After The Rain

There was a time in my life when writing lyrics was simply something I did. Long before Carrero, during my musical years, I wrote songs. A lot of them. I still have notebooks full of lyrics from that part of my life, pages and pages of thoughts, feelings, stories, and pieces of myself put into words and intended for music.

I suppose I’ve always processed life through writing. Sometimes it became a song, sometimes it became a book, and sometimes, many years later, those two parts of me find their way back to one another.

After the Rain

I actually wrote the lyrics for After the Rain about a year ago. At the time, I had started thinking about and planning another Carrero story. Going back into that world meant looking back at the women I had written, the journeys I had taken them on, and inevitably looking back at myself too.

Carrero has always been deeply personal to me. I am a survivor, and when I first began writing The Carrero Series, I was still healing. I don’t think I fully understood at the time just how much of that healing was finding its way onto the page. The first two trilogies ahve so many parts of the real me and my real past all hidden in plain sight. It was my therapy and a way to get it out from inside of me so it could no longer keep damaging me.

I created women who were complicated. Women who carried things, who didn’t always make the right choices, who loved fiercely, broke down, got angry, pushed people away, made mistakes, found friendship, found love, and slowly learned how to stand in their own lives. They were not always strong. Sometimes they were weak and gave people access they shouldn’t have.

There are pieces of me scattered among them. Not because any one Carrero woman is me. They aren’t. But I understood their storms because once, I was a girl who stood in the middle of what felt like an endless storm. If you asked me ten years ago who would be closest to who I am, it was Sophie….. now…ten years later. It’s Rachel, only…the Rachel you meet at the end of book 3.

I couldn’t see beyond it. When you’re standing there, you don’t necessarily believe someone when they tell you the clouds will eventually move. You can’t imagine the person you’ll be years from now because you’re concentrating on surviving the person you have to be today. And then, somehow, time passes. You heal. You change. You grow. Not perfectly, not in a straight line and not without scars, but you do. And you make bad decisions on the way, which only keep hurting you further.

A year ago, while looking at Carrero again and thinking about where I might take it next, I realised just how far I had come. After the Rain came from that realisation.

The Series That Became Bigger Than Me

The Carrero Series started as something I needed. Writing gave me somewhere to put emotions, experiences, and pieces of myself while I was healing. I could take things that hurt and turn them into something else. I could give my women battles and then let them fight their way through them. I even included people who were part of my ongoing pain. Yes, my villains came from somewhere.

But Carrero didn’t stay mine, and that is probably one of the most beautiful and unexpected things that happened to it. Readers found these women. You loved them, became frustrated with them, cried with them, defended them, shouted at them, and rooted for them. Some of you saw yourselves in them. I have the emails from readers who told me they found therapy in identifying with my women and could see themselves and how they needed to push forward. Over the years, readers have shared their own stories with me and told me what certain characters, relationships or moments meant to them. Something I had begun as part of my own healing had somehow reached outside of me and touched other people’s lives. That still means more than I know how to properly explain.

So although After the Rain began as a song about me, when I came back to it, I realised it wasn’t only mine anymore. It belonged to my Carrero women too, and it belonged to my readers.

Not Because the Storm Is Over

There is a line in the song that probably says more about my understanding of healing now than anything else:

Not because the storm is over, but because I learned to bend.

I don’t believe healing means becoming untouched by life. It doesn’t mean the past disappears. It doesn’t mean you’ll never struggle again, never hurt again, or never find yourself standing beneath another dark sky. There will always be storms. The difference is that I no longer believe every storm will last forever.

I’ve seen the clouds move. I’ve watched the light come back. I’ve lived long enough to meet versions of myself that the younger me couldn’t have imagined.

That’s why the ocean, rain, changing tides, sunlight, and rainbow imagery surrounding this song feel so right to me. Life moves. Nothing stays exactly as it is, even when you’re trapped inside a moment that convinces you otherwise. Perhaps that is what I wish I could tell the girl I used to be. Keep going, because you haven’t seen everything yet. Life is long.

Now I Dance Under Rainbows

I was once a girl who stood in the middle of an endless storm. Today, I dance under rainbows. That doesn’t mean I have forgotten her. Quite the opposite. I carry her with me. I carry the scars, the lessons, the ridiculous wrong turns, the people I’ve loved, the people I’ve lost, the things I’ve survived, and all the unexpected beauty I couldn’t see waiting beyond that horizon. I still have PTSD, and I still have a dark side that never fully recovers. But it’s okay, as I have an Alexi to vent that through, hahah

I’m still her. I’m just her after the rain. I always think the world looks something fresh and clean after rain. That it even smells somehow better.

And in many ways, that’s what I see when I look at the women of Carrero. Different women, different lives, different wounds and different stories, but they keep moving. They discover that there is life beyond the thing they thought would destroy them. Maybe some of you who have travelled through this series with me have discovered that too.

So After the Rain is for me. It’s for the Carrero women, and it’s for you.

It’s for every reader who found comfort, escape, strength, friendship, or simply a place to disappear for a few hours inside these books. It’s for anyone currently standing in their own storm who can’t see the horizon yet, and for those of us who made it far enough to turn around and realise just how far we’ve travelled.

May we never forget the rain, but may we always remember to dance beneath the rainbows when they come. 🌈❤️