Author’s Note
THIS IS MY pandemic book.
I started this story in the summer of 2020 and finished it in the spring of 2021.
It’s a story I wrote when my real life, like most people’s, was full of worry, and stress, and uncertainty, and fear, and isolation. I always try to find a balance between darkness and light in my stories. For this book? The balance was as much light as possible.
I remember talking with my editor, Jen, about the big plot elements of the story very early on. I wasn’t liking the career I’d given to one of my main characters, Jack. The job he had back then was so dull, I couldn’t even focus when I tried to research it. So Jen said, “Why can’t he be a movie star?” And my first response was, “Isn’t that too fun?”
We talked about it a while and decided: There’s no such thing as too fun.
Especially not that year.
All to say, writing this book got me through 2020.
It was the thing I held on to, the thing I looked forward to, and the thing that helped me make my own sunshine during some very gray times.
It could easily have been a thousand pages long. I loved being with my main characters so much, I would’ve happily added scene after scene of them teasing each other, accidentally snuggling, and giving each other piggyback rides.
The setting of this story is my own beloved grandparents’ Texas cattle ranch. The Stapletons’ house is my grandparents’ place—a rambling farmhouse with a bright kitchen, screen doors that slap closed, and the smell of leather and honeysuckle everywhere. My grandparents are both gone now. The house is still there, but we rent it out, and I haven’t been inside in years. But writing this book let me go back and visit, at least in my head. It let me travel to a place I loved, that I can still see every inch of—and it was such a bittersweet joy to be there.
It really left me thinking about what stories are for.
Because writing this book was more than just fun. It was like a tonic for my weary soul.
There’s a quote I love about writing by Dwight V. Swain: “A story is something you do to a reader.” I’m so grateful for what this particular story did to me. It nourished me in profound ways that I’m not even sure I could’ve asked for.
I always want my stories to be about love, and light, and making sense of hard times, and getting back up after life has knocked us down. I always want them to make us all (me included) laugh and swoon … and give us something wise to hold on to.
That’s never been more true than with The Bodyguard. I thought about it so often during 2020: How much laughter matters. How much hope matters. How much joy matters.
How the right story at just the right time can lift you up in ways that feel like a rescue.
That’s all writers can really ever hope to do for readers: invent stories full of all the magic we’re longing for ourselves. I hope your time on the ranch with The Bodyguard did all the soul-nourishing things for you that it absolutely did for me.
Katherine Center