A Gift of Thought (32 page)

BOOK: A Gift of Thought

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His mom had gotten the phone call from the sheriff the day before. She was free to leave the state if she so desired. The district attorney had decided no charges would be pressed. In another hour, she and his dad would catch a plane to North Carolina to spend part of the holiday with her family.

“So is Rose really . . .” Akira started.

“Don’t say it,” he told her. “She gets weird about that word.”

“But, Dillon,” Akira protested.

“I’m serious,” he said. “She thinks it makes her sound like a goody-two-shoes or a Christmas tree ornament. She swears if you ever say it again, she’s going to turn into a poltergeist just to make you stop.”

“But . . .” Akira began to complain and then stopped herself. “All right, I won’t say it. What about you, though?”

He glanced at her. “What do you mean?”

“Are you going to head through a passageway sometime soon?”

He looked over his shoulder. No passageway had appeared. He shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

Akira frowned. “Are you okay with that?”

Dillon spread his hands. “I wanted my parents to be together and to be happy. They are. But I guess this dimension needs something else from me before it’s ready to let me go.”

Akira sighed.

Dillon grinned at her. “Aren’t you curious to find out what it is?”

Author Note

If you enjoyed reading about Dillon, Sylvie and Lucas, please consider leaving a review at your favorite online retailer. For any author, but especially those of us self-publishing without marketing budgets or PR people, Reviews = Sales = Money = Time = Stories making their way from our imaginations to your screen. Your support makes all the difference.

You can find me on the web at
http://sarahwynde.blogspot.com/
or
http://www.facebook.com/sarah.wynde
or on Twitter as wyndes.

Thanks for reading!

Acknowledgements

Some writers write because the act of putting words to paper is like oxygen for their souls. I write because it’s less expensive than playing
World of Warcraft
. (Unemployed graduate-school dropouts need cheap hobbies.) That said, I could not possibly have kept writing through this incredibly difficult year (see:
Dedication
) without the encouragement of all of the people who wrote reviews for
A Gift of Ghosts
, sent emails, and posted comments to my blog. This book literally would not exist without you. Thank you so much.

I’d also like to thank everyone who reviewed
A Gift of Thought
as it was posted on fictionpress.com, with special thanks to Luckycool9 for his helpful insight and to Caroline Humphries who got me writing again when I wasn’t sure I ever would.

Rachel Sager cheered me on every step of the way. I owe her more than I can repay. I hope she lets me return the favor someday.

The folks at Project Team Beta (
http://projectteambeta.com/
) emailed me and asked if I wanted beta readers: saying yes was an easy decision and I’m grateful I did. My thanks to the beta readers who read early chapters, but especially to the wonderful and talented Shellynne Waldron and Jordan Walterman for their insight and commentary and all their help with those pesky commas. Mike Kent found the first chapters of
A Gift of Ghosts
on critiquecircle.com, loved it, told me so, and gave me the confidence to self-publish it. And then he offered to beta-read
A Gift of Thought.
I greatly appreciated all of his suggestions (even the ones I ignored—the world needs more parentheticals!) and his help making
A Gift of
Thought
a better book. Heidi Eckstein found the first draft, “meh, but entertaining”: her honest criticism was much appreciated and truly useful. Stacy Taylor read the first draft and posed great questions; I’m grateful for her help. Finally, I had an incredible stroke of good fortune when Yvie Burleson agreed to beta read: her knowledge of DC and legal issues improved every reference to the city and made the police scenes more realistic (all errors are mine, of course), while innumerable sentences are cleaner, stronger and shorter because of her suggestions. Thank you all!

My wonderful aunt, Marcia Newton, walked the fine line between unconditional encouragement and making smart suggestions for change beautifully, while my wonderful sister, Karen Lowery, stayed firmly on the unconditional encouragement side. I’m very grateful to them both and to all of the rest of my family for their support and enthusiasm.

Finally, special thanks and love to my brother, Werner Sharp, and my friends, Pam Hartman and Suzanne Courteau, for being here for me during a very dark time. You are the safety net that keeps me from falling too far and lets me bounce back up when the drop is over.

Table of Contents

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