Her brother and I do.
It will be a lie. I will never give her away, not to anyone. She will always have the center of my heart.
But I can’t see that from here. I only feel that something has already started, as we sit at opposite ends of a twin bed, our knees untouching but angled toward each other. All around us are the shared stories that have formed our lives.
“A story. Let me think. Do you want one you know? Or a new one?” I ask her. I look from picture to picture. I know most of these. I heard them or I lived them.
Hana peeks at me and then away. She shrugs, like she doesn’t care one way or another. But then she says, “Maybe one I don’t know.”
I think about it. “How about one from when I was little?”
“How little?” she asks.
“Very. Much littler than you, so it’s a story that happened a long time ago, but it’s still happening now.” She sparks to the words, the cadence of a ritual we both know. These words remind us that we have budded from the same strange vine. She leans in toward me, a little closer, without even realizing she’s doing it. “It’s the story of how I got my name. If I tell you, will you tell me how you got yours?”
She considers the offer, and then she says, “Tell me.”
A long time ago, right now, I was born, I say to my little sister.
I was born blue.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank you, first, Person Who Bought This Book. Because of you, I have a job I love. Because of you, the people in my head get to live outside of it. When I meet you, you talk about my characters as if they are old friends (or enemies) we have in common; I cannot explain how miraculous this feels. If you are one of those people who have put my books into the hands of other readers—either professionally as a god-called lunatic who loves books so much you hand-sell them or as a reader who picked one for book club or gave it to your best friend for a birthday—well. This book exists because of you. I hope you are happy about this. I am—happy and grateful and a little bit in love with you.
A wise, keen-eyed editor is a gift, so I owe my wonderful agent, Jacques de Spoelberch, an extra thank-you note for connecting me with Carolyn Marino. She is a Book Person down to the bone. I am lucky, lucky, lucky to be with her at William Morrow, where amazing folks like Liate Stehlik, Lynn Grady, Jennifer Hart, Emily Krump, Tavia Kowalchuk, Mary Beth Thomas, Carla Parker, Rachel Levenberg, Tobly McSmith, Kelly Rudolph, Chloe Moffett, and Ashley Marudas have this book’s back.
Three years ago, I started taking classes at Decatur Hot Yoga from the beautiful and excessively bendy Astrid Santana. She often begins class by retelling a classic Hindu god pantheon story, but her sentence structure and word choices and even some images come out of southern oral tradition. It is an odd and compelling blend. Because of Astrid, I started dreaming the stories, and then I began reading them. Paula and Kali intersected in my head, and the novel took a sharp turn east. I gave Astrid’s waterfall of long, dark hair and her smiling, crescent-shaped eyes to the character of Kai—if only Kai were half as kind and generous!
“I AM NEVER WRITING ABOUT YOU PEOPLE AGAIN! And by you people, I mean lawyers,” I wailed to litigator Sally Fox as I struggled with the threads of legal tangle in this book. She combed them out with endless patience over cocktails at Paper Plane, and I came to admire her as a person as well as a professional. She is a doe-eyed redhead, pretty and petite, and she will eat your liver raw on behalf of her clients. She hooked me up with Constancia Davis and Markeith Wilson, a pair of criminal lawyers who helped me plan my characters’ various crimes. Anyone eavesdropping on us at lunch is probably in therapy now.
Social worker Sarah Smith has been working with foster kids for years, and she came through the system when she was a minor. She was an invaluable source of information and ideas; I am grateful for her time and expertise, and I sleep a little better, knowing that some of the foster kids here in Atlanta have such a loving, warmhearted, courageous advocate on their side.
Sarah and all three lawyers know their stuff—any stupid mistakes are mine.
My community of writers makes me better and braver. I love them, even when they viciously make me cut a thousand precious, special-snowflake words. Especially then, actually. I list them in the order that I met them: Lydia “Knit, Ride, Dog” Netzer, Jill “the Medicine” James, Anna Schachner, either Sara Gruen and Karen Abbott or Karen Abbott and Sara Gruen (depending on who is telling that story), Caryn Karmatz Rudy, Reid Jensen, Alison Law, and the Reverend Doctor Jake Myers.