He looked into the smooth margin of Holly’s forehead and into her open, youthful eyes and absorbed the steadiness of her being as if he were coming out of a long and fractured dream. He saw love in her eyes. It wasn’t something that could be mistaken. He remembered when he was a boy and his father took him to a cornfield maze in autumn before Halloween. He had walked through the maze’s twists and turns with his father and told him he’d race him to the end, and slowly released his hold on his father’s coarse and gentle hand. His father went one way and he went the other, running as fast as he could. The cornstalks were above his head and when he looked up all he could see was the sky and around him the cornstalk walls. He took a turn and then another; everything looked the same. He didn’t know which way to go. He ran breathlessly down the rows, making one turn after another, and found himself back where he started. He began to panic and breathed heavily, and then, just when he thought he would never find his way, he saw a cone of light and followed it and there was his father, waiting for him at the end of the maze. He remembered thinking no one would ever love him as his father had.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
EVERY WRITER NEEDS a second (or third, or fourth) pair of eyes. Thank you generous readers, Rebecca Schultz, Deidre O’Dwyer, Helen Schulman, Lelia Ruckenstein, Diane Goodman and Bill Clegg. Thank you Howard Norman, especially. Thank you Sanda Bragman Lewis for your support. Thank you Sarah Chalfant and Jin Auh for your steadfast belief and good council. Thank you Dan Smetanka for your passion, dedication, and keen editorial eye. We should all be so lucky. Thank you to my copyeditor, Allegra Huston. Thank you team Counterpoint: Charlie Winton, Kelly Winton, Rolph Blythe, Claire Shalinsky, Megan Fishmann. Thank you, husband and son, always.
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