Discretion (The Dumonts, #1)(87)

She’s laughing now, smiling from ear to ear, and I get to my feet, pulling her to me, kissing her hard. “I’m saying yes because I love you,” she says, and then she glances down at her hand in mine. “Don’t you need a ring?”

“Be right back,” I tell her and run into the bedroom, quickly fetching the ring that I’ve kept hidden in my sock drawer. It’s been there for a few months now, a sapphire-and-diamond ring that matches her eyes. The moment I stepped inside the antique store, I knew it was the one.

Just as I knew she was the one from the moment I first saw her. First saved her. From the moment I first realized that she was the one who saved me.

I go back in the kitchen, get down on my knees again, and then propose with the ring.

She accepts.

The ring fits.

She fits.

Into my heart, into this life, into the next life too.

“I love you, Sadie,” I whisper to her as I wrap my arms around her and hold her tight. I’ll hold her forever. “Thank you for getting off that train.”

I feel her smile against me as she realizes what I’m talking about. “Best decision I ever made,” she says.

“And deciding right now to become my wife?”

“Easiest decision I ever made,” she says. “I was yours from the start.”

“Now you’re mine forever.”

“Bien s?r,” she says and then pulls back to look at me, frowning through her happy tears. “I said that right, didn’t I?”

I laugh. “You’ll get there, mon lapin. You’ll get there.”

We’ll at least get there together.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’ve written close to fifty acknowledgments at this point in my life, and I imagined this would be one of the hardest, simply because this book was the hardest I’ve ever had to write.

But since the hard part is over, I’ve decided to make this as short and sweet as possible (though something tells me it’s wishful thinking).

First, a little about why this book was so damn hard.

I have to say, it really has nothing to do with the book itself. It’s not the characters or the plot or the subject matter. When the idea for the Dumonts first hit me, I sat down at my computer, and for the first time ever, I was able to crank out more than ten thousand words in one day. Now, that’s not unusual for me: I write fast, and when I’m on deadline, I’m often writing that much. What made it unusual was the fact that I wrote that within a day of getting the idea. Usually, I have to let an idea and characters and plot soak in for a few days to a few months before I can start writing.

But it just came to me, and I was so damn excited about it all. The intrigue, the sex, the money, the French—my God, I do love the French (especially my French readers—bonjour!). We travel so often to France that it feels like a second home, and I knew that this series had to be set there (I also knew that I had to incorporate my Chanel obsession in there, too, hehe). I was all about the Dumonts.

Then . . . I took a break from writing (I actually went to France to do a bit more research), and that’s when everything sort of fell apart.

November came along, and so did my usual bout of SAD (seasonal affective disorder). Usually we’re down south as soon as the days grow dark and gloomy, as this disorder actually interferes with my ability to work, but this time we weren’t going until December. And we live on an island that not only has no lights—you need a headlamp to cross the street to get the mail—but sits under a dark cloud for months with almost no sunlight and very short days.

Then I got sick with a nasty, never-ending flu, and that, combined with my SAD and the fact that I was also dealing with other big health problems for the first time, meant everything went downhill.

And I mean everything. I fell into a very deep depression from which there didn’t seem a way out. And though I’m no stranger to depression, especially that time of year, this time it was directly affecting my writing. I couldn’t conjure up the will to care about anything, let alone my characters or the book. The spark was gone. There was no joy to be found. And it wasn’t this book . . . it was everything. It didn’t matter if I wrote something else or nothing at all; I just couldn’t conjure up the mental energy or the will to do it. Every time I tried, a brick wall came down in my mind, and I had no strength to fight my way over it. I stopped caring, and I needed so deeply to care.

Yet, somehow, I kept going. Kept trying to climb over that wall or dig under it or pick my way through it. It must have worked, because, eventually, the book got finished. Deadlines got pushed back. The first ten days of vacation were spent writing from morning to night, fighting this story every step of the way, fighting for it to be told, fighting my depression. But somehow I got it done.

Looking back, I’m not even sure how. Mentally, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, and I know to many of you reading this, it won’t seem like that big of a deal, but, believe me, it was. Losing any hope and joy in something that once brought you those things is so devastating, and it’s scary when you start to believe you’ll never feel normal again.

All I knew is that if I could just get Olivier and Sadie’s story out there, then that meant depression wouldn’t have won. It meant that I hadn’t given up. It meant that I prevailed when it felt like I never would.