Relief suddenly washed all the tension out of her expression. “You don’t have any idea what I’m playing, do you?”
“Not one tiny clue.”
She groaned and pushed at his shoulder. “Come on, LJ, the wedding march?”
“The—” He froze, his eyes flying up to hers.
She slid off the bench, the guitar bumping the floor as she knelt before him, taking both his hands. “Lyndon Johnson Delisle, I want you to be my husband.”
He swallowed, but his voice still came out scratchy, just barely above a whisper. “Now, why’d you have to say something so pretty and mess it up with my big ugly name?”
She squeezed his hands. “LJ, you don’t have to make a joke. If you don’t want to get married, you just say so, and we’ll figure something else out, okay?”
He shook his head and swallowed, but this time it didn’t do a bit of good. He just had to nod. Fast, two or three times so she couldn’t mistake how much he wanted to be married to her.
He ducked his head and pressed her hands to the back of his suddenly hot neck, holding his hands hard over hers to hide their shaking.
He wanted to pull every dollar out of his bank account and lay them at her feet so she’d know the secret he’d been keeping. He’d been saving for months, but he didn’t have half enough for a ring worthy of her. He wasn’t about to ask until he did.
Her thumbs made a slow, soothing sweep over the back of his neck. “If you’re this upset about the proposal, you’re going to be flat on your back after the next surprise. It’s . . . a little weird.”
He swiped his face against the shoulder of his shirt before he lifted his head and mustered a shaky grin. “Sweetheart, if you want to be on top after saying something like that to me, you surely can be.”
“There he is,” she whispered, and leaned in for a kiss. “Thought I scared you into a heart attack.” She set aside the guitar. “Don’t be mad, okay?”
“Way I feel now, I’m not sure I could work up to a good mad before next Christmas.” His whole body was surging with waves of heat and electricity. Andra Lawler was going to be his wife. She hadn’t been scared off by all the hardships of blending two very separate lives together, and now she wanted to make it permanent. Hell, she wanted it enough she couldn’t even wait for him to save up for her ring.
“Okay, well, brace yourself.” She opened the hinged top of the piano bench. “Ty would only loan me the guitar on one condition. That if you said yes, you’d wear this when you returned the instrument.”
Out of the piano bench, she pulled a filmy little veil, its tiara studded all the way around with tiny plastic penises, punching triumphantly toward the sky.
LJ stared at it. “You drive a hard bargain, Andie-girl.”
She bit her lip. “I could maybe tell him I lost it . . .”
“Not a chance in hell.” He stuffed the penis tiara onto his head, the veil tickling his neck, and pulled her up to standing. “Everybody in the neighborhood is about to know you’re marrying me. And wearing this thing, nobody is ever going to forget it.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book took a lot of help from a lot of people. All my thanks to the following folks:
To Naomi Davis, for being a stellar agent and fighting fiercely for all my books. This book is only on shelves today because you believed in it and put all your energy behind it at a time when many people would have hung it up for something safer. Thank you for helping me come up with the new ending, and giving me a necessary nudge to extend that one scene that shall remain unnamed. You make a killer muse.
To Kristine Swartz, for giving my book a home and the absolutely perfect title, and for knowing its complicated soul right away—you already knew how it should be presented without me having to say a word. You’ve been a dream to work with.
To Becca Wolf, for letting me borrow your wealth of horse knowledge, which outstrips my own severalfold, and for choosing the perfect location for Wild Falls, Montana.
To James McNorton III, for speaking so honestly, kindly, and openly to me about your experience with desegregation and race issues in Florida, California, and Idaho. You helped so much to inform the experience of my own fictional characters, and all remaining mistakes are my own.
To Nic Stone, for helping me get deeper into the experience of my characters than I was capable of doing on my own, and for articulating the issues with kindness and humor and an immense amount of compassion. This book is vastly better for your influence, but again, I’m certain I’ve still made mistakes and they’re all my own.
To Keyanna Butler, for all your help and insight on early drafts of this book.
To Layla Reyne, Andrea Contos, Suja Sukumar, and C. L. Polk for reading and adding invaluable comments to early versions of this book.
To Sandra Lombardo, for being my longtime favorite beta reader.
To Heather Van Fleet, for your endless enthusiasm for these characters, and for prompting the penis tiara epilogue. You were so right.
To Claire Zion, for all your excitement and hard work on this project.
To the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum, for keeping record of the firsthand accounts of Hurricane Katrina that informed much of the detail work in this book.
To my amazing writing community on Twitter and in Pitch Wars, who keep me from feeling alone in the crazy world of publishing.
To my husband, who always knows exactly the right thing to say. Maybe someday you’ll write a book on the proper care and feeding of Writer Wives!
And last and very most, thanks to Katie Golding (aka Goldnox), my partner in this whole writing journey. For helping with every sentence and every hard day and being excited about every tiny milestone with me. For having to build an autocorrect shortcut into your phone to save your thumbs because we were celebrating about this book deal for so many days in a row. From A Modest Proposal to fanfic to signing multi-book deals in the same year, we’ve done all of this together, and we’ve pulled off every long-shot dream we dared to have. We did it, girl. We really, really did it.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
All the details I used for LJ and his friends’ experiences after Hurricane Katrina are taken from true stories. I wish I could say they weren’t true, and that those things had never happened.
The grocery store in the Lower Ninth is real, as is the date that it opened: November 2014. The man who opened it has paid for it with his life savings, which he saved up from a lot of working-class jobs. Frequently running it at a loss, he’s done an incredible job of trying to provide this neighborhood with the goods that it needs. The portrayal of it in this book is fictional, and meant to highlight the desperation of the circumstances in the Lower Ninth even many years after the flood, but Burnell Cotlon should be commended for everything he’s done to stock the shelves of that store.
The episode with the police shooting a supposed “looter” is based on the death of Henry Glover. The officers in question were convicted of various charges for the incident and jailed, though the appeals and retrial process for each of them continue to be contentious and politically charged even now, thirteen years later. Many believe the white officers have escaped consequences for their actions due to the racially charged nature of the crime.
During the hurricane, several white people in Algiers Point started shooting black people on sight. The “shooting anything darker than a paper bag” was taken from a direct quote of a man who was charged with the unprovoked shooting of three people. His trial was delayed over a dozen times before he finally pled guilty in 2018.
After Katrina, I read accounts of people unable to locate family members for up to eighteen months. Some friends never saw each other again and never knew if the other had lived or died. Around seven hundred people are still unaccounted for to this day.
Readers Guide
Unbreak Me
Michelle Hazen
QUESTIONS F
OR DISCUSSION
1. Do you think food can be healing? If so, which is more nurturing: the enjoyment of consuming the food or the process of preparing it?
2. Why do you think Andra opened up more to LJ than to any other man, or even to her friends and family who she had known her whole life?
3. Throughout the book, LJ uses different mediums to express his feelings for Andra, including food, music, physical touch, and words. Which of these do you think is the most romantic way to communicate love, and why?
4. How many parallels can you think of between the rebuilding of a city after a hurricane and the experience of a woman healing from the trauma of an assault?
5. How do you think the long-term trauma of a rape is affected by the experience of reporting the crime, and the struggle to try to get the justice system to convict and sentence the perpetrator?
6. At one point, LJ is speaking about Andra’s father and says, “He has a weird feeling about me, like I might be trouble. That’s how it works. Nobody thinks they’re racist, Andra. They just think some people can’t be trusted, especially not with their daughters.” Do you think LJ is right about this? Why or why not? Do you think most racist behavior is conscious or unconscious?
7. What was your impression about the city of New Orleans before you read this book? Did that change after reading it? If so, how?
8. What do you think would have happened if Andra hadn’t followed LJ to New Orleans? Would he have come back? Would they have ended up together in the end?
9. Do you think the challenges of discrimination that LJ faced were different in Montana versus New Orleans? Which do you think would be worse or harder to deal with than the other?
10. How do you think the experience of being in an interracial relationship has changed in the last sixty years? What do you think the experience of interracial couples will be like twenty years from now?
11. If there were a movie version of Unbreak Me, who would you cast as LJ and Andra? What scene would you most hope made it into the film adaptation?
Photograph of the author by Chris Holcomb
Michelle Hazen is a nomad with a writing problem. Years ago, she and her husband swapped office jobs for seasonal gigs and moved out on the road. As a result, she wrote most of her books with solar power in odd places, including a bus in Thailand, a golf cart in a sandstorm, and a beach in Honduras. Currently, she’s addicted to The Walking Dead, hiking, and Tillamook cheese.
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