The book has already started reading you.
There is a kind of book that arrives at a person before they ask for it. This is one of those. If you are here, your nervous system has already read the line beneath the sentences. It is the line a Tzapic woman above a lake in Guatemala has been carving into stone for fifty years, in the same four words, in a language older than Spanish. I remember you.
What you hold is a novel. It is also a threshold. The nine women you are about to meet are composites of clients, friends, strangers on planes, and parts of the author — but they are also, at a level the author did not invent, themselves. You may recognize one of them. You may recognize more. You may recognize, in a corner of you that has not spoken in a long time, all nine.
The pages do not ask belief. They ask presence. The whispers that weave through each chapter are not decoration; they are how the book knows what you are capable of hearing, and passes you the next line at the right moment. There is no correct pace. There is only your pace. The book keeps.
If you came before the novel: welcome. Do not read this as a commentary on something you have not yet met. Move through as a pilgrim does — the way the eye goes, the way the breath follows.
If you came after: welcome home. What you are about to re-meet is not summary. It is the field beneath the field.
— L.M.G.