The Characters Who Stayed With Me After Writing

Every writer has them.

The characters you didn’t plan to love as much as you did. The ones who were supposed to occupy the edges of the story and instead walked to the centre of it and refused to leave. The ones who are still with you long after the manuscript is finished, still talking, still surprising you, still doing things in the back of your mind that haven’t made it onto the page yet.

The Compass Point universe is full of them. But four in particular have stayed with me in ways I didn’t entirely anticipate when I started writing, and I want to talk about why.

Fallon.

Flick. The girl with the band and the music and the particular quality of aliveness that made everyone in every room turn toward her without quite knowing why. She almost ran away with the series entirely, and there were days I would have let her.

The love story at the heart of her book is a complicated one, and deliberately so. Darius is almost twice her age. He met her when she was sixteen, and what he felt in that moment was immediate and absolute and completely impossible — and he knew it. So he did what an honourable man does when he feels something he has no right to feel. He removed himself. He took himself away from her and built walls and made himself scarce and tried, with every tool available to him, to do the right thing.

But Fallon is a particular kind of girl. The kind that stays with you regardless of distance. The kind that rewrites the internal landscape of everyone who loves her without even trying. And when she was nineteen and her life was in danger, Darius drove through the night without a second thought — because he simply didn’t have a choice. He never really had a choice. That’s the truth about loving someone like Fallon. The choice gets made for you.

Writing that — the intersection of honour and helplessness, the years of doing the right thing finally meeting the moment where the right thing and the necessary thing are exactly the same — was some of the most satisfying work I’ve done.

Knox and Garrett.

These two. These two.

Ten years. They had loved each other for ten years and been too terrified to say it. Not because they didn’t know — they knew, I think they always knew — but because some things are so important that the risk of losing them by speaking feels greater than the pain of keeping silent. And so they kept silent. For ten years they were whatever they were to each other, and they kept it locked down behind duty and professionalism and the particular stubbornness of two men who have survived everything the world threw at them and learned, perhaps too well, to keep their own counsel.

Knox’s hearing is failing. He carries that privately, in the way he carries everything — with a competence and a steadiness that doesn’t invite discussion. Garrett’s nights are something else entirely. PTSD doesn’t leave much room for softness, and Garrett has spent years in the dark hours fighting a private war that the daylight never fully sees.

What breaks them open, finally, is not a grand romantic gesture. It’s the thing it always is with men like these — necessity. Crisis. The moment when life is on the line and the things you’ve been too careful to say become the only things that matter. They do the right thing, as Knox and Garrett always do, and it nearly costs them everything, and in the aftermath of that there is simply no road left that leads back to pretending.

Ten years of love finally given a name. The weight of that — the relief and the grief and the fury at all the time and all the silence — was something I felt all the way through writing it.

Marc and Finn are my truest babies. That will never change. They live in a particular chamber of my writer’s heart that is entirely their own.

But Fallon, and Darius, and Knox, and Garrett?

They are right there with them. Right there.

And I suspect they always will be.

— Avery