I Love You, Kevin: A Love That Lives in Every Lifetime

The phone rang before dawn on September 25, 1996. In that single moment, Dawn’s world split into a before and an after she has lived in for thirty years.


In September 1990, a man named Kevin Patrick Mack stepped out of a dark hallway said three words and changed the entire trajectory of Dawn’s life. What followed were seven years, hundreds of handwritten letters in blue ink on yellow legal pads, prison visiting rooms, wildflowers left on ordinary days, and a love that broke every odd stacked against it.

It is also the story of addiction, incarceration, and a devotion the world often refused to understand. Kevin struggled. Dawn stayed. Not because she didn’t see what she was staying for, but because she saw all of it, the wreckage and the romance both, and chose him anyway, every single day, for seven years.

I Love You, Kevin is told through Dawn’s memories and Kevin’s own words, preserved exactly as he wrote them across more than two hundred surviving letters. It does not sanitize the hard parts. It does not smooth over the addiction, the fights, the years of fear, or the grief that followed, a grief so often dismissed because the man she lost was not seen as worth grieving.

This book asks readers to look closer. To see a real man behind a disease that too often erases the person living inside it. To see a real love, complicated and imperfect, that mattered anyway. To understand that loving someone through their hardest years does not make that love less real. It makes it deeper.

For anyone who has loved someone through addiction, incarceration, or a loss the world didn’t understand — this book says what so few are allowed to say out loud: your love was real, and it mattered.

Was it worth it? Every single moment.