The Death of Jane Lawrence(118)

To everybody who has cheered me on from the sidelines, I needed that ongoing support more than you can know. Neme, Thea, El, Casey, Val, Seth, and Caitlin—without you being absolutely feral in your support, this would have been a much harder and lonelier road.

I learned to write largely through text-based role-playing, so I owe a huge thank-you to all of my role-play partners over the years. In particular, I want to thank Krystal Loh and Dan Rodgers: through our games, I created and refined the character who would become Dr. Avdotya Semyonovna Nizamiev. She’s very grateful to you for her existence.

To my agent, Caitlin McDonald: you pushed and pushed at me to make this book as good as I could make it, and then found it the best home it could have had. Thank you for listening to me cry and rip my hair out every time I hit a wall, and for the blood, sweat, and tears you poured into helping me bring it these last few miles to the finish line.

Thank you to my editor, Sylvan Creekmore, for seeing exactly what I loved so much about this book and loving it, too. You’ve made this book the most true and thorough version of itself. Thank you, also, to the art and production team for supporting the text with absolutely gorgeous design and art, and to the rest of the SMP team for bringing the book out into the world.

Thank you also to my aunt, Dr. Kristin Cowperthwaite—you took my out-of-the-blue question about how a Victorian-era abdominal surgery would go, and my vague ideas of just what might have gone wrong with the patient to begin with, and not only sent back a thorough answer regarding techniques and risks but also coined the phrase “the location of the magical insult,” which I have delighted in and cherished ever since. You rock, thank you so much. I hope I didn’t get too many things wrong in surgeries I didn’t have you consult on!

Elsa Sjunneson, you are both an incredibly skilled sensitivity editor and a fantastic friend. I’m so glad we got to work together on this project.

I owe much of my understanding of why gothic horror is so effective and enticing to Jeanette Ng, who reminded me that the power is in letting the protagonist desire, in every sense of the word.

(Thank you, too, to Donald Maass, who, over the course of one coffee and without having read a single page of the book, cracked open the entire problem with my original third act.)

To my husband, David Hohl—thank you for not only supporting me through this book and the whole whirlwind that has been publishing but also not running away screaming after what I did to Jane’s husband in this book. Jane and I share a lot in common, but I promise you, I have no intention of making a “better” magical copy of you. Maybe let’s avoid houses with basements, though. Just in case.

Thanks also to my parents, David and Stacey Starling, for bragging about me to everybody you know and always being ready to cheer on each new milestone of mine. To my great-aunt Lynn Narasimhan, who is always ready with a willing ear and a glass of celebratory scotch, and who also has housed us during the upheaval of both graduate studies and a pandemic, I owe undying gratitude. Thank you, too, to my in-laws, Dave and Sukey Hohl, and the rest of my family, on all sides, for your constant support of and delight in what I do next. I hope this book hasn’t been too traumatizing to read.

And to all my readers who have trusted me enough to follow me from high-tech suits in far-off caves to a haunted house in faux-English hills—I hope you’ve enjoyed and that you’re just as excited to see where we go together next.