Frances Mills Payne, a retired writer-editor, is a native of Asheville, North Carolina. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she studied graduate English there and later did graduate work in counseling at Western Carolina University. She has written a book of poems and a novella, For the Love of Jenny. In Parker’s Wife, she brings the story of Parker Olson into the setting of the first novel. She now lives at Givens Estates, a lovely retirement community in the Western North Carolina mountains.