Sophie slipped an arm around Emma. “Yes, it is.”
“Know what I’m most thankful for every day of every year?” Emma asked. “That you rescued me and brought me down here to this place. Heaven can’t be any better than this.”
“Amen,” Josh agreed.
Dear Reader,
Friends come into our lives at different seasons for different reasons. That was the way with Emma and Sophie. They’d come into each other’s lives as children and then were torn apart for several years, but when they needed their old friendship again, it returned at just the right time. While I was writing this story, I felt like Emma and Sophie were in the room with me, telling me all their heartaches and joys. I’ve laughed with them, cried with them, and gotten angry with them. When I finally wrote the last words, they were very real people to me, and I was glad to have had the privilege of telling their story.
As I’ve said before, it takes a village to produce a book. The writer starts with an idea, but it needs good editors to help the author give it polish and finesse. With that in mind, I have several people to thank for taking this from a rough idea to a finished product. First of all, my thanks to my agent, Erin Niumata, and my agency, Folio Literary Management, for all they do; to my editors at Amazon/Montlake, Alison Dasho and Anh Schluep, for continuing to believe in me; and to my team for everything from copyediting to cover designs; to my amazing developmental editor, Krista Stroever, who took a lump of coal and helped me turn it into a diamond; and to my readers for their support and love.
Special thanks for this book go to my son, Charles Lemar Brown, for the picture of the hummingbird on the cover, and to Vienna Pharaon for giving me permission to use her quote. As always, my love to Mr. B for everything he does to help me, from first edits to washing the dinner dishes so I can write one more chapter.
Until next time,
Carolyn Brown
About the Author
Photo © 2015 Charles Brown
Carolyn Brown is a New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author and a RITA finalist with more than one hundred published books to her name. They include women’s fiction and historical, contemporary, cowboy, and country music romances. She and her husband live in the small town of Davis, Oklahoma, where everyone knows everyone else, including what they are doing and when—and they read the local newspaper on Wednesdays to see who got caught. They have three grown children and enough grandchildren and great-grandchildren to keep them young. For more information, visit www.carolynbrownbooks.com.