“Of course,” he replied, a flicker of something bittersweet crossing his eyes.
“What about you?” asked Mo. “Aren’t you going to make that call?”
“Nobody knows I’m here, Mo. Not Anna, and not Scholastica. It’s better that way. I don’t want them to live with the shame of knowing what I’ve done. I don’t want that to be my legacy to my daughter. It’s ironic. I did it all for Scholastica, so I could keep her safe, so I could give her the life she deserves. And now she’s going to grow up without me. If she grows up.” His eyes welled up.
“Shhh. You’re a good dad. And you’ve done a lot for other people’s children too. You’ve risked your own life to get them to safety sometimes. Someone will step up. Someone will make sure Scholastica is looked after.”
“Daddy?” Lily stared at the phone. “He’s not saying anything.” She handed the phone back to Gabriel.
“Maybe he got cut off. Let’s try again.” Gabriel pretended to dial Jack again. “It’s ringing now. Here you go.”
As Lily bent her head over the phone, it was impossible to ignore the sound of the approaching car.
“When?” Mo asked Gabriel.
“I don’t know.”
Mo gave him a slow, wistful smile. “Let’s save one more?”
Gabriel stared at her for a few still beats. “Let’s.”
They cocooned Lily between their bodies, knowing that the blast would destroy everything within its radius. But maybe, just maybe, they could take the brunt of it for Lily.
As the car sped up the ramp, Mo and Gabriel caught a brief glimpse of John Lazaro in the back seat. They braced themselves, forehead to forehead, arms around each other, shielding Lily in the middle.
“Daddy?” said Lily. Her face was all lit up as she spoke into the phone. “I’m in the safe place now.”
WHERE DO STORIES come from? How do they form and flow and find their way into our world? How do we take sparks of inspiration and bind them between the covers of a book, project them onto the big screen, or transform them into the notes of our favorite song? The creative process is a magical thing that lets us take thoughts, ideas, and feelings—those ethereal, intangible pieces—and condense them into reality. I cannot begin to explain how it works because it’s different for every one, every time, but I can take you behind the scenes and show you the events, people, and circumstances that inspired this book.
After I finished my last novel, The Paper Swan, I knew two things. One, that my next book would be set in Africa. Two, that it would be a love story. I let it go and waited for that spark, that rush, that knowing, that sets you sailing on a new adventure.
A few weeks later, I had dinner with Dr. Nasmo1*, who had just returned from Tanzania. Dr. Nasmo is an optometrist who was born in Tanzania but lives in the U.S. As a child, he suffered from poor eyesight, a condition that went uncorrected until a volunteer mission came to his village and fitted him with glasses. So impactful was this gift of sight, that he based his career around it. He now makes annual trips to Tanzania to help prevent blindness and vision impairment by providing free eye exams and glasses in rural areas. He is an inspirational figure, and I always look forward to the times when our paths cross.
On this particular trip, Dr. Nasmo had visited an orphanage for children with albinism. Tanzania has one of the highest concentrations of albinos in the world. People with albinism lack pigment and usually have a number of eye conditions, including poor vision and sensitivity to light. Ninety-nine percent of the kids that Dr. Nasmo examined at the orphanage needed vision correction. As we flipped through the photos from his trip, he showed me a video of an albino girl playing with a piece of string. She dropped it and attempted to pick it up several times, but failed, because she couldn’t find it.
Vision is not the only issue that children with albinism struggle with in parts of Africa. Thought to have magical powers, their body parts are bought and sold for thousands of dollars on the black market, for use in potions said to bring wealth and good luck.
I could not sleep that night. The powerful images I had seen kept flashing before my eyes. I recalled a similar night, when a friend had sent me a news article on the Westgate Mall attack, also in East Africa, where I lived for many years. Somehow the two events got linked in my head. When I got out of bed the next morning, something had crystallized from all the bits and pieces that had been circling my mind. Although the circumstances around the tragic Westgate Mall incident were vastly different from the fictional Kilimani Mall attack, a story had started to form.
It was not a story I wanted to tell. It felt too big and too real, and I didn’t know if I could do it any justice, so I stored it away. But it kept knocking and knocking until I opened the door and let it in.
Aside from the conception of the story, the following pieces of truth have been woven into the fiction:
- The villages on Mo’s sticky notes are named after real victims of albino attacks.
- Amosha is a fictional place, derived from the towns of Arusha and Moshi, in the Kilimanjaro region.
- Josephine Montati’s name is inspired by a woman who started a non-profit organization to help children from crisis zones get custom prostheses for missing limbs.
- The illegal rubber duck race in the Cotswolds is not fiction.
- John Lazaro is named after two albino contract killers in Tanzania.
- Scholastica is the name of one of the children in Dr. Nasmo’s notes from the albino orphanage.