As always, I’m tremendously grateful to all the people who contributed to this book in ways large and small, general and particular. It takes a village to tell a story, and I worry that if I started listing the villagers I would never stop. There are, however, five people who have read the manuscript all the way through, several times over in each case. Suzanne Baker and Gavin Baker are a formidable mother/son team, absolutely indefatigable in reading draft after draft, generous in their praise, keen and unflinching in their criticism. I’ve always thought it’s better to be lucky than good, and I’m about the luckiest writer alive to have Hannah Bowman as my agent and Marco Palmieri as my editor. Finally, this book, like all the others, wouldn’t exist without Johanna Staveley, who believed in it and me more powerfully than I did.