You must take good care of your Elizabeth until I come for you, sweet girl, my grandfather had told me.
But I hadn’t. I’d lost the doll in the nightmare tree.
I looked up into Bran’s eyes. Sapphire and Emerald. The only points of color in a silver night. “You kept her? All this time?” My intake of breath was quick and shallow. “Why?”
He tucked a stray curl behind my ear. “Don’t you know?” he whispered. “Haven’t you always known?”
There comes a moment in every person’s life when fate wheels on the head of a pin and changes their destiny forever. For me, that instant came when a little boy, with blue and green eyes, handed me an apple.
I flew to him. When Bran Cameron pulled me close and began to murmur the words that would send my heart soaring and shatter it in one fell swoop, I shook my head and touched his lips with shaking fingers.
“Bran,” I said through pain and joy that mixed to scratch my voice. “Just . . . stop talk—”
His mouth came down over mine, stopping my words, crushing me to him in a kiss we both knew would have to last us for a long, long time.
TO BE CONTINUED
Acknowledgments
I DON’T KNOW HOW ANY AUTHOR CAN EVER BEGIN TO thank all the people who were involved in helping her write a book. But I’m going to do my best.
First and foremost, I want to thank my husband, Phil. My love, best friend, and sweetheart since that Halloween party when we were seniors in high school. (You know what I’m talking about, baby.) Day after day, he’s my biggest fan, my strongest cheerleader, and the one who’s talked me off the ledge more times than I can count. This book would not exist without him.
It also wouldn’t exist without my book-loving mom, Nena Butler. My mom is my alpha reader, my traveling companion, and the one who put a book in my hand when I was three years old, teaching me how the little squiggles on the page could carry you away into a million different worlds. Thanks, Mom, for reading all the terrible first drafts and telling me each one would be a movie someday. To my sweet daddy, Duck, who’s so very proud of me, and to my beautiful sister, Jennifer, and my gorgeous nieces, Hannah, Kayley, and Ava—who let me use her middle name for my main character.
A humongous thanks goes to my incredible rock-star agent, Mollie Glick. Mollie, you never gave up on me or on Hope. You recognized something in my little time-travel story, then whipped me beyond the boundaries of what I thought I could do. Thanks also to her fantastic assistant, Joy Fowlkes, who fielded a million emails from me and never got tired.
Thank you to my fabulous editor, Sarah Landis. Sarah’s my guru, my sherpa, and the keenest editorial eye I’ve ever known. Thanks also to Mary Wilcox and Christine Krones, for taking me in hand while Sarah was off being fecund. My brilliant publicist, Rachel Wasdyke, and marketing sage, Ann Dye, and all the wonderful folks at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for believing in this story.
To Heather Webb, author extraordinaire, leader of our writing group, and the best friend/sprinting partner in the world. Huge hugs to all the girls in the SFWG writing group—Susan Spann, Candie Campbell, Julianne Douglas, LJ Cohen, Marci Jefferson, Amanda Orr, DeAnn Smith, Arabella Stokes. Together we’ve become better than we ever dreamed.
Love to all my Arkansas friends. My BFF since third grade, Kelley Riggs Nichols (yes, you can come with me and dress me on book tour), Linda Gayton, Yolanda Longley, and Lynette Place (whose talent made my author picture look halfway decent). Michelle Buchanan; her brilliant daughter, Marlee; Barbara Varnon. Thanks to my DFWcon writer friends, Jenny Martin, Dawn Alexander, Kate Michaels, and Lindsay Cummings.
I’m forever grateful to Diana Gabaldon, for making historical time travel cool. And to my experienced guides through this crazy biz—Joelle Charbonneau, Leigh Bardugo, Rysa Walker, Kendare Blake, Alethea Kontis, Danielle Page, Brenda Drake, CJ Redwine, and Rachel Caine.
A huge thanks to my new “posse,” the Sweet 16s. I couldn’t get through the day without WAY too many texts, IMs, emails, frantic phone calls flying between me and Marisa Reichardt, Shea Olsen, Shannon Parker, Catherine Lo, Kathryn Purdie, Ashley Herring Blake.
The most massive “I love you” goes to my brilliant, hilarious sons, Phillip and Parker, who keep me in line when I try to be cool.
And finally, in loving memory of Parker’s beautiful girlfriend, Katherine Palludan, who loved books as much as I do, and whom we lost so tragically last year. We love you, Katherine.