I became a Taylor Swift fan at 26, when love had left me ruined. For several months that year, I played “Dear John” on loop as I drove to and from work. It was the first non-single of Taylor’s I’d ever heard, and as I belted it down dusky highways, tears blurring brake lights, I marveled at how a complete stranger had written a song detailing my exact heartache, helping me feel a little less as if I’d lost my mind as well as my heart. Back then, I couldn’t have imagined that over a decade later, Taylor’s music would help me write one of my most twisted thrillers to date.
Cross My Heart, out Jan. 14, follows Rosie, a heart transplant recipient, who becomes fixated on her donor’s husband. She believes that, because the heart he once loved is now hers, he’s destined to love her too. It’s a story of obsession, of a woman so desperate for connection that she crosses more than one line to find it — even when she discovers that the man she’s pursuing might have had something to do with his wife’s death. Because in her eyes, no matter his flaws, he belongs with her.
It should come as no surprise, then, that as I was brainstorming this novel, I had Taylor’s “You Belong With Me” in my head. The song tells the story of someone pining for a friend who’s too wrapped up with the pretty, popular girl to notice the one he’s actually meant to be with has been right there the entire time. It’s a sweet, hopeful love song — or at least that’s how I’d always heard it. But when I listened with Cross My Heart in mind, a single lyric hit me like a record scratch.
After Taylor spends several choruses asserting the song’s titular phrase, she sings, “Think I know where you belong, think I know it’s with me.” She thinks she knows? To me, that line reveals that for all her insistence, all her certainty about this relationship, some of it is perhaps all in her head. That idea seems to foreshadow the Speak Now vault track “I Can See You,” particularly these lines: “You won’t believe half the things I see inside my head. Wait ’til you see half the things that haven’t happened yet.”
And that kind of runaway imagination is so Rosie in Cross My Heart. Even as she finds real-life ways to interact with her donor’s husband, Morgan, she’s still fantasizing about him, still dreaming up connections they surely share —which only strengthens her conviction they belong together.
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Once I’d pinpointed that nuance in a classic Taylor love song, I couldn’t stop hearing new layers in others, too. In “Labyrinth,” the narrator proclaims over and over that she’s “falling in love again,” but she prefaces that statement with “uh oh” and “oh no,” acknowledging that, for her, this isn’t necessarily a good thing. Listening to that song at my desk, I knew my book needed that perspective. Only, it was far too self-aware for Rosie, who’s dying to find love before her new heart fails her, which is always a possibility with transplants.
Enter: Nina, Rosie’s best friend, who tries so hard to be her voice of reason, cautioning her against starting a relationship with Morgan, reminding her that she’s repeating patterns that have gotten her into trouble before. But just like in the end of “Labyrinth,” where “uh oh” and “oh no” get overlapped by competing notes until the words become almost blurred, Rosie does not hear Nina’s warnings. Even as her innocent crush leads her down increasingly menacing paths, Rosie tunes Nina out.
If Rosie had been communicating with her friend using only Taylor Swift lyrics (something I’ve never done — no need to check my group chats!), she might have responded, “Nothing safe is worth the drive.” That’s from “Treacherous,” which, on the surface, is about plunging head-first into a romance, even knowing that love is a dangerous gamble. The narrator acknowledges the risk just before she sing, “I would follow you, follow you home.” When this song was released in 2012, I was at the bold-moves, bright-eyed phase of a relationship myself, so I heard only her willingness to take a chance on her love interest, to follow wherever he leads.
Writing my novel, however, I heard something else: an undercurrent of obsession as the tentative “I would follow you home” switches to the more definitive “I will follow you, follow you home.” It repeats several more times, as if the narrator can’t shake the thought. As if she’ll follow him whether he invites her to or not. And just like that, another element of Cross My Heart was born: in more than one scene, my narrator, Rosie, stands outside Morgan’s house, watching the man she’s sure is her future.
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In order to begin living that future, though, Rosie first has to orchestrate a meet-cute with Morgan. Taylor Swift, the queen of teasing new projects with Easter eggs, knows all about making elaborate plans. She even sings about it in “Mastermind,” where she admits to pulling some strings to make a relationship happen: “What if I told you none of it was accidental and the first night that you saw me, nothing was gonna stop me?”
What strikes me most here is she doesn’t say “the first night I saw you.” The lyric is very deliberately “the first night you saw me,” implying that, in fact, the narrator has had her eyes on this man for a while without him knowing. That distinction inspired me as I wrote the scene in which Rosie sees Morgan in a café and hatches her plan to “accidentally” bump into him, jumpstarting their twisty — and twisted — journey together.
Without Taylor’s music, Cross My Heart would have been a very different book. Even if it had the same characters and same big surprises, it wouldn’t have dug as deep into the more obsessive — even possessive — side of love. The side that’s just as much delusion as desire. The side where passion tips into peril, where pursuing a partner feels as necessary as a heartbeat.
Rosie’s not the easiest character to root for, but even in her most outrageous moments, there’s something relatable about her — a quality Taylor’s songs helped me find. Because just as it did when I was 26, her music reminded me we all lose our minds a little to love.
To hear more songs that inspired me as I wrote my novel, check out the official Cross My Heart (Taylor’s Version) playlist.
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