Release Day!

I shouldn’t tell you this. A person ought to have their secrets—their tiny little oddities, their own delicate box of hurt or passion, which they open only when they’re alone. 

I open mine late at night. 

When everyone is somewhere else. When the farmhouse, hidden in mountains and deep blue shadows, is especially still. When moonlight filters through the curtains, and the smell of whatever I cooked for supper wafts like perfume in the air. 

Usually, I decide at once. In my warm nightgown, I rush downstairs, turn on the old lamp with a click, and pull that same worn book from the shelf. The Best Loved Poems of the American People. I think I found it once in one of Granny’s upstairs bookshelves. The pages are brown with age. Some loose. Some bent. And if I’m not careful, the little red feather or dried flowers might slip free and flutter to the floor, as they’ve done a hundred times before. 

Then I nestle into my rocking chair. 

I read like the world was ending. Like I was the sobbing breath of a preacher, crying over the grave of someone he loved. Or the whisper of a maiden—that breathless, priceless whisper—as she splays her fingers over her chest and sighs over her first kiss. How silent the farmhouse always is. It’s so quiet you can hear everything. 

The dog howling outside.

A tractor rumbling down the road. 

The wind against the panes.

But when I read, when I breathe the poems out loud like that…well, everything dissipates. I get tangled in the words. I feel them. They touch parts of me, and understand depths of me, that no one else can reach. 

And then I cry. 

I always cry.

Why? What is that, anyway? That feeling? Maybe it’s melancholy nonsense. Maybe it’s sentimentality. Maybe it’s loneliness. Or maybe it’s one of the million things in life that is just achingly…well, tender.

Tenderly Betrayed, my new novel, is like that. I can’t explain how, really. 

No more than I can explain why reading hundred-year-old poetry feels so soft. But the book, like the poems, reaches inside me. It has a gentle touch. It explores, burns, hums, flickers. The pages flutter with everything from warm baked apples, and hair that smells like lavender, and fingers that graze bashfully against fingers, and carriages that roll away, and a plate that still waits for you at the kitchen table, even late at night. The story is what you hate about life. But it’s what you love about life too. 

And somehow, like the dusty book of poetry I read at night… 

It’s tender.