It’s Out There. Almost Yours Again Is Actually Out There.
Tonight I uploaded Almost Yours Again to Amazon, and now I’m sitting here staring at the listing like I’m waiting for it to do something.
It won’t do anything. It’s a book listing. But here I am.
This one has been living in my head for a long time — longer than I’ll admit to — and now it belongs to anyone who wants it, which is the most exhilarating and quietly terrifying thing a writer can experience. You spend all this time with these people. You know how they think, how they argue, how they sound at two in the morning when everything is falling apart. And then you hand them over, and they’re not just yours anymore.
I think that’s the right thing. I’m about ninety percent sure that’s the right thing.
Here’s what I can tell you: this book is the beginning of something much bigger. The universe these characters live in has been mapped out to forty books. Forty. That number sounds absurd when I type it, but every single one of those stories exists for a reason — because the people in this world are complicated and layered and they don’t let go of you once you find them. Marc and Finn and the rest of the Compass Point crew have a lot of road still ahead of them.
The first ten books are written and edited and ready. One a month for the next ten months. Whether that plan makes me dedicated or slightly unhinged is genuinely up for debate, and I’m choosing not to examine it too closely right now.
Right now I just want to sit with the fact that Almost Yours Again is real. It’s listed. Someone out there who needs this story can find it.
That’s not nothing.
That’s actually everything.
If you pick it up — thank you. If you love it, tell someone. If you want to know what comes next, stay close. There is so much more coming.
I’ve been trying to write this post for three weeks.
Every time I sit down to do it, I stare at the screen for a while, type something, delete it, and go make another cup of tea. My friend Karen, who has heard more about this book and these characters than any person should reasonably have to endure, has been very patient. She has also been very gently suggesting, in the way she does, that perhaps I should just write the thing, Avery.
So. I’m writing the thing.
Almost Yours Again is at the editor. The cover has been made. The cover reveal is locked in for May 20th. And the book goes live on June 1st.
June 1st. Thirty-four days from today.
I need you to understand something about what it means to type that sentence.
I have been living inside the Compass Point Security universe for fifteen years. Alone, mostly, in the way that writing is always fundamentally alone — just me and the characters and the particular madness of a world that refused to stop expanding every time I turned my back on it. Forty books across four series. The novellas that exist because certain characters were absolutely not going to accept a supporting role and I don’t know why I ever thought they would. Fifteen years of notes and scenes and timelines and character voices that have become so familiar I sometimes forget they don’t actually exist.
Karen has been alongside me for a lot of that. Not writing Avery — that’s mine, entirely mine, my voice and my world and my particular obsession — but there. The person on the other end of the phone when I couldn’t work something out. The one who has heard about Marc and Finn probably more than she ever asked to, and who kept listening anyway. We work together on other projects, Karen and I, and that partnership has taught me what it means to have someone who truly understands what you’re trying to do — which makes her support of this work, the work that’s entirely my own, mean more than I can easily say.
But Almost Yours Again is mine. That matters to me and I want to say it clearly, because this is the work I built alone across fifteen years and a great deal of very strong tea.
Marc and Finn are the heart of everything in this universe. That’s not hyperbole — it’s architecture. Every series, every character, every thread that runs through Compass Point traces back to them. They are the reason the world exists in the form it does. And Almost Yours Again is their story: the one I’ve been holding the longest, the one I’ve circled back to again and again over fifteen years of building everything else around it. The one that had to come first, even though — especially because — it’s the most important one.
For those of you who are new here: Marc Dalton and Finn Cooper are the soul of Compass Point Security. Everything else in this universe grows from what they are to each other, what they’ve been through, and what it costs two people to find their way back when the distance between them has been measured in years and silence and choices that couldn’t be unmade. That’s all I’m going to say right now. The book will say the rest.
For those of you who have been waiting — who have been here through the years of it’s coming, I promise it’s coming — I don’t have adequate words for what it means to finally be writing it’s here. Or almost here. Close enough that I can see it from where I’m standing and it doesn’t disappear when I blink.
The manuscript is with the editor, which means it’s temporarily out of my hands and in capable ones. The cover exists and is beautiful and I am being heroically restrained about not sharing it before the 20th. Fifteen years of waiting has given me a certain capacity for delayed gratification. I am drawing on every last bit of it.
Here is what I know about June 1st: it’s the day forty books get their foundation. Everything I have built in this universe — every team, every mission, every love story, every scar and every choice and every moment of two people deciding each other is worth the risk — gets its why on that day. Marc and Finn are the answer to questions the rest of the series is still asking. That’s what it means to have lived in a world this long. You know, eventually, where everything comes from.
This is where it comes from.
Fifteen years. One universe. The cover reveal is May 20th. The book is June 1st.
Almost there. Almost yours.
— Avery
Almost Yours Again is Book 1 of the Compass Point Security universe — the beginning of forty books across four series. Cover reveal: May 20th. Publication: June 1st. Sign up to the newsletter to be the first to see it.
There’s a particular kind of character who walks into a story already convinced of one thing:
They are not the person who gets to be loved.
Not because they’re cruel. Not because they’re incapable of it.
But because somewhere along the way they decided love wasn’t meant for them.
In the Avery Beckett universe, many of those characters are soldiers.
And soldiers learn very early that survival changes the way you see yourself.
Survival Guilt Changes the Equation
Soldiers carry a quiet mathematics in their heads.
Who came home. Who didn’t. Who should have.
Sometimes the answers to those questions don’t make sense.
Sometimes the person who lived was the one who believes they deserved it the least.
Survival guilt doesn’t always look dramatic. Often it’s quiet. A background noise that says: You’re still here, and they’re not.
Over time, that thought becomes something else.
A belief.
That the life you’re living now isn’t something you get to fill with joy. That your job is simply to carry forward.
To finish the work.
To protect the people who remain.
Love starts to feel like something that belongs to other people.
People who didn’t walk away from the same battlefield.
Protectors Don’t Expect Protection
Another truth soldiers absorb is that their role in the world is very clear.
They are the ones who stand between danger and everyone else.
They are the shield.
When someone spends years living that way, the idea of being protected themselves starts to feel… wrong.
Unnatural.
They’re comfortable being the one who takes the hit. The one who stays standing. The one who makes sure everyone else makes it out.
But when someone tries to stand between them and the danger?
That’s harder to accept.
Because it disrupts the role they’ve built their identity around.
They believe they’re the protectors.
Not the protected.
Emotional Restraint Is a Survival Skill
For soldiers, emotional restraint isn’t just personality.
It’s training.
In high-risk environments, emotions can cloud judgement. Fear can slow you down. Grief can distract you when someone else’s life depends on your focus.
So they learn to compartmentalize.
They learn to set feelings aside until the mission is over.
The problem is that habit doesn’t disappear when the war ends.
It follows them home.
They become quiet about their pain. Careful with their emotions. Slow to trust anything that might destabilize the control they worked so hard to build.
And love—real love—is destabilizing.
It asks for vulnerability.
For openness.
For the kind of emotional exposure they’ve spent years learning how to avoid.
Touch Has to Be Earned
For some characters, touch is easy.
For soldiers who have lived with trauma, it often isn’t.
Physical closeness means trust. It means letting someone close enough to see what’s underneath the armor.
In many Avery Beckett stories, touch isn’t casual.
It’s earned.
The first hand on a shoulder. The first quiet moment sitting beside someone without tension. The first time a character realizes they didn’t instinctively pull away.
These moments matter because they signal something deeper.
Safety.
Not the absence of danger.
But the presence of someone who makes the world feel survivable again.
Love Feels Like a Risk They Can’t Justify
If you already believe your job is to protect others, love starts to look like a liability.
Because loving someone gives the world something to take from you.
It creates vulnerability.
It introduces the possibility of loss.
And for someone who has already lost too much, the instinct is simple:
Better not to start.
Better to stay alone.
Better to keep your focus on the mission.
Why They’re Wrong
The truth, of course, is that none of this means they don’t deserve love.
It means they’ve spent so long protecting others that they’ve forgotten they’re human too.
They forget that safety doesn’t only come from being strong.
Sometimes it comes from letting someone else hold the line for a while.
From letting someone see the parts of you that aren’t invincible.
From discovering that protection can go both ways.
The Quiet Power of Being Chosen
The most powerful moments in stories like these aren’t the dramatic declarations.
They’re the quiet realizations.
The moment a character understands that someone stayed.
That someone chose them.
Not because they were perfect. Not because they were unbroken.
But because they were worth loving anyway.
And for someone who spent years believing love was for other people, that realization can change everything.
Because sometimes the bravest thing a protector can do…
Avery Beckett Books 