Wreathed (29 page)

Thanks of course to my wife and my twin daughters (who, at age five, are finally sleeping well enough for me to finish this novel in a timely fashion). And thanks to the rest of my family, either here in New Jersey or in Texas, who read the last book and helped get the word out.

Thanks to Carin Siegfried, who was again willing to work with me and edit this manuscript and set me straight about my near-total lack of understanding regarding women and the clothes they wear. She is a joy to work with and has helped make this manuscript better than it had any right to be.

Thanks to Christine LePorte, who proofread the book and was an immense help in catching the continuity errors that persisted after a couple of major rewrites and realignments to the middle part of the tale. I can only apologize for not including the five-page lyric poem about Whataburger that I promised her. Any errors that remain are my responsibility (although I hope that there aren’t any, or if there are, they aren’t as egregious as the one about IHOP in my last book.)

Thanks to Doug Niday, who did the calligraphy on the dedication. One of the few things I enjoy about self-publishing is doing things my own way, and using calligraphy on the dedications of my books is something I enjoy (and which a traditional publisher would probably not let me get away with).

Thanks to the wonderful and talented (and anonymous) artists of Dangerdust (
https://www.facebook.com/ddccad

), who designed and chalked the beautiful cover. You can follow them on
Instagram

or
Tumblr

, and buy their stuff on
Behance

or
Etsy

.

Thanks to Nathan Bransford, whose terrific blog and book on novel-writing has been a big help this far in my career, and who helped me get my query letter in shape. (It is not his fault that this book is self-published, a fact about which I refuse to say anything further.)

Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed
Rain on Your Wedding Day
, including fellow authors John Shors and Markham Shaw Pyle. Thanks to everyone who’s retweeted me or let me write for their blog or done whatever needed to be done to help get more readers for that book, and I hope I can count on you to do the same thing for this book.

And, of course, thanks go to you, the reader, without whom the entire enterprise is based on sheerest folly. I am pleased beyond measure that you’ve read this far, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the book and that you’ll tell a friend. God bless you and keep you safe from harm.

Curtis Edmonds

Duckthwacket, New Jersey

October 2014

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Epilogue