First and foremost, I'd like to express my thanks and gratitude for each and every single person who read this far, who gave this story a chance. This was a fun story to write, and I hope it was also a delightful story to read.
Also I am sorry for the deception.
I guess it slowly became clear that Eli was never intended to be the main protagonist despite many things suggesting that he is at the beginning. It has always been Ari, and I was hoping that the hints I placed about his secret would allow for a slightly different and clearer experience for anyone who decided to reread this.
Nobody is perfect in this book, and that, too, was intentional. But people learn and grow from their mistakes even when they remain flawed. Ari's abuse left him with some subtle traumas that never really went away, and I hope I depicted that convincingly. It was one of my many worries about his character.
And Constantine was never the crazy villain I made him seem to be. I thought it was fun to make him the one person who actually had a brain intact. It was people and their assumptions that gave Ari a hard time – but mostly his mother.
Also let's not forget that Cassie was the one person who came the closest to killing Constantine in this whole story by almost drowning him as kids. Beautiful.
I hope the ending was to your liking and I hope it was satisfying. Thank you again for reading this.
- Ria.