Some stories never get recorded
Because telling them could have cost the people involved their careers, or in some cases considerably more. So, they were carried privately for years. Many of those stories were never told at all. The people who lived them grew old, passed away, and the story went with them.
On Friday September 25th, 2026, I start publishing a novel about one of those stories.
Author’s Note
This story is a work of fiction inspired by the real lives of my friends who served on the USS Nimitz Aircraft Carrier, real love, and the quiet courage it takes to exist truthfully in a world that does not always make space for it.
The Nimitz Affair
It is 2010. Lieutenant Brody Anders has been flying off the USS Nimitz for two years and has been in the Navy for fourteen. Airman Philippe Laurent is twenty-one, from Toronto by way of Rochester, and has spent his entire life making himself impossible to find, which is a skill he acquired at twelve and has never stopped practicing.
They meet in a corridor. Almost nothing happens.
What follows is a slow burn in the most literal sense. There are four thousand people on USS Nimitz and no privacy anywhere. Every hour these two men get together is an hour they have engineered, using pencil marks in a maintenance logbook, meeting intervals drawn from part numbers so that no pattern can form, and a forgotten storeroom on the sixth deck that becomes the only place on a 100,000 ton warship where either of them can be themselves.
The novel is set in the final months of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Title 10, section 654 was law from 1993 until the 20th of September 2011, and in the eighteen years it stood, more than 13,000 service members were separated under it. That is the world in which this book takes place. I have tried to be accurate about it rather than dramatic, because the accurate version is worse.
This is not a book about a statute; it’s about being witnessed.
Almost everyone in it is carrying something alone. A lieutenant commander with a photograph. A corpsman who stands at a coffee station at two in the morning twice a week for no reason she will ever explain. A petty officer in Quality Assurance whose entire professional life is finding out what other men did wrong.
And a woman in Iowa at a kitchen table with a fountain pen, who spends seven months trying to write four pages she keeps throwing away.
It ends at a table. That is all I will say about the ending.
Part One: The Ship Finds Them
Part One is seven chapters and 23,000 words.
It covers eight weeks and is about accumulation. A pilot walks down to a hangar bay at one in the morning to put his hand on the side of an aircraft, which is something he has done every night for two years. An airman works late because it is quieter and easier to think. They pass each other four times before either of them registers that they have been counting.
There is no dramatic turn in it. There is a corridor, and a torque wrench, and a night in a hangar bay when one of them says the other’s name and gets it wrong.
It ends in a storage compartment, with a man who came to end the whole thing and cannot finish the sentence, and another man who crosses two of the five feet between them and leaves him the rest.
Release Schedule
Forty Chapters, six parts, six Fridays.
Part One - Chapters 1-7: “The Ship Finds Them” Friday, September 25th
Part Two - Chapters 8-14: “The Rooms They Built” Friday, October 9th
Part Three - Chapters 15-20: “What It Cost” Friday, October 23rd
Part Four - Chapters 21-27: “The Man Who Watched” Friday, November 6th
Part Five - Chapters 28-34: “Crossing the Room” Friday, November 20th
Part Six - Chapters 35-40: “The Table Sits Eleven” Friday, December 4th
Each part runs 22,000 to 24,000 words, which is roughly ninety minutes of reading.
Parts Two through Six provide a recap of the previous part at the beginning, so you can come in late and still know exactly where you are.
Reading It
Free to everyone, all seven complete chapters.
New parts drop on Substack first. Subscribe so you will never miss one.
