Telling this story wouldn’t have been possible without the editorial input and guidance of Anne Sowards. Thank you so much for your advice and friendship. We would also like to thank Nancy Yost, our agent, for her endless oceans of patience and willingness to deal with a seemingly never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, and crises.
As always, we are grateful to all of the people who have worked on making this manuscript into a book. The managing editor, Michelle Kasper, and the assistant production editor, Julia Quinlan. Judith Lagerman, the art director; Juliana Kolesova, the artist responsible for the image on the cover; and Jason Gill, the cover designer.
We would also like to thank our beta readers, who selflessly endure the tortures of proofreading a half-baked manuscript. They are, in no particular order: Ying Dallimore, Laura Hobbs, María Isabel Amoretti de Pagano, Nur-El-Hudaa Jaffar, Kelly Brooke, Beatrix Kaser, Olivia Toune, Nicole Joury, Christian, and especially Shannon Daigle. Thank you to Vibha Patel, Lisa Rigdon, JeNoelle Flom, Liz Semkiu, Olga Zmijewska-Kaczor, and Bambi Parfan for help with medical issues. All errors are ours and ours alone.
Finally, thank you to all of you for sticking with us thus far. We hope you enjoy the book.