This Newsletter covers a range of things - other fiction, thoughts on writing, the occasional detour. But today it is about Khaled, the protagonist of He Walks With The Dead (the fiction novel I am working on).
Khaled lives in a stark world.
He is an investigator in an unnamed city at war. He carries the dead - not as metaphor, but as presence. They follow him into interrogation rooms, through broken streets, into the silences between what he knows and what he can prove. He has learned to treat the war the way most people treat weather: something that was there when you woke up and will be there when you sleep.
To survive a world like that, a man has to disconnect from it. At least partially. At least enough to keep going.
But you cannot write a character like that and only show the armor.
If Khaled is only the investigator - only the man the dead follow, the man who reads knots and studies cups and moves through the city with quiet precision - then he is a function, not a person. Readers recognize functions. They do not grieve them.
At some point you have to find the person inside the armor. You have to find the part of him that has nothing to do with the case.
Chapter 14 was that moment for me.
It is the first chapter I wrote - and in many ways the only complete one - that exists purely to show a side of Khaled with no connection to the investigation, the dead, or the mechanics of the plot. Just a man, a table, and a memory of someone he loved.
I felt emotionally drained after writing it. I also had a tear or two, because I loved it so much. It remains one of the most important chapters in the book.
But the emotional excavation was only one of the challenges.
The other was the prose itself.
Most of this book is written in a deliberately difficult style. Short sentences. Declarative. Punchy. Fragments used not as decoration but as impact - they don't trail off, they land. The rhythm is clipped, controlled, almost bureaucratic in its refusal to linger. It mirrors Khaled's world: a city where nothing is soft, where everything has been stripped down to what survives.
That prose style is a choice, not a limitation. It reflects the starkness of the world he moves through. The war as weather. The dead as presence. The work as the only thing left.
The challenge with Chapter 14 was not abandoning that prose - Khaled's voice had to stay intact, the sentences had to stay short, the register had to remain restrained. But somehow, inside all of that compression, emotion had to breathe. Grief. Love. The specific, irreplaceable texture of a person who is gone.
Prose that refuses to raise its voice still has to make you feel something.
That is harder than it sounds.
There is a moment later in the book - I won't say where or why - where the prose does change. Deliberately. Structurally. For reasons that only make sense when you get there. But that is a story for a future post. For now: the prose of Chapter 14 stays inside the rules. The emotion has to find its way through the gaps.
I think it does. You can tell me if I'm wrong.
One more thing worth saying about this chapter, and it is about where the food comes from.
Many years before I started writing this book, I wrote two lines down and saved it. I had no idea what it was for. I just liked it.
Love is ordering food that isn't your favorite because she loves it. So she can pick on your food.
It sat there for years. Then Khaled arrived, and the line found its world.
That is something I have come to believe about writing: certain sentences exist before they have a home. You write them because something in you knows they are true, even before you know whose truth they are. The job, sometimes, is just to wait for the character who deserves them.
Khaled deserved that one.
A note before you read: this is the first draft of this chapter - not the final version. The manuscript is still being edited and smoothed. But this version is where it began, and it is the version I want to share. First drafts have something final versions sometimes lose. The unguarded moment. The writer still finding their way into the room.
This is me finding my way into Khaled's.
Chapter 14: The Table
He cannot think inside the office.
The walls there hold too many voices. Radios. Phones. Files that demand answers before questions are ready.
Strategy needs quieter places.
So he walks.
The restaurant appears at the end of the street the way memory does—half intact, half gone.
It used to be elegant. White tablecloths. Glass catching the light. Soft music that made people lower their voices even when they disagreed.
Now the roof is open to the sky. One wall is missing entirely. Plastic sheeting hangs where windows once were, snapping softly in the wind.
They still set tables.
They still polish what cutlery remains.
They still pretend the world has not ended, at least between opening and closing.
He steps inside.
One of the waiters sees him and nods without surprise.
Fewer staff now. Some left when they could. Some stayed until they couldn't. Some are names spoken softly when someone asks who used to work here.
"Your table," the waiter says.
Not a question.
The table stands near the corner where the wall still offers a little shelter from the wind.
The same table.
Always the same.
He sits.
To others he is Inspector Khaled. To the city he is another tired man eating alone.
Here, he is something else.
Here, he is her husband.
He orders the meal he never liked.
Lamb with cinnamon and almonds.
Too sweet for him. Too rich.
She loved it.
Said the sweetness made the salt feel honest.
He waits.
The dead are quieter here.
Not gone.
Just softer.
Because this place belongs to another memory.
He sees her across from him the first night they came.
Their first real date. Both pretending it was casual.
She arrived late, breathless, apologizing—then laughed at herself.
A laugh that slipped out louder than she meant and ended in that small, ridiculous snort she always tried to hide.
He fell in love with that sound before the meal even arrived.
The waiter brings the dish.
It smells exactly the same.
He remembers her stealing the almonds from his plate because she said he didn't appreciate them.
She never knew he ordered the dish just so she could take them.
He remembers the night he carried a ring in his pocket and nearly forgot his rehearsed words when she started telling a story and laughing so hard she cried.
He remembers kneeling awkwardly beside this same table while the entire restaurant pretended not to watch.
She said yes before he finished the question.
He cuts into the food now.
He eats slowly.
Birthdays here.
Anniversaries.
The night she leaned across the table, eyes shining.
"I have news," she said.
He knew from the look on her face that it was something big.
"I'm pregnant."
For a moment the world stopped.
Then he laughed.
Not politely. Not carefully.
Loud and helpless and full of something that felt like the future opening.
They talked about names.
About rearranging rooms.
About a life stretching forward beyond the noise of the city.
That future never arrived.
She died in the street outside their house.
Not hiding.
Helping.
Neighbors had lost their home.
She ran out with blankets. With water. With herself, because she believed showing up mattered.
The bomb did not care.
Neither did the sky.
He does not come here often.
Memory is heavier than most men think.
But when he needs strength, he returns to the places where she still exists most clearly.
Where her laugh still sits in the air if he listens carefully enough.
The waiter passes quietly.
"You don't pay," he murmurs, like always.
Khaled shakes his head, like always.
"I do."
They accept the money, like always.
Not for themselves.
He knows where it goes.
Into meals for those who cannot pay.
Into plates placed in front of men and children who no longer have kitchens.
She would have liked that.
He finishes the meal.
Not because he enjoys it.
Because finishing feels like honoring something.
He sits a moment longer, looking at the empty chair across from him.
"I remember," he says quietly.
The wind moves the plastic sheeting overhead.
The open sky looks down through the missing roof.
Somewhere nearby a generator coughs into life.
He stands.
Outside, the city is the same wounded shape it always is.
But inside him, something has aligned again.
Youssef mattered.
A gentle man.
A small life.
If a life like that can disappear without answer, then the world she believed in fades a little more.
Khaled will not allow that.
He knows now what he must do next.
Start small.
Start with people.
Find who he can trust before he decides what to do about the name the suspect gave him.
Trust is rarer than evidence.
Harder to prove.
Easier to lose.
He walks away from the restaurant carrying memory like armor.
Because she is the reason he stayed.
The reason he lives when others did not.
The reason he remembers what the future was supposed to look like.
And why Youssef's death cannot be allowed to disappear into the noise.