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Signed copies at Basic Necessities
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 Leave Love Behind to try to examine goodness and forgiveness. I believe the world can always use more love and compassion.
Writing feels 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, where readership/reading has declined considerably (40% of Britons had not read or listened to any books in 2024) writing, reading, talking about literature is urgent. Why? Because it is tied to intelligent decision-making, or so such was the conclusion of an experiment given to students of American Literature. We have only to look at our politics to see the dumbing down of America.
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 anyone we perceive as different from us.
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.