“You have the same face,” the first guard explained. And it turned out we were in fact related through our great-grandfather. That a complete stranger would be so attuned to my features, and that another stranger would be so open to the idea that I was a long-lost cousin, showed me that although Caribbean families may be fractured to this day, there is always the possibility of reconnection—of, as the St. Lucian poet and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott writes, a love that can reassemble our fragments. I hope this sense of possibility, of love, is something readers will take away from this novel.
