The Family We Built: Barbara, Vance, Sterling, Marcus

Alex, Patrick, and James get most of the attention — they're the love story, after all. But the people who hold that story up, who make the world of A City of Two feel lived-in instead of lonely, are the supporting cast. And I want to be honest about something: every one of them is real. Not composites, not archetypes borrowed from other books — real people who lived some version of this alongside me. Some of them know exactly who they are on these pages. For their privacy, that's where I'll leave it — the specifics stay theirs to share, if they ever choose to.

What I can tell you is what they mean to me, and why I couldn't have written this series without them.

The Family You Build When You Can't Be Honest

There's a particular kind of family that gets built when you spend years unable to be fully honest about who you are — a family assembled out of necessity, out of shared risk, out of the specific relief of being around people who don't require you to perform. We were serving in a machine that demanded perfection, every hour of every day, and somewhere inside that pressure, a handful of us found each other and quietly, wordlessly, decided to survive it together.

That's the emotional truth behind every supporting character in this series. They're not sidekicks. They're the family that closeted life required us to build for ourselves.

Barbara

Barbara is, simply, amazing. We found each other early — recognized something in one another neither of us said out loud for almost a full semester. We didn't need to. She was the one who saw the first hairline fracture in my mask before anyone else did, and without a word about it, helped me glue it back together before it ever showed. Then she went and held her own mask perfectly for three more years, graduating at the top of our class — one of the finest officers the Navy ever commissioned.

She's living her best life now, openly, with an incredible partner by her side. Watching that happen for her, after everything we both carried quietly for so long, is one of the great joys of my life. Every bit of Barbara's steadiness, her brilliance, and her quiet fierceness made its way onto the page.

Vance and Sterling

Vance and Sterling were, back then, part of the world we had to survive rather than people we counted as allies. There's a long, complicated history behind those four walls of Bancroft Hall — some of it I'll probably save for another book, because it deserves more room than a blog post can give it. What I can say now is this: decades later, the four of us have found an unlikely peace.

Vance and Sterling have become good friends of ours today, something none of us would have predicted at eighteen. Growing older has a strange way of rewriting the past — not erasing what happened, but making room for who people become after it.

Marcus

And then there's Marcus. I didn't really know him — not truly — until after graduation, on a trip to, of all places, Disney World. That's where I met the actual Marcus: a stoic, disciplined military man who could, in the space of about four seconds, transform into an overgrown kid demanding we wait forty minutes in line for the Peter Pan ride, all while eating a Mickey-shaped ice cream bar and wearing white socks with sandals and shorts like it was a uniform of its own.

That contradiction is the whole character. On paper, Marcus reads as exactly what you'd expect from a career officer — composed, exacting, impossible to rattle. And then something delights him, and the fifty-year-old admiral vanishes for exactly as long as the roller coaster lasts. I like to think every reader has met a version of that person in their own life — someone whose discipline is real, but whose joy, when it shows up, is somehow even more real. Word is he still won't ride anything without a churro in hand first, and he's been known to negotiate fiercely for a FastPass like it's a hostage situation.

Were we friends back then? Not really — not in any way that would have made sense at eighteen. But time has a way of turning old classmates into family, if you let it.

Why I Write Them

None of these characters exist just to fill out a scene. They're the record of the people who got me through years I couldn't have survived alone — the ones who knew, who didn't ask, who held the mask up when I couldn't, and who I get to call friends now instead of just old shipmates. Writing them is how I say thank you, in the only language some of it can still be said in.