To Pete Wolverton, Lily Cronig, and the team at St. Martin’s Press. A very special shoutout to the book’s cover artist, Rob Grom, and the designer, Kelly Too, who spent a great deal of time working with me one-on-one to develop the book’s aesthetic. I’m grateful to them for indulging my pedantry, and thrilled with the work they did.

To my audiobook narrators: Stephanie Willis, Abigail Thorn, and Kaveh Taherian. To Steve Wagner, Paul Schuler, and the audiobook team at Macmillan.

To others who gave feedback and support along the way: Kat Lo, Antonella Inserra, Ken “Todd in the Shadows” Munson, Angelina Meehan, and Alex.

* * *

Kaveh Mazandarani was originally two characters, an older recovering alcoholic/mentor figure named Mark and a younger love interest for Cora whose name I can’t even remember (it took me ten minutes of digging through Google Drive to even find it—his name was Reed). Both were basic white guys and neither had much personality. After I wrote half of an unsatisfactory first draft, Mark and Reed got merged into a single character around 2014, and around the same time I also decided that character would be Iranian.

At that point his name was Omid, but something about the shape of that name just didn’t fit, so I decided to name him after this guy I knew from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, a fertile ground from which I’ve poached several character names (including from my classmates Hongsik “Vincent” Park, Satomi Mack, and Sev Ohanian, whose name I had to change to “Ghasabian” after the real Sev went and became a Hollywood famous writer/producer). Kaveh went through several surnames, but it wouldn’t be until Axiom’s End was nearing completion that I finally gave myself permission to name him what I secretly had always wanted to (readers of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera will get it).

Kaveh Taherian was the producer of the advanced documentary project (CTPR 547, for those in the know) that I directed at USC, and by the mid-2010s he was one of those colleagues I saw once a year or so when he happened to be in New York. It’s always awkward telling people you named a character after them, especially in this case where said character is not only the protagonist but a recovering alcoholic who has an affair with a girl fourteen years his junior. That is part of why the conventional wisdom is that you shouldn’t name characters after your friends.