You helped show me that I could do things I never dreamed I’d be brave enough to try, you showed me that it’s worth holding on until you meet that one person that makes you feel complete, but most importantly, meeting you meant I had the courage to be those things by myself. Part of me feels like I’ll never truly be complete without you, but this past year I’ve made a pretty good start. I’ve been bitten to death by mosquitos, I’ve been unable to sleep because of the heat, I’ve been scratched to death by bushes. I’ve slept out under the night sky, I’ve seen wild lions, giraffes, leopards. Best of all, I’ve captured it all on camera. I never would have done any of that if I hadn’t run into you, quite literally, on that cold, December day.
So I’ll say now what I wasn’t brave enough to say in person, and please know that if I’m ever lucky enough to feel this way again, I’ll make sure I’m brave enough to say it then.
I love you, Max.
Now and always.
Josie
Acknowledgments
Any credit I deserve for writing this book should be equally split with my amazing, smart, and talented editor, Sherise Hobbs, without whom this book would quite literally not exist. From that very first conversation in a café, Sherise has been relentlessly brilliant and incredibly generous with her creative thoughts, encouragement, and attention to detail, and has helped me shape this book into something I’m truly proud of. So, Sherise, thank you.
Thanks too to Bea Grabowska for being on team #AlwaysinDecember （and thank you for telling me the book broke your heart, which I choose to take as a compliment, even though I’m not totally sure what kind of person that makes me）。 Thank you, Katie Green, for a brilliant copyedit. In the United States, thanks go to Hilary Teeman for some brilliant last editorial suggestions, which helped elevate the book further, and to Caroline Weishuhn.
Emma Rogers is to thank for the absolutely beautiful cover—a cover that I really hope everyone judges the book by. Thank you to Nathaniel Alcaraz-Stapleton and Rebecca Folland for your hard work and securing some truly champagne-worthy rights deals. Team Marketing & Publicity always have a special place in my heart, so thanks to Ellie Morley and Emily Patience （Emily gets extra credit for sharing my name）。
Outside the publishing force, Charlotte Levens deserves enormous thanks for coaching me through this book, for brainstorming ideas about Christmas dates （in the middle of July）， for answering my research questions about hospitals, and for many forced coffee/wine chats about this book. Char, I’m pretty sure you know this book as well as I do by now, but look, now it’s published and it was worth it! I will thank you with more wine, preferably on a beach with some horses around.
Lastly, thanks to my lovely older sister, Jenny, for letting me stay in her beautiful house to write this book （and to Tom, her husband, because by virtue of staying in her house I am also staying in his…）。 And thank you to my nieces, Lily and Ella, for helping/distracting me and making me take breaks from staring at my laptop all day to play zoos/The Floor is Lava/puzzles and, in Ella’s case, to put this story aside to help her write stories of her own, inevitably about a girl called Jane and a horse called Daisy.
If you’ve read this far then you, reader, also deserve thanks. Thank you for reading this book—it makes it all worthwhile.