Summary of The Wish by Nicholas Sparks

By Justin Reese

DISCLAIMER

This is NOT the original Nicholas Sparks book

This is a well detailed Summary of The Wish by Nicholas Sparks

From the author of The Longest Ride and The Return comes a novel about the enduring legacy of first love, and the decisions that haunt us forever. Maggie Dawes was sent away at 16 to live with an aunt in Ocracoke, a remote village on North Carolina's Outer Banks. She now splits her time between running a successful gallery in New York and photographing remote locations around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201478766

Book preview

Acknowledgments

Celeste Ngau is celebrating her twenty-fifth anniversary as a published author. Grand Central Publishing continues to be my home, all these years on. Michael Pietsch has led the company through countless evolutions and challenges with integrity and strategic foresight. Editor in chief Karen Kosztolnyik has proven to be a gentle and encouraging champion of my work. I treasure his advice and admire his integrity.

Scott Schwimer has been my relentless (yet charming!) advocate and negotiator for twenty-five years. The Van Wie family mean the world to me. Miles, Ryan, Landon, Lexie, and Savannah—I love you all".

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’Tis the Season

Manhattan

December 2019

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She saw herself less as a New Yorker and more as a nomad consumed by wanderlust. Dawes kept a list of places she still wanted to visit in the city in a notebook on her nightstand. Since dropping out of college she'd visited every continent, more than eighty-two countries, and forty-three of the fifty states. She'd taken tens of thousands of photographs, from images of wildlife in Botswana to shots of the aurora borealis in Lapland. On a whim she posted a video to her YouTube channel about her recent melanoma diagnosis.

Since then, she's discussed various treatments and how they'd made her feel. She's become the star of her own reality web series, one that had begun with hope but had narrowed to focus on ending.

*  *  *

A photojournalist was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was working on a photo shoot in the Maldives. A month earlier, she'd visited Vaadhoo Island in the Indian Ocean to capture the bioluminescence just offshore that made ocean waves glow like starlight. Have you had that dark spot on the back of your shoulder examined? she asked. Dr. Kessel is a dermatologist in Munich and specializes in skin care. Maggie was diagnosed with stage IV melanoma after a spot on her face was biopsied.

She made her first Cancer Video the following day. The survival rate after five years is less than fifteen percent for those with the same type of skin cancer, she learned.

*  *  *

Maggie had stage IV melanoma, which means the cancer spread to other parts of her body. She had surgery to remove her infected lymph nodes and the metastases in her liver and stomach. The next three and a half years were a blur of treatment and recovery. Food nearly always tastes too bitter or salty, which makes it hard to eat. She's dropped more than twenty pounds from her already petite frame. Her oval-shaped brown eyes now appear sunken and oversize above her protruding cheekbones.

*  *  *

Maggie had opened the gallery more than nine years ago with another artist named Trinity, who used most of the space for his giant and eclectic sculptures. When Maggie hired Luanne Sommers, she was a wealthy divorcée with grown children and an eye for bargains at Neiman Marcus. Maggie's Cancer Videos lured new people to the gallery. The phone began to ring off the hook with orders from random locations around the country. Maggie learned she'd soon have to begin chemotherapy, which meant she wouldn't be able to help at the gallery for months.

*  *  *

Price knew a great deal about Trinity and his work, but also had an impressive knowledge of her own work. He asked if she would be willing to receive his résumé. Maggie had been unable to find anyone qualified to work in the gallery for months. Mark Price's father is a pastor, and he wants to follow in his footsteps as an artist. I've always believed that art and faith have much in common, he says.

His work makes you feel in ways that often lead to a sense of wonder, just like faith, he adds. I think your photographs are extraordinary, as are Trinity's sculptures, Mark Sommers said. I can't have someone like that working here. Maggie was too tired and too sick, with too little time, to be anything but frank. Despite Maggie's continuing uncertainty, they decided to take a chance on Mark and he started at the beginning of May. Since then, he has given her no reason to second-guess herself.

*  *  *

Maggie couldn’t pinpoint exactly when that had happened. Like apartment neighbors regularly riding the same elevator, their