ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

JILL SANTOPOLO, wonderful editor and friend, believer in this novel’s possibilities and future, I thank you for your guidance, your gentle prodding, and your talent for knowing how to shape this story into what it needed to be. I am grateful to have you as an editor and also just overall in my life! To everyone at Philomel for welcoming me into their publishing home, especially Michael Green and Talia Benamy. To all those at Penguin who have been involved in the production of this book, thank you for the care you’ve taken with it as you send it out into the world.

Carlene Bauer, Marie Rutkoski, and Daphne Grab all read drafts of this story at different points in its life. I am grateful to you for your feedback, ideas, and, most of all, your continued encouragement and friendship, especially over the last several years.

I feel confident in saying that Miriam Altshuler is the best agent in the whole wide world. I am so lucky to have you in my corner, Miriam. I think we just passed our tin anniversary. Thank you for your continued encouragement, feedback, and tireless cheerleading of my career, and your friendship most of all. I am grateful, too, to Reiko Davis at MA Literary for her support of this novel, willingness to read, offer feedback, and meet for brunch.

To Daniel Matus, for everything you are in my life.

Whenever I start a new novel, I realize that my heart seems to permanently reside along the beaches and towns of Rhode Island, where I grew up. I am grateful to this place and all those people who’ve inspired the various stories I’ve set there.