The Rains

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks go to:

– Lisa Erbach Vance of the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency, for whom I’ve run out of superlatives.

– Trevor Astbury, Rob Kenneally, Peter Micelli, and Michelle Weiner, my extraordinary team at CAA. What a job they’ve done for me.

– Marc H. Glick and Stephen F. Breimer, my expert counsel. Twenty years, boys.

– Melissa Frain, my delightful, insightful editor.

– Kathleen Doherty, my publisher, and Ali Fisher and Amy Stapp, also of Tor Teen, for their terrific support.

– Maureen Sugden, my erudite copyeditor, who slays with wit.

– Mark Sullivan, who taught Chance how to get off that shot with a Ruger M77 Hawkeye.

– Melissa Hurwitz, M.D., and Bret Nelson, M.D., for reading early and helping me make the implausible plausible.

– Christi Goodman, for generously helping me color my fictional setting.

– Dana Kaye, my astute and tenacious publicist.

– Delinah, Rose, and Natalie, for making my life outside my stories as vivid, unpredictable, and rewarding as what goes down inside them.

– My parents, for filling my childhood with the ingredients that give rise to imagination.

*No Rhodesian ridgebacks were harmed in the writing of this book, or Simba and Cairo would have had something to say about it. They are loyalty and goodness personified. Pretty impressive when you consider that they don’t even have opposable thumbs.