A life, kept in order.

Karamuka and Uzamutuma. Teacher and nurse. Nine children — I always thought I was the baby who opened the floodgates. Six of those children, and both of them, were killed in 1994.

National University of Rwanda. She made it through a school system designed to keep her out — two or three percent of students from her side of the divide were admitted to high school in the whole country; fewer still reached university. Her parents fought, year after year, to keep her inside it.

Her older brother Emile, on his wedding day, with his bride. Ten years older than Henriette. My hero, like a second dad to me. He vetted Innocent before the marriage and became his close friend. He did not survive the killing.

Innocent. The day she married him. Muhe— the Kinyarwanda word for give, the name everyone called him for his generosity. His driver once told her: He prayed to God that if he had to lose half of his wealth, he would gladly give it up, if only he could have you for his wife. He survived the genocide with her.

Modeste, at the wedding party. Henriette’s closest friend from university — the friend who carried me before I carried Divine. Killed with her family on the first day of the genocide. Her last call, the Easter weekend before: There is nowhere we can hide, unless we hide in Jesus.

Beni, newborn. Their firstborn. Beni — blessing. She had refused to keep any clothing in the house that was not for a boy, even as her family begged her to prepare just in case. She gave the pink dresses Innocent brought home to a friend who was praying for a girl — I didn’t want God to see any signs of doubt. The first of the four she would carry through the country in collapse.

Innocent at the height of his career, before the genocide. His business stretched across stores, trucks, and several countries. By 1993, his name was appearing on death lists. They did not yet know how close it was.

Ebralie. She and her husband William moved into the gated neighborhood when his promotion brought them there. The streets were quiet, the houses kept their distance — until Ebralie began knocking on doors. That is when God sent Ebralie to us.She has remained a close family friend and advisor in the thirty-five years since — Henriette’s prayer partner through the genocide, the one who would later check on the children in Kenya, and the friend still at the family table at Thanksgiving.

Beni, Nadine, and Emmanuel Julius — E.J., named for Henriette’s younger brother Emmanuel. Three of the four she would carry through the killing. Photographed in the year before the warnings became unbearable.

Kabayiza, just before the genocide. Five years older than Henriette. The watchful one. No more questions for now, Henriette. Just observe.Father of Angelique, the niece who would survive, strapped to her grandmother’s back. He did not.

Clementine. Adopted with Esperance after Uzamutuma’s brother and his wife died in a car accident before Henriette was born. Henriette only ever knew her as her oldest sister. Present at every birth — gentle through the panic, laughing at her sister’s questions.

Divine, born one month after the killing ended. The child Henriette carried through the Hundred Days. I had carried a divine faith all those years, and now I would be carrying my baby Divine through the worst one hundred days of my life. The book takes her name.

The burial of Karamuka and Uzamutuma. Her mother’s body had first been laid in a neighbor’s yard — Christian and Rose, who had risked everything to recover it and to keep three-year-old Angelique alive among the dead. The family returned to give her a proper grave. As the casket was lowered, Henriette raised her hand and began to sing.

Father Richard Brunelle and the Brunelle family. An American Catholic priest she met by accident on a flight home from Miami in 1995, doing mission work in Rwanda, Tanzania, and Kenya. He gave her the phone number of a nun. That number became the door her family walked through to safety — the Assumptionist Brothers in Kenya, who sheltered Innocent and the children while she waited in the United States. His sister Anne Marie in Maine took her in. Their youngest daughter is named Brunelle, for them.

After two years of asylum paperwork — a caseworker named John Martin holding up the file, the preschool at New Life Church singing each morning with the children of Israel song’s words changed to John Martin, let Henriette’s children go— the family came through customs. Henriette reunited her eight children in the United States. Seven of them meeting their baby sister Brunelle, born in Maine that March, for the first time.

Divine at her high school graduation. The child carried through the killing, walking now.

The eight children, Henriette, and Innocent — together. Chantal, Beni, Nadine, Angelique, E.J., Shalom, Divine, Brunelle. Twenty years after the genocide.