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Velvet picked up the phone.
I know what you did.
Click, thel ine went dead.
They could not have been more different: a black television host and a white supremacist in prison, and the death they share in common.
Velvet Lafonn, successful talk show host, lives in endless fear that the world will find out her terrible secret. Dale Atkins, delinquent turned white supremacist, holds the key to Velve’s shocking past as well as her salvation.
A novel for our times, Leave Love Behind is a meditation on role of forgiveness, especially the seemingly unforgiveable. Characters are forced to examine everything they ever thought was true. Leave Love Behind examines our interconnectedness, true redemption, and ultimately what it means to be good.
Leave Love Behind
I wrote and am now introducing Leave Love Behind as a means to promote forgiveness, goodness, and of course, entertainment—and also to encourage reading and writing.
Reading and writing are important for several reasons: One is that in today’s world where the average sentence length in bestsellers has shrunk by a third since the 1930s, and where readership/reading has declined considerably (40% of Britons had not read or listened to any books in 2024) reading literature is important, if not urgent. Why? Because it is tied to intelligent decision-making. We have only to look at politics to see the dumbing down of America, and I believe ignorance, especially combined with arrogance, is our biggest threat.
The main theme of this book is the power of forgiveness, and so perhaps more importantly, I find that today’s world is a world where forgiveness is needed more than ever to bridge divides not only between political parties but perhaps also between races, generations, sexes, or with anyone who we perceive of as different from us, including animals, who are so often exploited.
The title is not pessimistic but rather taken from one of the characters who says, when we leave this earth what matters is the love that we will have left behind.
While this novel is about human interactions and not animals (my usual) I still donate 100% of profits back to the animals and some environmental organizations as well. There are of course many great causes out there, but we cannot donate to them all. Or I cannot. So, I limit my charities to focusing on alleviating suffering for the voiceless, specifically factory-farmed animals and the dangerous, unethical use of animals in testing. I do not believe that man can ultimately achieve peace when perpetuating the large-scale suffering of billions of animals. Or of humans. For charities supported www.kaypfaltz.com/Missionstatement.
Leave Love Behind was written as an intellectual exercise to write from two different narrative points of view as well as from two different sexes and two different races.
Excerpt:
Velvet Lafonn entered her corner office and walked over to the wall of windows. Sunlight hit the steel towers opposite reflecting a high-toned world in contrast to the Gestalt of shadows below. Staring down, she saw small figures—cars, buses, bicycles, humans—that moved in lines on seemingly set paths, yet perhaps with no more direction than a toddler learning her first steps. When she lifted her eyes, the light glinted on the glass panels. She blinked and heard her grandmother’s words: “Always stay in the light, child.”
She gazed out to the city, wishing Grandmother Effie could see her: A once friendless child now beloved by fans spanning the country. A dirt-poor black girl in her midtown office suite on top of the world. Maybe Effie could see her, for the living world can never fathom what the dead know or see.
On most days Velvet found satisfaction in her work. There were also days when she would say she was happy if any real happiness could exist when so much of the world suffered. True peace of mind might have been hers, but for the lingering unease, always just one thought away. She had worked hard with countless therapists to keep feeling at bay but her mind was not always her ally. And now, as if on cue, from thoughts of Effie, time unspooled and her mind jumped, soldering to the one person whose image remained vivid, even after all these years—but of course after all these years.
Her daughter, Sunny.
Velvet turned from the window as if Sunny were hovering ghostlike just beyond the glass. She had just sat down behind her desk when her phone buzzed. She tapped “accept” expecting her assistant, Kali. For a moment there was silence then the five words:
I know what you did.
Click. The line dead.
She frowned at the phone, anxiety beginning yet still unformed. Maybe no more than a mistaken call.
But as the phone buzzed again and she glanced down at the unfamiliar number, fear crept closer. It would not be the first time she would understand how people are forever prisoners of past actions.
“Who is this?” Her voice quivered.
“That’s my business.”
“What do you want?”
“What do you think?”
“Please do not call again.”
Velvet tried to brush it off like all the tabloid stories, stories about her eating binges or her telling some person off, but this was different. Something in the unwavering command of the voice on the other end made her believe that maybe this time the game was up. She shut her eyes and breathed deeply through her nose, but in the darkened space behind her eyelids her daughter’s smiling face shimmered. And in the silence that pervaded, her phone was quiet and no one spoke yet still she heard the voice—maybe no more than the hum of eternal existence, telling her that every deed must have its due, every cause its effect.
Try as she did to shake off the call as nothing, this time something deep within her knew. As she had grown more successful, the inevitability that one day she’d be found out had also grown. And now the call she knew would come had come on an ordinary morning without bells or whistles, without forewarning.