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Chapters (54)
  1. Cover
  2. Colophon
  3. ALSO BY RICHARD PAUL EVANS
  4. Title Page
  5. Copyright
  6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  7. Dedication
  8. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  9. Epigraph
  10. Grace
  11. THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL
  12. CHAPTER One
  13. CHAPTER Two
  14. CHAPTER Three
  15. CHAPTER Four
  16. CHAPTER Five
  17. CHAPTER Six
  18. CHAPTER Seven
  19. CHAPTER Eight
  20. CHAPTER Nine
  21. CHAPTER Ten
  22. CHAPTER Eleven
  23. CHAPTER Twelve
  24. CHAPTER Thirteen
  25. CHAPTER Fourteen
  26. CHAPTER Fifteen
  27. CHAPTER Sixteen
  28. CHAPTER Seventeen
  29. CHAPTER Eighteen
  30. CHAPTER Nineteen
  31. CHAPTER Twenty
  32. CHAPTER Twenty-one
  33. CHAPTER Twenty-two
  34. CHAPTER Twenty-three
  35. CHAPTER Twenty-four
  36. CHAPTER Twenty-five
  37. CHAPTER Twenty-six
  38. CHAPTER Twenty-seven
  39. CHAPTER Twenty-eight
  40. CHAPTER Twenty-nine
  41. CHAPTER Thirty
  42. CHAPTER Thirty-one
  43. CHAPTER Thirty-two
  44. CHAPTER Thirty-three
  45. CHAPTER Thirty-four
  46. CHAPTER Thirty-five
  47. CHAPTER Thirty-six
  48. CHAPTER Thirty-seven
  49. CHAPTER Thirty-eight
  50. CHAPTER Thirty-nine
  51. EPILOGUE
  52. A LETTER FROM RICHARD PAUL EVANS
  53. JOIN THE RICHARD PAUL EVANS MAILING LIST, GET A FREE GIFT AND HELP A CHILD
  54. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Who was she? She was my first love. My first kiss. She was a little match girl who could see the future in the flame of a candle. She was a runaway who taught me more about life than anyone has before or since. And when she was gone my innocence left with her.

There is pain in bringing out these memories. I suppose I don’t really know why I feel compelled to write at this time, only that I am. Maybe I want those closest to me to finally know what has driven me for all these years. Why, every Christmas, I occasionally slip away into my thoughts to someplace else. Or maybe it’s just that I still love her and wonder, after all this time, if I can still find grace.

CHAPTER Two

To choose the path is to choose the destination.
But sometimes it seems that the path is under our feet
even before we know we’re walking.

GRACE’S DIARY

My story began in October of 1962 about ten days before the world was supposed to end. I think the Cuban Missile Crisis brought us as close as we’ve ever come as a species to extinction.

Even without the imminent threat of global destruction, the holidays looked pretty grim for my family. In November of that year my mom told us it would be a “Dickens Christmas,” and she didn’t mean the festive kind with merry carolers wassailing in nineteenth-century attire. She meant the real Dickensian landscape of debtor prisons and want.

My family—me, my parents, and my ten-year-old brother, Joel—had just moved from a palm-tree-lined suburb of Los Angeles to a blighted neighborhood in south Salt Lake City, just a few blocks from State Street with its nightclubs, bars, and pawnshops. My father, a construction worker, had contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome, a serious disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks parts of the nervous system. It started with weakness in his legs and for several months he was paralyzed from the neck down; the doctors said that if it got any worse he’d have to be put on a respirator to breathe. Fortunately, it never progressed that far. The good news, they said, was that he would likely make a full recovery, at least physically. Our financial situation was a different matter.