The Search for Lily Myers ✓

Author's Note

So here's the thing: this is my first second draft ever.

It's also the first book I wrote when I came back to this website after a long break from writing, and I never could have anticipated the friendships that I'd make on here while I was working on that first draft.

I've genuinely just never had the experience of being so attached to a story of mine that I couldn't simply shelve it and let it go once I finished the first draft. I've always been the type to move on to the next thing as quickly as possible, but the next thing for me this time turned out to be...a lot more books in what I've affectionately started calling the Lilyverse. All of the books on my account currently are connected in some way—which I'll explain in a lot of detail in the next (and final) part of this book, so keep on scrolling if you're interested in that.

But writing all of these interconnected stories meant that even as I was moving on to the second and third and fourth books, I still wanted to be proud of what I'd done with the first. And although I was, I knew right away that the first draft of The Search for Lily Myers had a lot of issues that I wanted to eventually fix. Some characters' roles were completely changed (Colton), others were reduced or scrapped to make way for what I thought was more important (sorry, coworker Tom), and I majorly reworked the cause of Lily's disappearance and how that mystery eventually gets resolved. Although the book you've just finished is still far from perfect, in my eyes it is much, much better than that first draft and I can truly say that I'm very proud of it.

There were a lot of moments when I wasn't sure if I would ever even finish this version—I was so nervous about it that I didn't even start posting until I'd already written 40 of the 50 chapters. Even though I had a much stronger idea of where I wanted to take the story this time, it took a lot of careful planning to make sure that I wasn't doing anything to mess up what I'd established as canon in the prequel books.

But now that we're here at the end, I owe a massive thank you to so many people:

♡ to Steph, Phoebs, Thy, Kayla, Jordan, and Cate for keeping me sane on the blue bird throughout this rewrite

♡ to Dana, for being the world's biggest Robert Caruso fan and always making me smile (and sometimes genuinely cackle out loud) with your comments

♡ to anyone and everyone who read the first draft and still decided to come around for another read — I recognize that this is a long book and that you could have spent your time doing something else besides returning to a story that you've already read before. your support means the world to me

♡ and to each and every reader for getting this far and for showing so much love to these characters who I have absolutely adored crafting over the past two and a half years

As for if there will ever be any more Henry and Amelia stories, I don't foresee them being the main protagonists of any more books (I want them to get to live their happily ever after!), but we'll keep hearing about them here and there throughout the other books I've written that take place after this one. I might also have some bonus chapters that I could write, so please let me know if you'd ever be interested in reading one of those!

I compiled some of the questions I've been asked about this book into a Q&A, so please keep on scrolling to the next chapter to read those and to get a sneak peek at what my next project is going to be!

Thank you again and sending you all my love ♡