We went to dinner with friends the other night and one of them asked, "how does it feel to be with someone who will be there for you for the rest of your life?" I had to take a pause from sipping my craft cocktail before I answered because I never really thought of that. Here we were, two couples out for a delicious dinner and then it hit me. We were not going to a club, we weren't going to a party, we were all out with our husbands sharing laughs, stories and great food. I never thought of marriage as something that was even remotely in the cards for me, and to have the question about the rest of my life was a new experience. There was only one response - it felt comforting. It was a surprising chapter I never saw coming.

New chapters are always a mystery. Characters that were in the prior pages are suddenly written out. Sometimes the reasons are easy to see from the adventures that were read, and sometimes, they are a twist that the reader never saw coming. You can examine the words to find what clues you may have missed, you can re-read your favorite passages and hope you can find the explanation, but in the end, like any good book, there are so many more pages to be discovered that you move on - chapter by chapter, adventure by adventure. Like all the Agatha Christie books I read when I was younger, clues were there, sometimes hidden by the actions of the other characters or by the red herrings that disguised actions that no one should have missed. But, every mystery ended with the situation solved and the characters moving forward - and the reader picking up the next book in Agatha's long line of published works.

So, the answer to that question from me was simple. Turning the pages will never not be exciting, to read what's ahead will still be full of surprises, but the main characters will continue to evolve and take their places in adventures to come. Pages will be written that are unexpected, but those characters in the story will keep each other warm on cold nights in front of the fire. And, in the end, it's my story to write but never again a story to write alone.