Acknowledgements & Author’s Note - The Husband I Buried

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, thank you for picking up this story. Thank you for spending your time with these characters, for recommending my books, reviewing them, messaging me, and continuing to support my work. Every single reader matters, and I never take that for granted.

Thank you to the incredible team at Embla for believing in this story from the very beginning. Publishing a book is such a collaborative process, and I’m endlessly grateful for the care, enthusiasm, and hard work that went into bringing this novel to life. To my editor and everyone behind the scenes – thank you for your guidance, patience, and for helping shape this story into something stronger with every draft.

To my early readers, reviewers, bloggers, and ARC team: thank you for reading so passionately, championing my books, and sharing them with others. Your support means more than I can properly put into words.

To everyone who helped me research the darker corners of this story, particularly around trauma and memory, thank you for answering my endless questions and helping me make this world feel real.

To my family and friends, thank you for your encouragement, patience, and for understanding when I disappeared into fictional problems and morally questionable characters for long stretches of time. Your support carried me through this book more than you know.

I hope this story kept you guessing until the very last page.

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A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Like so many of my books, this story began with a question.

How much of what we see is shaped by what we’ve lived through?

Two people can experience the same moment and walk away with entirely different truths. Memory, grief, fear, love, trauma – they all leave fingerprints on the way we interpret the world around us. Sometimes they protect us. Sometimes they distort things. And sometimes they make us question whether we can trust our own minds at all.

That idea became the heartbeat of this novel.

I’ve always been fascinated by perception: the things we convince ourselves of, the things we overlook, and the lengths the human mind will go to in order to survive painful experiences. While this story is fictional, many of the emotional themes within it were inspired by real discussions surrounding memory, trauma, identity, and the complicated relationship between truth and belief.

More than anything, though, this book became a story about trust. Trust in the people we love, trust in ourselves, and what happens when those two things begin to fracture.

Mackenzie’s journey was an emotional one for me to write. Beneath the suspense, twists, and secrets is someone desperately trying to hold on to her sense of self in a world determined to reshape it.

Thank you for spending your time with these characters and this story.

—Maryann Webb