People always ask me why I put romance inside a thriller. Like the two don't belong together. Like love is soft and danger is hard and never the two shall meet.
But here's what I know: the most dangerous thing you can do is let someone in. And the most thrilling thing in the world is doing it anyway.
Love is never safe
When I started writing Smiling Faces Tell Lies, I wasn't thinking about genre. I was thinking about Cocoa. About a woman who comes to FAMU with her guard already up — because she's had to be — and then finds herself pulled toward someone she can't fully read in the middle of something she can't fully escape.
That's not a romance subplot. That's the whole tension. The love story and the danger story are the same story.
The most dangerous thing you can do is let someone in. The most thrilling thing is doing it anyway.
Why the HBCU setting matters
FAMU isn't a backdrop. It's a character. The culture, the homecoming energy, the way a campus full of Black excellence can still hold its secrets — that's the world the story lives inside. It gave me a setting where community and isolation can exist in the same breath, which is exactly where a thriller belongs.
The romantic thriller genre gave me permission to explore all of it without apology. The tension. The longing. The fear. The wanting. It's all the same current running through the story, and I'm not interested in separating any of it out.
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