When Come Hither, Falling Ava was still a zombie story, I had this idea that the book would have songs in it. I couldn’t get the story to make sense back then so the songs went with it.

Then the story finally clicked. The 3-act structure started working, the first two chapters came together, and somewhere in the middle of writing chapter two I realized — there needs to be a song here. Not because I planned it. Because the scene demanded it.

The scene is quiet. Ava’s father sits on the porch alone in the dark. Ava watches him through the curtains. Neither of them speaks. But they’re sharing something — the same sorrow, the same love, the same inability to reach each other across a distance that has no name. I needed music for that because words in a sentence weren’t going to be enough.

So I wrote one. I’m not a musician. I don’t write music. I can read very basic notation and that’s being generous. I’ve been taking opera classes for three years so I have a voice and some instinct for melody, and my teacher has agreed to write the notation once I figure out the tune. But right now I’m flying in the dark — humming into the void and hoping something lands.

The song is called Two Blue Hearts. It’s sung from the father’s perspective, about Ava, about the lake, about what he took from her without meaning to.

My daughter I see you wearing my green socks

Alone and hollow you follow my twisted past

My daughter you share my desperate blue heart

Twenty feet deep across my lonely sorrows

Adrifting broken tomorrows

My daughter your heart breaks my sinful sorrow

The wall of separate amidst our stitched paths

Reflections mirrored backwards through our cold dance

My roots search far and deep yet never get the chance

Without

My daughter

You wearing my green socks

I trapped your light, blocked by Baikal’s dream

It starts with a butterfly searching a meadow for a blue flower. She passes green grass, red tulips, frothy dandelions — refuses every one of them — until she lands exhausted on a marigold. She never finds what she was looking for. But she lands somewhere.

I don’t know yet if I’m the butterfly or the blue flower.

I have a writing tutor helping me keep the story’s structure honest and an opera teacher who will eventually turn my humming into something readable. Everyone around me is helping me build something I don’t entirely know how to build.

That feels right for this book.