Dear Dawsey, Amelia, Isola, Eben, Eli And Kit, Please Forgive Me. That’s First. I Hope You Will Forgive

Dear Dawsey, Amelia, Isola, Eben, Eli and Kit, please forgive me. That’s first. I hope you will forgive me breaking the promise I made not to write about your Society. We had a trust I am profoundly sorry to have betrayed. Secondly, know that this manuscript is yours alone to do with what you will. I will not publish it. That’s not why I wrote it. “Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse, seeking to find the old familiar faces,” Charles Lamb wrote. Without knowing it, I feel I have been searching for the old familiar faces for many years now, and can’t quite account for why I recognise these as yours. But I do. Do you suppose it’s possible for us to already belong to someone before we’ve met them? If so, I belong to you, or you to me, or me simply to the spirit I found among you on Guernsey. That is as good a definition of family as any I know. Thank you for sharing the story of your family with me. And for sharing Elizabeth. Though I did not get to meet her myself, I feel keenly how her life has changed the arc of my own forever, in ways I am only just beginning to discover. I wish you all peace, and hope that if books do have the power to bring people together, this one may work its magic. 

                                                                                            Love, Juliet