• The Grover book is a real book acquired by the author in the manner described by Clay.
• Clay’s Cabo getaway took place at the Riu resort.
You really do have a choice to make.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When
I have the best readers in the world. Thank you—for your letters, your prayers, your support and encouragement. You are with me each time I sit down to write; you are constantly on my mind.
Thank you to the champions: my agent, Steve Laube, and my editor, Karen Ball. Words are feeble tools; they cannot do my gratitude to either of you justice.
Julie Gwinn, I am so grateful for you. Everyone at B&H, it is a privilege to work with you. Kris and Jeff Beckenbach, Chad Bring, Katie Weaver, Kristin Nelson: thank you for keeping me relevant and (relatively) sane. And thank you: my friends, my sister Amy, my heart-sister Meredith, and Rick, my beloved, for loving me even when I’m not (sane—which is most of the time).
I owe a great debt of gratitude to those who enabled my obsession and made this book possible: Joyce Hart, Jeff Gerke, Karen Lee-Thorp, Reagen Reed, Dan Mueller, Conan Schafer, Peggy Malzacher, Don Hawkins, Greg Stier, Tim Hodges, Scott Boles, Alice Yoon, Angie Bentley, and my parents (all of them).
Thank you most eminently to my God, Elohim, for your relentless pursuit of this girl’s heart.
PROLOGUE
I have seen paradise and ruin. I have known bliss and terror. I have walked with God.
And I know that God made the heart the most fragile and resilient of organs, that a lifetime of joy and pain might be encased in one mortal chamber.
I still recall my first moment of consciousness—an awareness I’ve never seen in the eyes of any of my own children at birth: the sheer ignorance and genius of consciousness, when we know nothing and accept everything.
Of course, the memory of that waking moment is fainter now, like the smell of the soil of that garden, like the leaves of the fig tree in Eden after dawn—dew and leaf green. It fades with that sense of something once tasted on the tip of the tongue, savored now in memory, replaced by the taste of something similar but never quite the same.
His breath a lost sough, the scent of earth and leaf mold that was his sweaty skin has faded too quickly. So like an Eden dawn—dew on fig leaves.
His eyes were blue, my Adam’s.
How I celebrated that color, shrouded now in shriveled eyelids—he who was never intended to have even a wrinkle!
But even as I bend to smooth his cheek, my hair has become a white waterfall upon his Eden—flesh and loins that gave life to so many.
I think for a moment that I hear the One and that he is weeping. It is the first time I have heard him in so long, and my heart cries out: He is dead! My father, my brother, my love!
I envy the earth that envelopes him. I envy the dust that comes of him and my children who sow and eat of it.
This language of Adam’s—the word that meant merely “man” before it was his name—given him by God himself, is now mine. And this is my love song: I will craft these words into the likeness of the man before I, too, return to the earth of Adam’s bosom.
My story has been told in only the barest of terms. It is time you heard it all. It is my testament to the strength of the heart, which has such capacity for joy, such space for sorrow, like a vessel that fills and fills without bursting.
My seasons are nearly as many as a thousand. So now listen, sons, and hear me, daughters. I, Havah, fashioned by God of Adam, say this:
In the beginning, there was God . . .
But for me, there was Adam.
1
A whisper in my ear:
Blue. A sea awash with nothing but a drifting bit of down, flotsam on an invisible current. I closed my eyes. Light illuminated the thin tissues of my eyelids.
A bird trilled. Near my ear: the percussive buzz of an insect. Overhead, tree boughs stirred in the warming air.
I lay on a soft bed of herbs and grass that tickled my cheek, my shoulders, and the arch of my foot, whispering sibilant secrets up to the trees.
