Below is the complete list of Tessa Bailey’s The Girl books in publication order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
The Girl Books in Publication Order
- Getaway Girl (2018)
- Runaway Girl (2018)
- Halfway Girl (2019)
About The Girl
Tessa Bailey’s The Girl series is a contemporary romance collection built around runaway moments, public expectations, and people who are forced to decide whether the life planned for them is the life they actually want. The series begins with two full-length romances, Getaway Girl and Runaway Girl, then continues with the shorter connected stories Renaissance Man and Halfway Girl. Across the books, Bailey mixes Southern charm, romantic comedy, family pressure, and the kind of high-chemistry emotional conflict that defines much of her work.
Getaway Girl opens in Charleston with Addison Potts returning after years away and walking straight into family scandal. She attends her estranged cousin’s wedding, only for the bride not to appear, leaving Addison to become an unlikely escape route for the abandoned groom, Elijah Montgomery Du Pont. Elijah is not just any jilted groom; he is a carefully managed public figure with a political future and a life shaped by discipline, reputation, and expectation. Addison, by contrast, has the energy of someone used to being misjudged and kept at the edges of polite society. Their romance works because both characters unsettle the roles they have been given: Elijah discovers there is more to life than control, while Addison finds someone willing to see her as more than a family problem.
Runaway Girl turns the premise in another direction by focusing on Naomi Clemons, the bride who left Elijah at the altar. That choice could have made Naomi a shallow antagonist in another story, but Bailey gives her a full emotional arc. Naomi is a former pageant queen and polished Southern woman who realizes, at the worst possible moment, that she has been performing a version of life rather than living one. Her escape leads her to St. Augustine, Florida, and to Jason Bristow, a Special Forces diver raising his younger sister. Their story has a sharper reinvention angle: Naomi is not simply running from a wedding, but from a lifelong pattern of being pleasing, predictable, and ornamental.
The two main novels are closely connected through the failed wedding, but they are not the same romance told twice. Getaway Girl is about the outsider and the public man learning how to exist together under scrutiny. Runaway Girl is about a woman dismantling the image that once protected her and discovering desire, independence, and purpose outside the world that shaped her. Bailey uses both stories to explore reputation, but from opposite sides: Addison has to live down what people think of her, while Naomi has to stop living up to what people expect.
The shorter entries, Renaissance Man and Halfway Girl, expand the world with more playful, concentrated romantic setups. Renaissance Man brings in Kyle Musgrave, an ex-Special Forces soldier caught in the unlikely setting of a renaissance fair, while Halfway Girl focuses on Jerimiah and Birdie in a locked-in, close-quarters situation. These stories are lighter in scale but still fit the series’ larger pattern: strong physical attraction, awkward vulnerability, and characters pushed into honesty by unusual circumstances.
The Girl series is best read as a set of connected romances about escape, reinvention, and being seen clearly after years of playing the wrong part. Bailey keeps the tone warm, bold, and flirtatious, but beneath the comedy is a consistent emotional question: what happens when someone finally stops cooperating with the life everyone else designed for them?