was too heavy.
He said, “You know my mother was a prostitute.”
He was trying to talk her out of it. “Baby, you know that doesn’t matter to me.”
His face was still turned toward the ring. “When I got her belongings, she had all this cheap costume jewelry.”
Sara bit her tongue. The ring had not been cheap.
“Necklaces and bracelets and—what do you call that ugly thing Amanda wears on her jackets?”
“A brooch.”
“A brooch,” he said. “The necklaces were so old that the strings disintegrated. All of the silver bracelets had turned black. There were at least twenty of them. I guess she stacked them all together. What are those silver bracelets called?”
“Bangles.”
“Bangles.” He finally looked up from the ring. He rested his hand along the back of the couch. His fingers played with the ends of her hair. “What’s the kind of necklace that’s tight, like a dog collar?”
“A choker,” she said. “Do you want me to pull up some photos on my laptop?”
He gently tugged at her hair. She realized he was teasing her.
He said, “You’re so beautiful.”
Her heart skipped. There was a dreaminess to his smile. Sara had been swept off her feet before, but Will was the only man she had ever met who could make her weak in the knees.
He said, “Your eyes are such a specific color of green, almost like they’re not real.”
Will stroked her hair behind her ear. She tried not to purr like a cat.
“When I met you, I kept thinking I’d seen that color somewhere before. It drove me crazy trying to remember where.” His hand fell away, resting on the back of the couch again. “I’ve been looking at rings for months. Princess cuts and marquis and cushion, and then I went through this whole panic where I thought I had to spend eighty grand.”
“Will, you don’t—”
He reached into his pocket. He pulled out a small, silver ring. It was cheap costume jewelry. The metal was dented. The green stone was scratched down the side.
The color was almost identical to her eyes.
He said, “This was my mother’s.”
Sara’s hands had gone to her mouth. He had kept the ring in his pocket. He had been waiting for the right time.
He asked, “So?”
“Yes, my love. I would be delighted to marry you.”
Sara didn’t need to hear the question.
She was not going to screw it up this time.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Dear Reader—
Here is your big, gigantic warning that this letter is filled with SPOILERS, so please be advised if you continue before reading The Silent Wife, the story will be completely ruined and you will have no one to blame but yourself. I mean it! Don’t tell me you read this note and the story was ruined because I will show you this paragraph and yell very theatrically BE IT ON YOUR HEAD.
Now that that’s out of the way, I want to thank you for reading my books, whether you are a new reader or whether you’ve been reading from the beginning. If you are in the latter category and you are wondering how many years have passed since Blindsighted, the number you are looking for is nineteen.
I know what you are thinking—“I read Blindsighted when my first child was born and now she’s pregnant with her first!”
Reader, these are heart-warming stories that I do not want to hear.
When I started thinking about the idea for The Silent Wife, I knew I wanted to go back to Grant County, but I also knew after nineteen years (and sixteen books) of putting Sara in the most heinous situations imaginable, I could not bring myself to make her forty years old. In fact, in the current Will Trent books, only five years has elapsed between Jeffrey’s death and the current stories, which worked out fine in the Will Trent world, but presented an issue when I was structuring the latest story, mainly because of the massive technology gap between the two series. In 2001, Yahoo! and BlackBerrys were cutting edge. Facebook, Google and iPhones were either not yet invented or in the nascent stages. I remember using an America Online CD as a coaster beside my tube computer monitor while I wrote the book. For the love of God, my laptop weighed almost as much as my cat.
Given these challenges, I decided to take advantage of the fact that my books are fiction. Instead of nineteen years elapsing between Blindsighted and The Silent Wife, the number is eight. (Weirdly, that is exactly how much I have aged in the