The Blog

Every book has a word that arrives before the rest of the story does. For me, it was sorrowroot — a name I had before I knew what the flower looked like, what it meant, or who would be holding it.

I knew two things going in: it needed to be small and unremarkable enough that a girl who'd grown up surrounded by rarer, showier blooms would still call it her favorite. And it needed a use — "for wounds of the heart" — specific enough to mean something the first time it's said, and devastating the second.

The color came last. Pale blue, the kind that shows up in a clear sky or a robin's egg, with petals creased like the pages of a book left open too long. Once I had that image, the rest of the symbol built itself: a flower that looks delicate and is anything but, handed between two people who have every reason not to trust each other.

That's usually how it goes for me. The name shows up first. The meaning catches up once I've spent enough time sitting with it.

Sopatra needed to feel like paradise before it could feel like a cage. That ordering mattered more than almost anything else in the early drafts — if the reader doesn't fall in love with the place first, the moment it turns on its own people doesn't land the way it should.

So I started with what Livia would actually love about it: a library with a stained-glass dome, a garden that responds to her, animals that follow her into bed at night without being called. Soft things. Safe things. The kind of world a protective father builds when he's trying to keep his daughter from ever needing to be brave.

The wrongness had to live underneath all of that, not instead of it. Paradise as a design choice, not an accident — a place built to keep someone from remembering who she really is, dressed up in everything she'd ever want. I didn't want readers to distrust Sopatra. I wanted them to love it exactly as much as Livia does, right up until they understand why that love was never entirely hers to give.

Varick doesn't walk into this story as a monster. The prologue finds him a conflicted warrior just home from a mission that went awry, quietly protective of the vendor boys in the streets, listening to a wind that has always seemed to know things he doesn't. I wanted readers to meet the man before the weapon — because when he finally does the unforgivable thing, it should break something in them, too. His whisper to Livia is "Forgive me." He doesn't get to decide whether she does.

I think the difference between a redemption arc and a free pass comes down to whether the character is allowed to want forgiveness or has to earn it. Varick doesn't get to skip the cost of what he's done just because he starts caring about the person he did it to. He has to sit in that. So does the reader.

That tension — menace that's real, tenderness that's also real, and neither one canceling the other out — is the only kind of villain I'm interested in writing anymore. The scary part isn't that he might hurt her. It's that he might actually deserve her, and what that would cost him to believe. And underneath all of it, the wind keeps whispering. It knows the way — it's sown into the trilogy's name.