So, I am in the thick of “Remember the Nightingale” and, really, just want to chat about the story overall. I’ve struggled to get through even happy chapters … because I know what’s coming, and I’m just a bit worried about what it’s going to do to my feelings towards one of my protagonists.

I’ll give just a brief rundown of the story: it is based on Rwanda genocide of 1994. The research for this book has been horrendous and left me with all kinds of disturbing nightmares. The trauma that these people endured in a mere 100 days is mind-boggling. The river was their water source… but they couldn’t use it for two years because it was tainted by all the dead bodies being thrown in it. Reconciliation villages. Rape used as a weapon of war (250,000 reported rapes). Machetes. Stuff straight out of a horror film actually happened. Who needs Stephen King’s imagination when there’s real life stuff like this?

In my book, we have Gaeton and Evariste. Lovebirds. Gaeton is three years older than Evariste and has always loved her. He’s an engineer of sorts: he likes to build things, provide the practical things needed to give birth to dreams. In essence, he’s Evariste’s dream maker.

Do you remember the first time you fell in love with someone?

I do.

I remember it clear as day cause, for all that’s holy, I never believed I was capable of it. I’d had one other boyfriend (unless you count Aaron, the sweetest fifth grader ever to walk Earth who asked me if I’d “go with” him, and then held my hand on the playground every day. Really wish I could remember that boy’s last name). That very first boyfriend didn’t last but a few weeks because, when he tried to kiss me, I promptly freaked out. No, thank you. Unfortunately for him, my father had only been in jail for, like, two years by this point. I was nowhere near ready.

Or… so I thought.

After freaking out, that very first boyfriend wasted no time in having an “affair” with someone more normal. When he told me about it, I panicked. I’d grown in a house where affairs were the catalyst for some serious fights. No, no, no thank you. So, that whole experience doesn’t really count because there was no part of me invested. In hindsight, I went on that first date because I was trying to prove to myself I was “normal” even though I knew very well I was not.

Climbing back out of the rabbit hole, it wasn’t too much longer after that that I met someone in whom I was very invested. People talk about a spark… I felt that. The entire world disappeared. I still panicked. Panic tinged with all the butterflies in the world.

My biggest problem, though? I had enough walls to wrap around China that ultimately got in my own way… but what I’d felt during those few months was real. Enough that I felt physically safe even when things were heated. Enough that it impacted my life. Enough that I didn’t forget it. Enough that it convinced me that, whether I ever knew it or not, true love was a real thing …. and intimacy didn’t have to be terrifying.

What Gaeton and Evariste have in my story is stronger than even that… because they are true soulmates. Although Gaeton has trauma in his past – his father and brother were murdered in the Tutsi revolt of 1990 – Evariste does not. She comes from a loving home… and she’s always had Gaeton watching her back for her. The fact that he’s a Hutu and she’s a Tutsi is totally irrelevant: the world knows they will marry when she is old enough.

They hear a tragic story that ultimately ends with a nightingale acting as the protector for a beautiful, voiceless woman. The nightingale’s song is capable of both powerful comfort and fierce attacks.

Until.

War breaks out. Gaeton has harbored a deep-seated anger towards the people who murdered his father and brother. He almost died that night, too: someone took a machete and scarred up his chest. He has some lingering to-do list that he hasn’t acknowledged to anyone. Until a President’s plane is shot down and, suddenly, he’s being encouraged to hunt down any Tutsi he so chooses and exact whatever kind of revenge he feels like. To Gaeton, it’s justice. He’s not trying to kill any Tutsi or all Tutsi; he just wants the ones responsible for his trauma, the ones who walk in his nightmare, to pay.

The problem is that, in order to do this, he joins one of the Hutu militia. The militia were given lists with the names of Tutsi, and they were instructed to kill everyone on their list. If they were part of your family–so sad, so sorry, but they were Tutsi, so they had to go. Suddenly, Gaeton finds himself in an impossible situation: he’s a member of the militia standing at Evariste’s hut. He walks in, hoping to find the family hiding in the woods, but sees instead the men ready to rape and decapitate his soulmate. The girl he’s loved since she was born. The girl he’s sworn to protect.

In that moment, Gaeton makes a desperate choice that forever alters both their lives. In an attempt to save Evariste’s life, Gaeton sacrifices her younger sister. The bond severed, the book follows their path to healing, and asks questions about what it means to forgive, what does forgiveness not mean, what does it look like?

…

Listen, the excerpt below is unlike the ones I usually post. Romance is a part of several of my books (Me, Sing Me Home, The Storyteller) but it’s not there just to be romance. It’s there for a lot of reasons. The truth is: my inability to separate rape from healthy intimacy has cost me dearly. One of the (many) things survivors of rape have to do in order to truly heal is first recognize that it’s not always violent and the person they love doesn’t want the same thing that their rapist did (writing that sentence made me tear up). Intimacy has the power to destroy parts of you, but it also has the ability to empower you, to give you wings, to make you see that you’re not “dirty.” It has the ability to uplift you as easily as it can tear you down. So, it’s in some of my books because I don’t want to a superficial healing for my characters: I want real healing. I want to talk about the things that others can’t talk about because secrets and silence … those are the doors to our cages.

In this scene, Evariste has never been hurt… and so she’s unlike any of my female characters right now: young, free, unhindered by complicated ideas of shame or unworthiness. All she knows is that she loves Gaeton — and it shows. I wish I would ever be able to initiate something or to actually ask: the trust that that shows is just…. for a survivor of rape like me, the trust it takes to just simply ask “one more?” is wild. I’ve only felt that physically safe during one unique period in my life. Sadly, though, the Rwanda genocide will change Evariste into someone I more easily recognize: a survivor. My hope is that she can come full circle and see that true love is stronger than evil.

**

Chapter Eight

“The best part of Rwanda is her hills,” Evariste says, spinning on one leg, stretching her arms out beside her. “Last night, I dreamed I danced over all of them. Well, actually, I leaped over some, twirled across a few, and–” she arches onto her toes and spins, “–danced like a ballerina over the rest.” Her smile, brighter than a thousand suns, makes her dark eyes sparkle. It morphs into a girlish giggle as she dramatically bends, grabs Gaeton’s wrist and tugs.

A crooked grin pulls at the corner of his lips as he shakes his head. “You’re the dancer, not me.”

“Oh, come on,” she releases his wrist and spins again, holding her arms out wide. “Who is around to see you but me?”

“Right,” he teases. “No one but the greatest future dance teacher in all of Rwanda is around to see me.”

She giggles again, rolling her eyes. Suddenly, her mouth widens into a surprised, “oh!” and she clasps her hands behind her back, swaying from side to side. “You’re forgetting something, Gaeton. Something very, very important.”

“I am?”

“Yes. Dancing with me means you’d have to…” she moves her shoulders up and down and says, “hold me around the waist.” She widens her eyes, juts her chin out, and claps her fingers over her lips. “Just think of the scandal, Gaeton. It’s Mamree-worthy.”

He chuckles.

“But I won’t say anything if you won’t,” she sings. Then she holds out her fingers for his again.

Sighing heavily, he mutters, “The things I do for you,” and unwinds his legs. Standing, he towers over her. Sliding his arm around her waist, he urges her a step closer before his feet start to move. He makes a mockery of his earlier reluctance, confidently gliding her around the field of tall grass and flowers until she runs out of oxygen. Laughing, she gently pushes away, falling to the soft, cool grass. Gaeton follows her, leaning back and closing his eyes.

In comfortable silence, they listen to the cicadas, and each other’s breathing, until Evariste rolls her head towards him to find his dark chocolate gaze watching her. “Well?” she asks, arching her brows.

“Well, what?”

“Was the… you know… getting to hold me worth having to do something as childish as dance?” She’s teasing, but he doesn’t smile. Instead, he rolls to his side, towards her. He uses his knuckles to brush the side of her caramel skin. “Truth?” he asks. A hint of concern sneaks into the depths of her speckled eyes, but she nods, bravely smiling. “Of course. Always.”

His mouth opens as if to respond, then closes. Finally, he pushes himself up onto his elbow and leans towards her. Evariste feels the softness of his lips on hers and moves her fingers to his cheeks. She expects him to pull away as he usually does; he’s never pushed for more. Instead, she feels his fingers slide from her face down her neck to her shoulder and then to her arm. He grips her arm and tugs while simultaneously inching himself closer.

Nervousness makes her pull her mouth from beneath his.

“Gaeton…”

He drops his lips to hers again, sliding his fingers back up her arm to her neck. When the pressure increases, when she feels the edge of his tongue tracing her closed lips, her fingers steal around his neck. He moves even closer; the pressure subtly grows.

“Do you trust me?” he whispers softly, moving his mouth from hers and trailing soft kisses to her ear.

Her head jerks forward. “Yes.”

“Then open your mouth, Lucie,” he whispers, moving his lips back to hers. Evariste’s heart races until she thinks it’s going to burst out of her chest. Excitement and nervousness and fear collide but, stronger than any of these, is tenderness. It’s the nickname that does it, she later decides. It’s the reminder that he sees her as a light. Her mouth parts just enough for him to steal inside, sending shockwaves through Evariste. When she moans and turns into his arms, Gaeton pulls her closer, until she’s lying beneath him. The kiss turns wild when she mimics him, pulling his head closer.

It isn’t until he feels her fingers slip beneath the collar of his shirt to graze his skin that he pulls his head away from her. “Sweetheart,” he swallows, trying to get his heartrate under control.

“You-you don’t want me to touch-“

He drops his head again, his mouth opening against hers with such passion she moans, her tongue dancing with his. He uses his nose to nudge her head up so he can trail kisses down the underside of her chin to her neck. He groans, his fingers gripping her hips. When her hand disappears into his shirt, touching his bare shoulder and then the back of his neck, he finds her lips again.

By the time he pulls his head up, the loss of his kiss makes her lift herself up towards him, her hand simultaneously tugging his neck down. He chuckles, moving his face out of her reach.

“One more?” she tries to inject teasing into her tone, but her voice shakes with blatant longing that tests Gaeton’s control. Taking a deep, unsteady breath, he whispers, “one more,” and lowers his mouth to hers again. Instead of the fiery passion he’d shown her moments earlier, this kiss is soft and light. It both frustrates and grounds her. When he lifts his head this time, his hands change from firmly gripping her close to tenderly adding distance between them.

She’s not sure what happened to the earth moments ago; she only knows it disappeared. She’s not sure what happened to the nighttime noises: she hadn’t heard them while he kissed her, but she slowly becomes aware again of them. The whispering of the wind through the grass, the chirping of the cicadas in the trees, and the sound of her own rapid breathing brings her back.

If anyone had seen them…

She gasps. She put her hand beneath the collar of his shirt; she touched his bare skin even when he questioned it. She asked him for another kiss. Heat stains her cheeks; her belly flops. But the saltiness of his mouth, of his tongue… she covers her face with her hands.

“We… that… I…” she exhales, sitting up. She touches the edge of her lips and shakes her head. “We… if anyone had seen… that… What was that, anyway? I think that was more than a kiss. Wasn’t it? Cause I’m pretty sure the whole world disappeared, Gaeton.”

“Evariste.” Amusement hugs his voice, but it’s the tenderness of his tone that sends shockwaves through her. Gently, he uses his fingers to brush her face. “To touch you in any way at all … forget dancing, I’d climb a thousand mountains for that.”

Her shoulders slump, and a small smile curls her mouth. She pulls the edge of her bottom lip between her teeth and scrunches her nose. Suddenly, she giggles, her face lighting up and, without warning, leans over and wraps her arms around his neck, pushing him backwards. He laughs, hugging her back. “Seriously, Evariste, who needs the Sun when there’s you?”

*** ***

“You’ve really thought this through,” Gaeton eyes the cave’s supplies. Mamree may only be ten-years-old, but she’s stockpiled plenty of the necessities: food, water, and enough of it to last several days. She shows him the large rock she rolls in front of the cave’s entrance to keep animals away. Proudly, she says, “Watch, Gaeton. If someone’s chasing me through the woods, I don’t want them to follow me, so I can use a big eucalyptus leaf to dust over my tracks!” She demonstrates, sweeping nature back into place after her steps.

“That’s important. We’ll work on learning how to build a fire now. Before we do, though, we gotta talk about the ground rules. One, if you really are hiding, building a fire will give away your location. People will see the fire and know where you’re at.”

Her young eyes grow darker. Without hair, Mamree’s emotions are on full view. Her thin eyebrows knit together and she tips her head. “But it gets really cold at night. I’ve tried to stay out here most of the night, to sleep out here, but it gets too cold.”

He nods. “It does get cold. You just have to wait until you think it’s safe. When they aren’t following you anymore cause the smoke will tell them exactly where you’re at.” He frowns. “I’ll work on finding something for you to keep here that can help you stay warm if it’s dark and not safe to light a fire.”

“Okay.”

He looks around the cave again, then sits on the ground. “Go outside and find some kindling. It needs to be thin pieces of wood, not big ones. Thin pieces and we need something else, like cardboard. I can probably snag a box from the village to get the cardboard. Bark will work for now. The important thing is that it needs to be dry. If it’s wet, it either won’t work at all or will take a really long time. The drier, the better.”

She nods and disappears outside.

Gaeton looks around again, ideas competing against each other. She would need a light source. She’d need a —

“Will this work?” Mamree comes back, holding a handful of grass, small pieces of bark she’d pulled from a fallen tree and twigs. “Yes, that’s good, Mamree. Okay, let’s sit outside. Rule number two: you can’t start a fire inside the cave.”

“Oh, I know that, silly, I’m not stupid.”

He smiles. “I didn’t think you were. I figured you knew it but thought I’d better just say it to make sure. Fires have to be outside cause otherwise the smoke will make you choke to death. We gotta find rocks,” he looks around him on the ground.

“The creek!” Mamree offers, proud to have a solution.

“I almost died once,” Mamree says matter-of-factly. “It wasn’t cause of the Hutus or anything, but I did. I almost died. Evariste never left my side, that’s what Ema’ma says.”

“It’s true, she didn’t. Evariste loves you very much.”

“She loves you too.”

Gaeton smiles briefly.

“I don’t remember almost dying.”

“You were very young.”

“Have you ever almost died?”

Gaeton’s head lifts. The scar on his chest flashes through his mind. “Yes,” he says simply.

“Were you too young to remember?”

“No.”

“What was it like?”

“Almost dying?”

“Yes. What was it like? Did it hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Did you cry?”

A brief silence. Images of a machete ripping his skin burst through his memory. “I didn’t cry. But I screamed.”

Mamree flinches. She frowns, looking down at the ground. She steps into the cold creek, grabbing a sturdy stick to help her walk along the rocks.

“You’re not going to die, Mamree.”

She sighs heavily. “Every day, they do it.”

“Every day who does what?”

“Whenever we walk to the village, those same boys… they walk so close to Evariste and me. Evariste tells me to go home, so I do. I run cause I don’t want them to walk that close to me. But one time, I didn’t. I didn’t go. She told me to, but I didn’t. I stayed.” She bent down, picked a rock up, turned it over and threw it down.

“The rocks should be dry, Mamree, not wet.” Gaeton says. “What do the boys do?”

“The time I didn’t go home, they threw rocks at her.”

Gaeton stops, anger bubbling in his gut. “They threw rocks at Evariste?”

“Small ones.”

Silence.

“The tall one, the one with the hair, he says he can’t wait until he kills her. He tells her … how, you know.”

“How he’s going to kill her?”

“Yes.”

Gaeton swallows the fury that races through his blood. “And how does he say he’s going to do that?”

She shrugs. “He says he’ll slice her open like a sandwich. He made a cutting motion, like this,” she draws a line from her throat down to her belly. Pursing his lips, Gaeton tries to suck in air. “What does Evariste say when this happens?”

Mamree frowns. “Nothing. I mean, sometimes she tells me they’re joking. They’re just boys, that’s what she tells me. But, I don’t believe her, cause one of them says we killed his family and that’s why he wants to kill her.”

Silence.

“We didn’t hurt his family.”

Silence.

“Anyway,” she shrugs. “I hope I don’t have to use the cave. But what if he comes to get Evariste and can’t find her? Or maybe he also kills me cause I’m part of the family. If he’s mad at us cause we hurt his family, wouldn’t he want to hurt me too?”

Silence.

“He says his daddy been talking about joining the good side; he said they’re gonna go kill all the Tutsi and he can’t wait. He say they be joining the militia soon.”

It feels like a long time before Gaeton holds out his palm, showing off two rocks. “Come on, these are good.”

Hours pass as Gaeton teaches Mamree how to start a fire. When her first sparks leap, she screeches in joy. As they roll the big stone in front of the cave’s entrance, Gaeton says, “I thought of something.”

“What?”

“I know you don’t want anyone to know about this cave. Not Ema’ma or Papi. Right?”

She nods.

“But… I’m just thinking here… what if something happened and they needed to find a safe place to go? Should we come up with a way to help them find the cave? Something small that they could look for but that anyone else would miss?”

She frows. “You mean like a code?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“I was just going to tell them to look for the big mound by the creek.”