I write this book in offering to the tea house woman, that complicated figure who appears first as bride-to-be in We Take Me Apart and then, years later, as widow in Desire: A Haunting, which I have only just completed.

To be honest, this is a bad period for me. It’s the end of a book, and there’s a kind of loneliness, as if that closed book were going on still somewhere else, inside me.

Like an open eye.

Salt Lake City, Utah
February 2014