The Anchor: Building Patrick

People who've read the series long enough eventually ask me the same question, usually carefully, sometimes bluntly: is Patrick real? The honest answer is yes — mostly. Patrick is built, almost entirely, on my husband. The man I've spent twenty-plus years of my life beside, through some of the most beautiful chapters I've lived and a few of the hardest ones too.

The Blueprint

My husband is the most committed, unyielding compass I've ever known. He is, without exaggeration, the anchor — steady in a way I've never had to question, unconditionally on my side no matter what storm we were standing in. He's stoic. Level-headed almost to a fault. Stubborn in the specific way that used to frustrate me and now, most days, I just find endearing. And as he's gotten older, he's developed a genuinely zero-tolerance policy for inefficiency, which I tease him about constantly — my grumpy old man, I call him, and we both know it's true in jest and true for real at the same time.

That's Patrick. That's the whole foundation. The unshakeable steadiness, the loyalty that never once wavered even when it would have been easier to, the quiet strength that doesn't announce itself but is simply always there — I didn't have to invent any of that. I just had to watch my husband closely enough, for long enough, to know how to write it down.

Not Just One Man

But here's the part I don't think readers always expect: Patrick isn't only my husband. Before the life I have now, I loved a few other people — really loved them, the kind of love that leaves a mark whether or not it lasts. Some of their mannerisms made their way into Patrick too. A particular way of arguing. A certain look someone used to give me right before they said something honest and hard to hear. A voice, a rhythm of speech, a specific kind of tenderness I once received from someone who isn't in my life anymore but is still, in some quiet way, part of the man I write on the page.

So is Patrick my husband? Mostly. Is he only my husband? No. He's a version of him — the truest, most concentrated version — with a few borrowed pieces from other chapters of my life folded in. I think that's true of most characters authors build from real love. You don't write one person. You write everyone who ever taught you something about what love actually costs and what it actually gives back.

Patrick's Arc

What I've loved most about writing Patrick across six books isn't the steadiness itself — it's watching that steadiness get tested, cracked open, and rebuilt into something even stronger. Patrick starts the series carrying enormous weight: family legacy, expectation, a world that demanded he hide the person he loved most. His arc isn't really about becoming a different man. It's about a stubborn, loyal, quietly devoted man finally refusing to shrink himself for anyone — not the Navy, not his father, not tradition. Watching him learn to stand his ground, out loud, cost him things. It also finally let him breathe.

That arc mirrors something true about my own life, and about my husband's. Loving someone through decades of a world that didn't always make room for that love takes a specific, unglamorous kind of courage. Not the dramatic kind. The kind that shows up every day, chooses the relationship again and again, and never once asks to be thanked for it.

Why I Wanted Readers to Feel It

I didn't set out to write a perfect man. I set out to write the real one — stubborn, occasionally maddening, endlessly loyal, the kind of steady you don't fully appreciate until you've had it for twenty years and realize you can't imagine your life without it. Every emotion Patrick and Alex move through — the ache, the distance, the fear, the relief of finally getting to love someone in the open — my husband and I lived some version of it ourselves.

I hope readers feel that on the page as strongly as we felt it living it. That's really all I ever wanted this series to do.