I have so much to be grateful for, and so many people to whom I’m so indebted for their knowledge, work, and support. I know I didn’t get here alone, and I know I’m not going anywhere without your help!
Thanks to my agent, Jessica Sinsheimer, for your continued encouragement and professional insight and genius soup recipes. Thanks as well to the rest of the team at Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency.
I’m exceptionally lucky and grateful for the vision and talent that’s behind this book at Orbit. Sarah Guan, editor extraordinaire, thank you for your perception and for the best hard questions. Two-hour phone calls feel like minutes! I have the most beautiful covers in the world thanks to Lauren Panepinto and Lisa Marie Pompilio. Thanks as well to Tim Paul for a map pretty enough to frame. Thanks on the publicity side to Alex Lencicki, Ellen Wright, Laura Fitzgerald, and Paola Crespo (who, seriously, never stops selling books!). To the whole Orbit team, thanks for this incredible opportunity and for letting me be part of a family of book-obsessed humans with you.
Randy, thanks for your love and support. I didn’t mean to write a story “inspired by real life,” but I guess when it comes to love and dedication overcoming separation, I did… ooops? No regrets. Eleanor and Marjorie, thanks for letting me disappear into a writing cave and have long phone calls about words and generally be a very weird mother.
Thanks to my parents for being my first and biggest fans and for not having Twitter so you can’t post my childhood scribblings for anyone else to see. To my family and friends, your support means so much—every time I awkwardly garble my thanks for reading my book, I hope you know how much it means to me.
To my sewing and history nerd friends, I hope you see your work in these pages. To my writing friends, I hope you know how much your kind words, check-ins, and Twitter banter mean to me.
And to all the readers who have come this far with me, thank you! I’m continually inspired by your support.