Editing The Night We Met (section)

==Characters==

* '''Larissa''' — The novel's female lead; a warm, resourceful woman facing genuine financial precarity who manages her difficulties with practicality and dry humour. She volunteers walking dogs and holds multiple jobs. Her relationship with Mike is real but quietly mismatched in ways she only begins to see through her friendship with Chris.
* '''Chris''' — The male lead; initially read as reserved and faintly unfriendly, he is in fact deeply principled, attentive, and emotionally intelligent. He is Mike's closest friend and considers loyalty to be a non-negotiable part of his character. He also carries a grief he has not fully processed, which runs as a secondary current beneath the novel's central conflict.
* '''Mike''' — Larissa's boyfriend and Chris's best friend. Jimenez renders him as a person of genuine warmth and likability rather than a convenient obstacle, which is central to the ethical complexity the novel sustains. He is privately struggling with alcoholism, a secret that Chris holds and that shapes the choices both men make.
* '''The Yorkie''' — The rescue dog Chris adopts and Larissa helps care for; described throughout as slightly unhinged and serving as both comic relief and the structural mechanism for Chris and Larissa's growing closeness.