Every book has one. The scene you circle for days before you finally sit down and face it. The scene you write and delete and rewrite, not because you can’t find the words but because the words keep costing you something.

For Almost Yours Again, it was the first one.

Not the inciting incident. Not the climax. The very first scene — Finn walking back to Marc.

I need you to understand what that costs him, because I think it’s easy to read courage and miss the layers underneath it. Finn Cooper is not, at this point in the story, a man who has much left to lose. He is broken in ways that he has stopped trying to catalogue. He is running on the particular kind of fuel that people run on when they have nothing left except one thing — one person they would burn themselves down to protect.

Flick. His sister. The person he has already sacrificed more for than anyone should ever have to sacrifice.

And he knows, with absolute clarity, that Marc will keep her safe. Regardless of everything. Regardless of how thoroughly and justifiably Marc now hates him. That is not a question in Finn’s mind — it is the one certainty he is carrying into that room. Marc Dalton is a great many complicated things, but he does not let innocent people come to harm. Finn knows this the way he knows his own heartbeat.

So Finn will fall on his sword. Willingly. He will hand Marc whatever ammunition Marc needs, accept whatever judgement is coming, make himself the price of Flick’s safety without flinching. That part, as terrifying as it is, is almost simple. It is a transaction Finn has already agreed to internally before he ever knocks on the door.

What he is not prepared for is the other thing.

Because somewhere underneath the broken pragmatism of Marc will protect her, there is something Finn has not fully let himself examine. He still loves Marc. He has never stopped. It is not something he chose or something he can undo — it is simply true, the way gravity is true, constant and unglamorous and not particularly interested in whether it’s convenient.

But here is the thing about Finn that took me a long time to fully understand, and that I think is the key to everything he is: the distance didn’t diminish it. Every month apart, every silence, every version of the life he was supposed to have that quietly closed its doors — none of it made him love Marc less. It made him love Marc more. As though loss and longing, instead of wearing the feeling down, kept deepening it. Kept adding to it. As though Finn’s love for Marc grew in the dark the way some things do — not despite the absence of light but because of it.

By the time he walks back through that door he is carrying years of that. Years of a love that just kept growing with nowhere to go.

And he does not believe it goes the other way anymore. How could it? After everything. After the choices Finn made and the damage they caused and the particular, irreversible way he disappeared from Marc’s life. Love does not survive all of that intact — or so Finn has told himself, so many times that it has become the architecture of how he moves through the world. He has accepted it. He is not walking back to Marc to reclaim anything for himself.

That is what makes it the hardest scene I’ve ever written.

Not the courage it takes to walk into that room knowing he might not walk back out the same way. Not the fear, not the brokenness, not the weight of everything riding on the next few minutes. What makes it almost unbearable to write is the quiet devastation of a man carrying a love that has only ever grown larger, walking toward the person at the centre of it, certain — absolutely certain — that what he’s bringing has nowhere left to land.

Finn is not hoping when he goes back to Marc. He has placed himself beyond hope, because hope is a luxury he can’t afford and a wound he can’t survive reopening.

He just loves him. Deeply, helplessly, more than ever.

And he’s made peace with the fact that it doesn’t matter anymore.

That is so much harder to write than anything a bullet could do to him.

And that is exactly why it had to be the first scene.

— Avery

There is a particular kind of man I keep coming back to in my writing.

He is not soft in the way the word is sometimes used as an insult — he is not weak, not passive, not without edges. He has often survived things that would have unmade a person with less core. He carries himself with a kind of controlled stillness that people sometimes mistake for coldness. He is, by most external measures, formidable.

And he loves like he’s terrified of what it means that he loves this much.

That’s the man I’m interested in. That’s always been the man I’m interested in.

Marc Dalton is not a soft man by anyone’s definition of the word. He is a man who was built, through circumstance and necessity and years of operating in environments that rewarded hardness, to take up a very specific shape. Contained. Controlled. Competent in ways that leave very little room for uncertainty. He leads, he protects, he solves — and he does all of it from behind a level of emotional management that took decades to construct.

And then there is Finn Cooper, who is — in his own way — just as armoured. Finn’s softness is deceptive, and that’s what makes him so interesting to write. He looks more open, more present, more immediately warm than Marc. But Finn stopped eating to keep his sister safe. Finn dragged a man thirty metres with a fractured skull. Finn’s softness is not fragility. It’s something that survived an enormous amount and came out the other side still capable of tenderness, and that’s a very different thing.

What happens between them is not the collision of hard and soft. It’s the collision of two people who both built walls — different walls, different materials, different architectural styles — and then found themselves in a space where the walls were no longer strictly necessary and had no idea what to do with that information.

That’s where the love lives. In that not-knowing.

When I write men who love softly, I’m not writing men who have been declawed or domesticated or relieved of their complexity for the sake of being palatable. I am writing men who have access to the full range of what it means to be human — which includes tenderness, and uncertainty, and the willingness to be seen — alongside everything else they are.

Marc learning to let Finn in is not Marc becoming less. It is Marc becoming more. The control doesn’t disappear — it shifts. It turns toward something. He brings to loving Finn the same absolute commitment he brings to everything else in his life, and when you combine that with a man who has finally been given somewhere safe to direct it, the result is — well. It’s the reason I write.

Finn, for his part, loves with a kind of fierce quiet that surprises people who’ve misread his openness as lightness. He is not light. He is warm, which is a different thing entirely. He loves Marc with the same determination he applied to surviving everything that came before Marc — completely, practically, without drama, as if it is simply the next right thing and he has decided to do it properly.

Two men who have been through the fire, loving each other with every tool the fire left them.

That’s soft, in the way I mean it. Not gentle as the opposite of strong. Soft as in — without armour. Soft as in — here I am, this is what I actually am, and I am giving it to you anyway.

I think we underfund this narrative in fiction about men. We are very good at the falling — the tension, the conflict, the almost-and-not-yet. We are less practiced at the being in it. The morning-light version of love. The quiet scene that doesn’t have dramatic stakes, just two people existing in the same space and choosing each other in a way that is so habitual it’s become structural, like load-bearing walls.

Marc making Finn coffee before he’s asked. Finn knowing exactly when to speak and when to simply be present. The way they have built, without a blueprint and against considerable odds, something that holds.

That’s what I want to write. Men who are not diminished by love but completed by it. Men who arrive at tenderness the long and difficult way and turn out to be extraordinarily good at it.

Men who love softly.

It’s the bravest thing I know how to write.

— Avery