries in response. She sounds so much like Mom, I actually have to stifle a laugh. “They’re on my ass, Nadia. They have no idea how to deal with this whole lupus thing—”
“It’s not a thing that needs to be dealt with. It’s just my life now.”
“It’s a serious disease.”
I press the back of my hand—warm and clammy from the effort of chopping—into the space between my eyes. “Believe me, I’ve noticed.”
“You lost your job.” The way she says this makes me want to barf. We’ve been having this exact conversation for six months, and each time it makes me hate who I used to be a little more. Cinderella lost her shoe; Virginia Woolf lost her mind; Nadia lost her job.
“Maybe it was a job I wanted to lose! Maybe I’m better off!”
Quietly, my sister grumbles, “You don’t believe that.”
“What difference does it make? This is my life, whether or not you and Mom and Dad think it’s pathetic or weird. This is what I’m doing.”
“But you’re not doing any—”
“I’m fine.” I cut her off before she can finish the word, before she can fully and totally accuse me of stasis. “I promise you, I’m not in crisis anymore. I’m just . . .” I search for the word. I’ve been searching for it for months, actually. One single word to describe what it is I’m doing. “I’m cloistering.” This . . . is the best I can do.
“Cloistering?” Liv repeats carefully.
“Yeah, like a nun. I’m turning inward, searching for meaning in the meaningless. I’m finding power in stillness—”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Exactly. That guy. All his stuff. He loved to be alone and wander around. In deserts. What a pill. At least I’m at the beach.” I clear my throat. “I’m totally fine.”
“Okay.” Liv sighs again. “You promise?”
No, I don’t. I am tissue paper in a windstorm, but she can’t know that. She’ll start listing other people we know who have blown away. Other people who made promises they couldn’t keep.
I set down the knife. “Yes, Liv. I promise.”
Excerpted from 32 Days in May by Betty Corrello. Copyright © 2025 by Betty Corrello. Reprinted courtesy of Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Betty Corrello is a writer, comedian, and proud Philadelphian. Despite her hardened exterior, she is biologically 95% marshmallow. Her greatest passion is writing stories where opposites attract, but love is chosen. When she’s not writing, she can be found fretting about niche historical events most have forgotten––or petting her very tiny dog.
Release Date: May 13, 2025
Publisher: Avon
Nadia Fabiola wants to lose herself in Evergreen—the Jersey Shore town where she grew up vacationing with her family—and never look back at her glamorous, gainfully employed former self. After a shocking lupus diagnosis turned her life upside down, she’s desperate for a sense of control over her body, her life, and her mental health. Nadia plans on keeping her life small and boring, while continuing to ignore her sister’s relentless questioning.
Nadia’s sister isn’t the only person worried about her. When her rheumatologist not-so-subtly sets her up with his infamous former-actor cousin, Marco Antoniou, Nadia is skeptical. But Marco is gorgeous—despite carrying his own baggage from a very public burnout. After a messy (but fun) first date, they decide that a May-long fling could be just what the doctor ordered: no commitment, no strings, just one month of escape.
Their undeniable chemistry starts to feel a lot like something more and while Marco pulls Nadia deeper into his life, she is dead set on keeping her diagnosis from him. But there are only so many days in May, and only so much pretending she can do. As the stress of their whirlwind romance takes its toll on Nadia’s health, she’s forced to decide if a chance at love is worth the risk of trusting someone new.
From Avon Books:
Discover love, vulnerability, and the perfect summer read in 32 DAYS IN MAY, a heartwarming and witty new romance by Betty Corrello, author of Summertime Punchline. Betty masterfully combines humor and emotional depth to explore complex themes that are sure to strike a chord with readers.
With its vivid descriptions and whirlwind romance, 32 DAYS IN MAY will take you from the jersey Shore to Rome, crying and laughing as you soak up the sun with these characters.
Wednesday, May 3
Doctor’s appointment.
I have to drive on to the mainland from Evergreen. I’m currently living in my parents’ Shore house. Generational wealth in the form of a duplex next to a sandwich shop. Privilege in the form of a robust savings account accumulated after eight years in advertising. I’m unemployed, unmoored, and next to a body of water. I’m basically a Kennedy.
The doctor’s office is freezing.
I pull my cardigan on and make a comment to the empty room about how I shouldn’t have worn sandals, then I feel ancient. Gone are the days of being goose-pimpled and silent. Thirty hits and you’re chasing down every manager, leaving one-star reviews on Yelp, begging the world to care about you the same way they did when you were twenty-two and fine with freezing your nipples off.
“Nadia, my dear. How’s the hydroxychloroquine?”
“It’s not doing anything.”
“It can take some time to kick in.” Dr. Antoniou folds his large hands and rests them on an equally large knee. “I can increase your dose. But you are looking a lot better.”
I scoff to keep from blushing. Sebastian is handsome and Greek, both visually and emotionally. He loves his family. There are photos of his beautiful Mediterranean wife plastered all over the place. She has long, artisanal hair extensions and the most luminous fake tan. Together, they’re bronzed and perfect. I imagine their chiseled, strong bodies clanging together while they fuck. Nothing but their hitched breath and the knocking of marble against marble.
“Can you imagine if I took some time to do anything? Four weeks to kick in at my job? Six months to kick in and pay my phone bill?” I swing my freezing feet back and forth from where I’m pouting on the table, the world’s most enormous baby.
“That’s a very funny observation.”
Thanks, I’m a writer.
I want to say it so badly. But I’ve actually forsaken that title. Have I written anything of note in the last week? The last month?
Okay, wait. On Sunday I texted stay clam to Soph instead of stay calm and we laughed and laughed, for at least three minutes.
I used to write everyone’s favorite commercials. It was a bit formulaic but what isn’t? It went something like: peculiar animal with funny name + oblivious white guy. I used to write things like Int. Day. Beach Bungalow. WIFE walks in on NAKED HUSBAND and get the types of laughs Joan Rivers could only dream of.
Am I looking better? He can’t just say that, can he? God, I want to feel better. Yesterday, I managed to bike three blocks (one and a half in each direction) to pick up sushi for dinner. Afterward, I had an epic energy crash. Today, I woke up feeling like I’d gone a few rounds through one of those old-school washing machines. Ridden hard, put away wet.
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Let’s just do it. Let’s increase my dose. What’s the worst that can happen?”
“I’m sorry. I know you hate being on so many medications.” He flashes me a mournful, sweet smile. Dr. Sebastian Antoniou puts the bed in bedside manner.
“How’s your urine?” he asks with a gentle sincerity I find simultaneously arousing and degrading.
“Normal,” I say, defensive. Then I shrug. “Sort of a . . . mustard yellow?”
“Any foam or froth?”
What am I, a cappuccino machine? “Everything’s better. I told you,” I lie. I love to lie. It’s the only rush I get these days. “I think it—the, uh, foam and you know . . . blood . . . was just a onetime thing.”
Dr. Antoniou works a hand over his chin. “I know that’s what you want. And I know your situation is a rough one. Your dad and I”—I always forget that my father and Dr. Antoniou both frequent the same country club, where Sebastian, no doubt, enjoys the tennis court and pool while my father stuffs as much of the free breakfast buffet into the pockets of his supermarket jeans as possible, then drains the bunghole of cucumber water at record-breaking speed—“have discussed your work ethic. Your passion. He calls you his bull.” Dr. Antoniou clenches one of his enormous hands in a fist and holds it up between our faces.
“Jeez. Dramatic.”
Doc laughs and nods. “Given your symptoms and that your urinary protein levels were elevated, we’ll need to seriously monitor your kidneys for the next six months. Lupus nephritis is a frequent progression of systemic lupus erythematosus, and we do not want that for you, okay? We need to protect your internal organs as much as we can. If we don’t keep this disease under our thumb, you’re going to start to feel it”—Sebastian raises an inky brow at me—“more than you already do.” He taps an uncapped pen against his clipboard, waiting for me to say something.
I don’t. What’s there to say?
“I’ll order another round of labs for you.” Scribble, scribble. “By the way, my cousin’s coming into town for a month.”
“From Eretria?” I’m desperate for a topic change. Enough of the piss talk. Enough of the organ talk. Ask me about the goddamn weather for once, won’t you?
Dr. Antoniou’s face lights up. He loves that I’ve remembered Greece, something Americans so often forget to do. “No. He lives in New York. Is it okay if I give him your number? Talia and I are headed out of town for a little while, and you know all the cool, hip spots in Evergreen.”
“It’s like, five streets and a boardwalk.”
Dr. Antoniou crosses the room and places a heavy hand on my shoulder. Only for a moment before pulling away. “You really need to make an effort to get out more.”
There it is.
Out. Everyone’s obsessed with out.
“Or what? I’ll get sick?”
“Nadia.” He says my name so sweetly I almost fall in love. “Self-care is healthcare.” Jesus. I grimace. Never mind. “Lupus is not a death sentence. As long as you wear a hat and your SPF—don’t roll your eyes at me. You Italians think you’re invincible!” Classic Southern European diaspora banter. I laugh to show I’m good-natured, but instead I show that it is possible to sound humorless and vacant, even while your mouth is producing a ha ha ha sound.
“Fine.” I hop down off the table, angling to make a quick exit through the door Antoniou has propped open with a long, leather-clad foot. “I’d be happy to. Just don’t tell him about . . .” I gesture vaguely at my body.
Sebastian laughs, the hardest he has yet. “That would be a HIPAA violation. As far as he’ll know, you are one hundred percent healthy. Oh, and . . .” He waves a hand around his head. “Love the haircut.”
A nurse leads me to another room, where he takes an ungodly amount of blood from my left arm. I make a joke about him being an extremely hungry vampire.
Neither of us laughs.
“Jimmy Timmon’s been committed.”
This is how my sister responds to Hello?
I set my knife down on the kitchen counter.
I’ve been cutting up apples for a pie I promised Allie for her birthday; she turned thirty nearly two weeks ago, so timing-wise, I’m actually doing very well. I only answered my older sister’s phone call because I was feeling too good about myself.
“Olivia. I don’t think you can say that anymore.”
Liv is completely unfazed by my reaction. “His mom’s heartbroken. She came in to pick up two pounds of braciole and she could barely hold it, her hands were shaking so badly. Terrible.”
Before my diagnosis, Liv only ever called me when she was absolutely desperate for some entertainment. If her fiancé, Mike, was out of town and our mom unreachable, I was her last resort. Now, we talk on the phone so frequently I can picture exactly what she’s doing as she yammers. I can picture her car keys jangling and swinging from her wrist and the ice in her latte clanking as she crosses the four-way intersection from our parents’ butcher shop to the opposite corner where she parks her car illegally, every day. I can almost smell the sunshine on the black-topped Philly street, can almost imagine how the cherry blossoms cushion each of her steps, their last petals shed and having given way to wide, shining leaves.
“No fucking shit!” I pick up my knife again, going back to hacking up a particularly large Pink Lady. “That’s her kid!”
Jimmy grew up around the corner from us, on a side street that always smelled like sulfur and dryer sheets. He’d been a scrawny, irritating kid with knobby knees and crooked teeth, cruising around on his bike or on the back of someone else’s, standing on their back pegs like a captain at his hull. Most of us grew up, moved away, moved on. But Jimmy hung around, still cruising on his bicycle. A living ghost.
A shiver runs down my spine.
“Sad stuff.” Liv sighs, but this feels like the beginning of a longer sentence she’s still working her way up to. Silence settles over the phone line until I can’t even hear the wind anymore.
“Thanks for letting me know,” I say to fill the space, dragging out the oh in know so it sounds like a question.
“Yeah, well, I wanted to tell you, just in case you had any ideas . . . about . . . you know . . .”
“Oh my God. Are you serious right now? How many times do I have to tell you—”
“Hey,” she cuts me off sharply. “Don’t sass me, sister. I’m the eldest daughter. I’m the parentified one here. Mom and Dad are worried sick, and that means I have to—”
“What, threaten me with a grippy sock vacation?” I let out a biting, incredulous laugh. “Is this Jimmy news really your best attempt at talking to me about mental health?”
“Yeah, and it scared you, didn’t it? Shocked you?”
Kinda. “You’re sick, bitch,” I say.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!” she cries in response. She sounds so much like Mom, I actually have to stifle a laugh. “They’re on my ass, Nadia. They have no idea how to deal with this whole lupus thing—”
“It’s not a thing that needs to be dealt with. It’s just my life now.”
“It’s a serious disease.”
I press the back of my hand—warm and clammy from the effort of chopping—into the space between my eyes. “Believe me, I’ve noticed.”
“You lost your job.” The way she says this makes me want to barf. We’ve been having this exact conversation for six months, and each time it makes me hate who I used to be a little more. Cinderella lost her shoe; Virginia Woolf lost her mind; Nadia lost her job.
“Maybe it was a job I wanted to lose! Maybe I’m better off!”
Quietly, my sister grumbles, “You don’t believe that.”
“What difference does it make? This is my life, whether or not you and Mom and Dad think it’s pathetic or weird. This is what I’m doing.”
“But you’re not doing any—”
“I’m fine.” I cut her off before she can finish the word, before she can fully and totally accuse me of stasis. “I promise you, I’m not in crisis anymore. I’m just . . .” I search for the word. I’ve been searching for it for months, actually. One single word to describe what it is I’m doing. “I’m cloistering.” This . . . is the best I can do.
“Cloistering?” Liv repeats carefully.
“Yeah, like a nun. I’m turning inward, searching for meaning in the meaningless. I’m finding power in stillness—”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Exactly. That guy. All his stuff. He loved to be alone and wander around. In deserts. What a pill. At least I’m at the beach.” I clear my throat. “I’m totally fine.”
“Okay.” Liv sighs again. “You promise?”
No, I don’t. I am tissue paper in a windstorm, but she can’t know that. She’ll start listing other people we know who have blown away. Other people who made promises they couldn’t keep.
I set down the knife. “Yes, Liv. I promise.”
Excerpted from 32 Days in May by Betty Corrello. Copyright © 2025 by Betty Corrello. Reprinted courtesy of Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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