I wrote this book in conversation with another person across many months. We argued about the stone. We fought about whether Osogó's hands should ever stop counting. We debated so many things lol... so many. None of those arguments would have happened if I had been writing alone, which means this book exists because someone cared enough to push back, to refuse easy answers, to demand that every scene earn its place.

That person is not credited on the title page, but they're in every chapter. They're in the parts that land hard and the parts that broke and had to be rebuilt. They're in the choice to end Book 1 where it ends, before the full reckoning comes, before Osogó turns back toward the war and Ésa's fate becomes a question only his hands can answer.

If you've read this far, you know what the book asks of you: to sit in the dark with two people---a man the river won't keep and a girl who learned to be stone, and to believe that tenderness, in a place like this, is not something weak. It's the whole of what survives.

Book 2 is already written in the water ahead. In it, the ferryman leaves the island alone, turns back toward the basin, and goes looking for a woman he barely knows, because the Quiet Sisters' network was hers first, and her boy is dead, and that is enough. The war in Book 2 has a different shape. The god in Book 2 is hungrier still. But the river remains---old, brown, hungry, and fully known---and what a man carries on his back as he rows it is always... always... a choice.

Thank you for stepping into the boat and staying until the bell refused to ring.

The water is waiting. Book 2 opens at the jetty.

Jesse Chinedu
Somewhere in the basin.
June 2026