Big news!

I have a new author website!

I know this may mean more to me than it does to you, but I’ve never had a real website for my author business (I’m trying to think of this as more of a business than just something I do). Previously, I had a Word Press website that was relatively easy to build myself, but it wasn’t really designed for an author to display and potentially sell books. My new website is.

I built the site using Tertulia for Authors. Tertulia makes it really easy to create a website. In fact, if you have an ISBN for your book, in most cases, Tertulia will be able to import all of the information for that book right into the new website. In fact, it often can pull in all the rest of your books as well.

Although I’m happy with the website for the time being, it’s not quite as robust as I would like. The way the site is set up is a bit limited, and it could be more aesthetically pleasing. Did I just say it’s ugly? No, that’s not what I said. But if I’m being honest, it could be a bit easier on the eye.

Despite its shortcomings, Tertulia is a great option for any author that is technologically limited and who doesn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a website. If a relative technological dunce like me can figure it out, I think most people can.

If you’d like to visit my new website (Why on earth wouldn’t you want to?), you can find it at LouMindarBooks.com.

If you’ve read my productivity reports for the past several months, you know that I’ve been talking about my desire for a proper website for quite some time. Now that it’s done, it’s time to turn my attention to marketing my books. As unlikely as that sounds, I have a plan. Hit the subscribe button and follow along if you want to see if I actually carry out that plan.

Chapter 65

A Ghost Comes to Visit

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

If life in Chicago taught him nothing else, it was that he had accumulated too much cash to simply keep it hidden under his bed or in a shoebox in the closet. It was a good problem to have, but it was a problem all the same.

He’d carried cash for years because it was simple. It couldn’t be frozen by a clerk who didn’t like his face. It couldn’t vanish because some bank shut its doors. If he needed to leave in the middle of the night, he could take his life with him in a satchel and keep moving.

But by 1941, “some cash” had become “too much cash.” It had gotten heavy. Not just in weight, but in risk. A fire. A thief. A careless moment. He’d spent most of his life trying not to be noticed, and a man guarding a pile of bills like a dragon invited exactly the kind of attention he hated.

So, he adjusted the way he always did. He rented a small safe deposit box at a local bank under a name that matched his papers and his habits. He kept enough cash on hand to disappear if he had to, but not so much that it could ruin him if it was stolen. He opened a savings account and a checking account and let the balances grow in ways that looked normal on paper.

He learned the language of it, too, without letting it turn him greedy. He bought government bonds because they were safe, and because he liked the idea of money tied to something solid and boring. Later, he bought a few shares in companies that felt permanent—rails, steel, oil—things that would likely still exist when most men in the room were long gone. He never chased rumors. He never went looking for a “big score.” That kind of talk belonged to men who had not been alive long enough to understand how quickly the world could change.

He wasn’t trying to get rich. He was trying to stay free. On paper, he became what he’d pretended to be in other places: an ordinary working man who saved his pay, made careful choices, and didn’t ask anyone for help.

Chicago let him do that. It was big enough for anonymity, busy enough that a man could keep his life private without seeming strange. It was also the kind of city where people were always arriving, always leaving, always starting over. That suited him.

By December, the war was no longer something happening somewhere else. It came into the city through newspaper headlines and radio voices, through ration books and recruiting posters, and through the way men stood a little straighter when they talked about the Pacific or Europe.

Benjamin had no intention of joining the military. He had done his time with war. He still remembered the smell of powder and blood, the way fear clung to a man’s clothing even after the shooting stopped. He also knew his limits. He wasn’t stronger than anyone else. He wasn’t harder to kill. He could still bleed out on a field like any man. The only difference was what happened later, and that difference was the one thing he had to hide.

So, he stayed where he could work and blend in. He took steady employment that kept him moving during the day and quiet at night. He didn’t talk too much. He didn’t drink too much. He didn’t tell stories about his past unless they were safe stories, the kind every older man could tell without proof.

In 1943 he met Katherine Conner. He first noticed her because she didn’t move through the world like most people, waiting for permission or seeking approval. She was not young, and she didn’t pretend to be. She walked with purpose, dressed plainly but well, and had the kind of face that was kind, unless she decided she wasn’t.

He met her near a market on the South Side, where he’d stopped to pick up a few things. She was arguing with a vendor about the weight of a sack of flour. Not shouting or causing a scene, just refusing to be brushed off.

“Either your scale’s wrong,” she said, “or you’re selling air.”

The man gave her a look like he expected her to back down.

She did not.

Benjamin watched for a moment, then stepped closer. He didn’t join the argument. He simply looked at the scale and pointed to the way it was set unevenly on the boards.

“It’s rocking,” he said to the vendor. “If you slide it here, it’ll sit flat.”

The vendor adjusted it, weighed the sack again, and his mouth tightened when the numbers changed.

Katherine looked at Benjamin as if she was deciding what kind of man he was. Then she gave him a small, grateful nod, the kind that said she didn’t like needing help but could respect it when it came without strings.

“Thank you,” she said.

“It wasn’t much,” Benjamin replied.

“It was enough,” she said, and that was the end of it.

But a week later he saw her again, and this time she was coming out of a shop with a bundle tucked under her arm. She recognized him first.

“You,” she said. “Scale-fixer.”

He almost smiled. “That’s what I am now?”

“It’s what you were last time I saw you.” She smiled and spoke with good humor.

They conversed for a minute on the sidewalk, ordinary words that carried more than they said. She told him her name. He gave her his. She asked him what he did. He gave her an answer that was true enough.

“Busy man,” she said.

“Like everyone else,” he replied.

She studied him again, as if she was hearing what wasn’t spoken. “You don’t talk like a man in his twenties,” she said.

Benjamin kept his face calm. “Or thirties,” he said. “I’ve had a few years.”

“A few,” she echoed, amused. “You sound like you’ve had a lot.”

They were joking with each other. Having fun. But the subject should have been a warning. It should have made him step away before anything started. But he was tired of stepping away.

They began to see each other in small ways at first. Coffee in the late afternoon when her errands were done and his day was winding down. Walks when the weather allowed it. Meals in places that didn’t ask questions and didn’t offer opinions. She told him she was a widow. Her husband had died years earlier, and the grief in her voice was old, but not gone.

“He went off believing he was doing something important,” she said one evening. “Then he didn’t come back.”

“The great war?” Benjamin asked.

She nodded. “He died in France. That’s what they told me. A letter from an officer who didn’t know him, and a folded flag that felt like it weighed more than it should.”

Benjamin didn’t say he understood, because understanding was too small a word. He had known too many widows and too many graves.

Instead, he said, “I’m sorry.”

She looked at him for a long moment. “Most men say that the way they say ‘good morning,’” she said. “You don’t.”

“No,” he admitted. “I don’t.”

That was the night it shifted from friendly to something else. Not because of one touch or one kiss, but because they both stopped pretending they were only passing time.

Katherine was forty-five. She carried herself like a woman who had lived, who had been disappointed and kept going anyway. Benjamin liked her for that. He liked that she didn’t need him to save her. He liked that she didn’t look at him like he was an answer to loneliness. She looked at him like he was a man.

The first time they ended up in her apartment, it wasn’t rushed. It wasn’t a mistake made in the heat of one evening. It was a decision. Quiet. Direct. No promises. No talk of forever.

He was surprised by how much tenderness there was in it. He’d had women in his life over the years, even when he told himself he shouldn’t. But this was different. This was not a deal made out of hunger. This was comfort, and it frightened him because it made him want to stay.

Afterward, Katherine lay close without clinging.

“You’re not married, are you?” she asked.

“No.”

“No children?”

“Not anymore,” he said before he could stop himself.

She lifted her head slightly. “Not anymore?” she repeated. “That’s an odd way to say it.”

Benjamin stared at the ceiling, choosing his words with care. “Life takes people,” he said. “Sometimes it takes them early.”

Katherine studied him. “You carry it like you’ve been carrying it a long time.”

“I have.”

She didn’t press. That was one of the reasons he kept coming back. She was curious, but she didn’t treat him like a puzzle she was owed the answer to. Still, as weeks turned into months, the odd parts of him became harder to hide.

He knew the world too well. He could talk about the way cities changed, about the way men reacted to wars, about how fear moved through crowds like weather. He had habits that didn’t match the face he wore. He woke too early. He didn’t get excited about things other men his apparent age got excited about. He had no desire to chase youth, because he had been trapped inside it for longer than most people could imagine.

Once, as they walked along a busy street, Katherine paused outside a shop window where a new radio was on display. The voice inside was reporting on troop movements overseas.

Katherine listened, her face tight. “My nephew’s in the Navy,” she said. “My sister tries not to think about it, but she does.”

Benjamin nodded. “The waiting is worse than the news,” he said.

Katherine looked at him. “How do you know that?”

He could have lied. He could have softened it. Instead, he said, “Because I’ve watched people wait.”

She didn’t argue, but something changed behind her eyes. Not suspicion. Something closer to a question she wasn’t ready to ask.

Nineteen-Forty-Four came and went. The war dragged on. The city tightened itself around rationing and worry. People spoke in cautious hope about a turning point, about the end coming soon.

Benjamin and Katherine became, without either of them naming it, a real couple. Not married. Not making speeches about the future. But together. Known to each other in the ways that mattered. She had keys to his place. He had keys to hers. He met her friends. She met a few of his, though Benjamin kept that circle small by design.

And then, one autumn afternoon, they took a walk in a neighborhood Benjamin hadn’t been in for a while. It wasn’t planned as anything important. Katherine wanted fresh air. Benjamin wanted a few minutes where the world felt ordinary.

They passed a small park with benches and a few trees turning yellow. A woman sat in a wheelchair near the path, wrapped in a coat even though the day was mild. A younger woman—maybe in her twenties—stood behind her with hands on the chair handles. The younger woman was talking quietly, patient, as if she had said the same things many times before.

Benjamin walked past without looking. He’d learned to keep his eyes forward. Then he felt someone’s gaze hitting him with force. He turned without meaning to.

The woman in the wheelchair was staring at him. Her mouth was slightly open. Her eyes looked wet, but not from wind. From shock.

Benjamin froze.

It took him a second to recognize her because her face was older now, hollowed and softened by time. But the shape of her eyes was the same.

Vivienne.

Joyce’s daughter.

The last time he had seen her, she was an eight-year-old, watching the only home she had ever known burn to the ground. He had carried her down burning stairs wrapped in a wet sheet, feeling her small weight against his chest, listening to her cough and cry into the cloth.

He did the quick math in his head. She was eighty-one years old now, and she was looking at him like she had just seen a ghost. Her hands trembled on the blanket covering her legs.

“Ben,” she said. The name came out as a whisper, cracked and thin.

Katherine’s grip tightened on Benjamin’s arm. “Do you know her?”

Benjamin couldn’t speak. His throat closed around the words.

Vivienne’s gaze locked on his face, taking in every detail, as if she were trying to prove to herself that her mind wasn’t lying. Then her eyes darted to his hair, his jaw, his posture. The same man. The same age. The same face she’d carried in her memory for more than seventy years.

“No,” the younger woman behind the chair said quickly, leaning down toward Vivienne. “Grandma, no. That can’t be.”

Vivienne ignored her. She was still staring at Benjamin with a stubborn, terrible certainty.

“You,” she said again. Louder this time. “You’re him. You’re Benjamin.”

Katherine’s breath caught.

Benjamin finally found his voice, but it was too late to shape anything clean. “Ma’am,” he said, and even that sounded wrong. It sounded like a stranger trying to play polite.

Vivienne’s face twisted, not with anger, but with confusion that hurt to see. “You left,” she said. “You left that night. You were there, and then you…”

The younger woman’s cheeks flushed red with embarrassment and fear. “I’m so sorry,” she said to Benjamin and Katherine. “My grandmother, she gets confused. She remembers things wrong. Sometimes she thinks she sees people from her past.”

Vivienne jerked her head toward her granddaughter with sudden energy. “I am not confused,” she snapped, and for a moment Benjamin saw the child she had been: stubborn, fierce, unwilling to be dismissed. “I know him.”

The granddaughter swallowed hard. “Grandma, please.”

Vivienne’s eyes never left Benjamin. “You look the same,” she said. “You look the same as you did when I was a girl.”

Katherine’s hand slid off Benjamin’s arm as if she’d touched something hot.

Benjamin forced himself to move. He stepped closer, careful, not wanting to startle her. “You’re remembering a long time ago,” he said softly. “Sometimes memories feel sharper than they should.”

Vivienne’s lips pressed together. “I remember him,” she said. “I remember you.”

The granddaughter leaned forward, voice low and urgent. “I’m so sorry.” she said to Benjamin. “She’s had a hard year. I shouldn’t have taken her out when she was tired.”

Benjamin nodded once. “It’s all right,” he said, though it wasn’t.

Vivienne’s eyes flicked to Katherine. For a moment her expression softened, like she was looking at a pattern she recognized. “Don’t trust him,” she said suddenly, not cruelly, but as if she were warning someone about thin ice. “He doesn’t…He’s not…”

The granddaughter straightened fast, mortified. “Grandma, stop.”

Vivienne kept speaking, her voice rising. “He doesn’t change. He doesn’t…”

“That’s enough,” the granddaughter said, and Benjamin heard the strain in her voice, the fear that her grandmother would be judged or mocked. She turned the wheelchair gently but firmly. “We’re going home.”

Vivienne twisted in the chair, still trying to look back. “Benjamin,” she said again.

Benjamin stood still, not moving or responding, as they rolled away.

Katherine’s face had gone pale. She stood, looking at Benjamin, frozen in place. When they were out of earshot, she turned slowly toward him. “Who was that?” she asked.

Benjamin’s mind went blank, not because he didn’t know what to say, but because every answer was impossible.

“She thinks she knows me,” he said carefully.

“She didn’t think,” Katherine replied. Her voice was flat. “She knew. She looked at you like she knew.”

Benjamin swallowed. “It was a long time ago.”

“How long?” Katherine asked.

He said nothing.

Katherine took a step back. “My God,” she whispered, and he felt the distance between them like a door shutting.

They walked home in silence. Not the comfortable silence they shared on good nights. This was the silence of a question hanging in the air and no one willing to grab it.

In the days that followed, Katherine tried to act normal. She made coffee. She spoke about small things. She asked how his work was. She smiled when she was supposed to.

But Benjamin could see the crack in it. He could see her watching him when she thought he wasn’t looking. Watching his face the way Vivienne had watched it. Looking for proof of something she didn’t want to believe.

One night, she finally said it. “You’re not what you say you are,” she told him.

Benjamin sat at her small kitchen table, hands folded, posture still. “I’m what you see,” he said.

“That’s the problem. I’m not sure I can trust what I see.”

He could have lied harder. He could have invented a brother or a son or some story about resemblance that would calm her down.

But he was tired and cared too much for her to lie. “I can’t explain it,” he said, and even as the words left his mouth he heard how weak they sounded.

Katherine’s eyes filled, but she didn’t cry. “Do you understand what it feels like to look at the man you love and realize you don’t know who he is?”

Benjamin’s throat tightened. “Yes,” he said, and it was the truth. He had felt it in reverse. He had watched people change while he stayed the same. He had watched love turn into confusion.

Katherine shook her head. “No. I don’t mean secrets. I mean… this.” She gestured at him, at his face, at his age that didn’t match his eyes.

Benjamin stayed quiet.

Katherine’s voice dropped. “Are you dangerous?”

“No,” he said immediately. “Never to you.”

She nodded slowly, but she didn’t look convinced. “That woman, Vivienne,” she said, tasting the name like a memory. “She wasn’t confused. She was terrified.”

“She saw something she didn’t have words for,” Benjamin said.

“So did I,” Katherine replied.

After that, the end came in small pieces. Katherine didn’t throw him out. She didn’t accuse him. She didn’t scream. She simply began to pull away.

A week passed, then two. Plans were canceled. Touch became rare. When he reached for her hand, she let him hold it for a moment, then slipped free like she was doing it without thinking.

Benjamin understood. He didn’t like it, but he understood.

By the spring of 1945, the war’s end was near. Radios carried voices that sounded lighter. The city breathed, slowly, as if it had been holding tension in its chest for years and was finally letting it go.

Katherine and Benjamin sat together one last time, not in bed, not in the warmth of their private life, but in the quiet of her living room with the lamps low.

“I can’t do this,” she said.

Benjamin nodded once. He didn’t ask her to explain. They both knew.

“I don’t hate you,” she added, as if she needed him to understand that.

“I know,” he said.

She looked at him for a long time, then said, “If I never see you again, I want you to know I meant it. What we had. I meant it.”

Benjamin’s chest tightened. “So did I.”

Katherine’s mouth trembled. “Then tell me,” she whispered. “Just enough. So I don’t feel like I’m losing my mind.”

Benjamin stared at her. He wanted to. God, he wanted to. He wanted someone to know him and not flinch. But he had seen what knowledge did. He had seen what questions turned into. He had watched the Society drain his family because they believed immortality could be passed down like a trait.

He could not put Katherine in that line of fire. Not with the country full of returning men and broken families and loose talk. Not with his own trail still uncertain.

He shook his head. “I can’t,” he said quietly. “I wish I could, but I can’t.”

Katherine’s eyes closed, and a tear finally slipped down her cheek. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, angry at herself for showing it.

“Then go,” she said, not cruelly or dramatically, just like a woman protecting what was left of her heart.

Benjamin stood. He paused as if he might say something better. There was nothing better.

He left her apartment with the old, familiar feeling in his stomach, the moment after a door shuts, when you realize you’ve made a choice you can’t undo.

Outside, Chicago carried on. People walked with newspapers tucked under their arms. Men laughed too loudly in doorways. A streetcar bell rang.

The war ended later that year. Strangers hugged in the streets. Horns sounded. Women cried. Men kissed faces they’d been afraid they’d never see again.

Benjamin watched from the edge of it. He felt older than he had ever felt, not in his body, but in the part of him that kept tally.

He had survived love or at least outlasted it. And he knew deep in his soul what that meant: it was time to move again.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

Chapter 64

The Old Stomping Ground

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

The first sign wasn’t the noise. It was the quiet.

Benjamin noticed it one morning when he stepped out of a rooming house before dawn and found the street already awake but strangely still. Men stood in small knots on the sidewalk, hands in pockets, hats pulled low, not talking much. A bakery that used to open before sunrise had its shutters down. The streetcar passed without stopping, nearly empty, its conductor staring straight ahead like he didn’t want to see who wasn’t riding anymore.

By the time the sun came up, the word had spread quickly and without ceremony. Banks closing. Factories laying off entire shifts. Businesses folding overnight, their owners gone or sitting inside with the doors locked, waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.

The country had stopped moving.

Benjamin walked through it with the calm of someone who had seen worse and survived longer. He listened more than he spoke. He watched men argue with clerks behind bank windows, watched women stand quietly with ledgers pressed to their chests, watched the same disbelief move from face to face as if it were contagious.

He had money. Not a fortune, but enough. Cash, folded and hidden the way he always kept it. He hadn’t trusted banks much even when they were supposed to be trustworthy. He’d lived long enough to know that systems failed faster than people believed, and that when they did, they took other people’s savings with them. For once, his caution worked in his favor.

He found work easily at first. There were always jobs that needed doing even when everything else fell apart: repairing broken equipment, hauling goods that still had to move, keeping things from decaying any faster than they already were. He took the work without pride and without complaint. He lived cheaply. Ate plainly. Slept alone.

Men around him were desperate. He could see it in their eyes, hear it in the way they talked too loudly or not at all. They worried about their children, about losing homes, about how long a man could go without wages before he became someone else entirely.

Benjamin worried about none of that. That realization sat uneasily with him.

He remembered other collapses. The war. Reconstruction. Fires that erased cities overnight. Panics that came and went. This was different only in scale. The feeling was the same: a sense that the rules everyone thought were solid had been written on paper instead of carved into stone.

Benjamin didn’t feel clever for having money when others didn’t. He didn’t feel proud of surviving another downturn. If anything, he felt tired. Survival had become automatic. Something he did because he always had.

He thought about purpose and found none waiting for him. No Anika. No Society. No enemy pressing close enough to sharpen his senses. Just time, stretching out ahead of him, empty and unmarked.

During the day, he watched storefronts change hands. A tailor closed; a secondhand shop opened in its place. A restaurant reduced its hours, then shuttered entirely. Men who once owned businesses stood behind counters for other men, grateful just to be paid.

Benjamin took note of which places still functioned and why. Some had owners who refused to panic. Others had creditors willing to wait. A few were simply lucky. He understood luck well enough to know it never lasted.

What he didn’t understand—what he couldn’t quite accept—was how easy it was for him to stand apart from the disaster. He had lost people he loved. He had faced wars and death and catastrophes, both natural and man-made. Yet here he was, steady on his feet while the world around him staggered.

He knew that wasn’t strength. It was endurance. And endurance, he was beginning to realize, was more about surviving than truly living.

By the end of the year, the wobble had turned into a fall. Lines outside soup kitchens lengthened. Trains carried more men than goods. Newspapers stopped pretending things would correct themselves quickly and started asking harder questions no one could answer.

Benjamin folded those papers and set them aside. Whatever was coming, he would survive it. He always did. The problem was that survival no longer felt like enough.

***

Benjamin waited until the panic settled into habit. That was always the moment when things could be bought.

In the first year of the Depression, everyone clung to what they had. Owners insisted their businesses would turn around. Creditors extended patience they couldn’t afford. Pride still mattered. By the second year, pride thinned. Men stopped talking about recovery and started talking about getting through the winter. That was when Benjamin began to move.

He didn’t announce himself as an investor or pretend to be anything more than he was. He showed up with cash, spoke plainly, and offered terms that didn’t insult the men sitting across from him. He didn’t bargain hard. He didn’t threaten. He made it clear he wasn’t there to strip a place bare and disappear overnight. To most businessmen, the distinction was important.

The first business was small; a repair shop whose owner had lost his line of credit and couldn’t afford parts anymore. Benjamin bought a controlling share, kept the man on payroll, and paid suppliers in cash. The doors stayed open. The workers kept their jobs. The owner slept again.

Benjamin didn’t stay long enough to become indispensable. Once the shop stabilized and buyers came sniffing around, he sold his share at a modest profit and moved on.

The next place was a feed and grain operation on the edge of town. Same pattern. Cash up front. No debt. Clear books. Benjamin didn’t expand. He didn’t innovate. He just kept the thing breathing until someone else could take over.

Word spread, but not the way it usually did. He wasn’t known as a savior or a shark. Just a man who showed up, fixed what was broken, and left before anyone got attached.

That part was deliberate.

He never used the same name twice in the same city. He never stayed longer than three or four years. When people asked where he came from or what he planned to do next, he shrugged and changed the subject. He lived in rented rooms and boarding houses, kept his belongings sparse, and never let anyone see how much money he actually had.

At night, he worked through ledgers by lamplight, pencil moving steadily across the page. Numbers made sense. They followed rules. They didn’t age. They didn’t die. They didn’t ask him who he was or where he’d been before. That suited him.

He avoided businesses that required long-term commitments. No factories. No railroads. Nothing tied too closely to government contracts. He preferred operations that could be turned over cleanly: car repair shops, dry cleaners, machine shops, plumbing companies. Things that could be fixed without becoming part of him.

There were women during those years, but none who stayed long. Some were widows. Some were simply tired of being alone. He didn’t promise anything he couldn’t give. When they asked questions that edged toward the future, he answered honestly without telling the whole truth. He left before anyone started planning around him.

The country ground on. Men drifted from town to town looking for work. Families doubled up in small apartments. Pride eroded into necessity. Benjamin watched it all from close enough to feel it but far enough to avoid being swallowed by it.

He thought about Samuel sometimes. About the homestead. About the trust they’d set up together. Knowing that place still existed, untouched, gave him a strange comfort. It was proof that something could be preserved if handled carefully. But he didn’t go back.

Detroit drew him again as the decade wore on. The city was bruised but stubborn, full of people who refused to leave even when leaving might have been easier. Benjamin liked that about the city. He took over a struggling warehouse operation near the river, streamlined it, sold it, then did the same with a trucking concern that moved goods too small for rail and too big for wagons.

Each time, he walked away with more money than he started with. Each time, the sense of control grew sharper.

He realized one evening, sitting alone in a rented room overlooking an alley, that this was the first period of his life where he wasn’t reacting to danger or chasing someone who stayed just out of reach. He was choosing where to be. Choosing how long to stay. Choosing when to leave. It should have felt like freedom. Instead, it felt like stalling.

He could survive anything. He had proved that beyond argument. He could adapt to any economy, any city, any disaster that didn’t involve a blade at his throat or a bullet in his chest.

What he couldn’t find—what none of the money or motion seemed to offer—was a reason to keep doing it.

By the end of the decade, newspapers had begun to change their tone again. The worst, they said, might be over. Recovery was coming. Industry would restart. Men would go back to work.

Benjamin folded the paper and set it aside. He had learned long ago that recovery only meant the next test was already on its way.

By the time the decade turned, Benjamin could feel the country shifting again.

It wasn’t anything dramatic at first. No single headline or speech. Just a tightening in the way people talked about Europe, a weariness in the papers that went beyond economics. He heard it in taverns and barbershops, in freight yards and boardinghouses. Men spoke about Germany and Japan the way they once spoke about banks: carefully, with a sense that something bad was moving but hadn’t arrived yet. Benjamin had learned to trust that feeling.

He closed out his last operation in Detroit in the spring of 1939, selling at a fair price and leaving the books clean. The buyer shook his hand and thanked him for keeping the business alive. Benjamin wished him well and meant it. He always did. Then he packed his things and left town before anyone could suggest a farewell drink or ask him to stay on as an advisor.

He traveled light, as always. One case. One coat. Cash divided and hidden the way habit dictated. He could have afforded better accommodations by then, could have stayed in hotels with names instead of numbers, but he didn’t trust comfort. Comfort made people visible.

Chicago called him back without saying why.

He told himself it was practical. The city was large enough to disappear into, busy enough to absorb another working man without asking questions. He knew its streets. He knew its rhythms. He knew where to live cheaply and where not to be seen too often.

But there was something else, too.

Chicago was where Joyce had lived. Where that part of his life had ended in fire and smoke and loss. He hadn’t returned since. He hadn’t wanted to. Now, after years of motion and noise and deliberate distance, the thought of walking those streets again felt less dangerous than it once had.

He arrived by train on a gray afternoon, the city hunched against the lake wind the way it always was. The station was crowded but orderly. Men in work coats. Women carrying parcels.

Benjamin rented a room not far from where he’d lived before, in a building that wore the years with little change. He found work easily, warehouse management at first, then logistics, then oversight roles that suited a man who understood systems and didn’t need supervision.

He didn’t start another business right away. He watched instead. Listened. Let the days settle.

At night, he read newspapers from cover to cover. The language had shifted. Words like “containment” and “mobilization” crept into editorials. Foreign names appeared more often, followed by maps and speculation. The world was bracing itself again, even if most people didn’t want to admit it.

Benjamin thought about enlistment notices pinned to walls during the last war. About the mud and noise and blood. About how he’d survived it and come back physically unchanged while others aged into ghosts.

He had no intention of putting himself near that again. Still, he paid attention.

In late summer, he walked past a recruiting office without slowing, noting how quiet it still was. In autumn, he noticed the line was longer. By winter, the line was orderly and patient, men waiting with the kind of resolve that came from believing something was inevitable.

Benjamin stood across the street and watched them for a long moment. He wasn’t afraid of war. He was afraid of what war did, to people, to memory, to time. He had seen enough of it to last several lifetimes.

And yet, as he turned away and headed back toward his rented room, he knew what the next years would bring him whether he wanted them or not. The world didn’t stop making demands just because he wished it would.

He had learned how to survive collapse. How to survive loss. How to survive prosperity and despair alike. What he hadn’t learned—what still eluded him—was how to live through the quiet stretches without waiting for the next catastrophe to give him shape.

As winter deepened and radios carried more news from overseas, Benjamin accepted a simple truth. The war wasn’t here yet. But it was coming. And when it did, it would find him right where he was, older than he looked, harder than he felt, and once again standing at the edge of something he could not avoid.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

Chapter 63

New Day, New City

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

By 1921, Benjamin had learned how to move through years the way other men moved through weather: noticing it, enduring it, doing what needed doing, and not expecting it to be fair. He kept his hair short and his clothes plain. He stayed clean-shaven most of the time, not out of vanity, but because a familiar face—any recognizable feature—was a problem when a man meant to disappear. He didn’t drink much in public. He didn’t tell long stories. He didn’t brag. He didn’t argue politics. He listened, worked, and left.

He had come back from Europe with mud still in his memory and the cold shame of being fooled by hope again. He had gone to the homestead. He had watched Samuel’s life thin down to a single room and a tired body. He had watched the last of his family line—at least the last that knew him—become a quiet man sitting at a table with no one left to feed. After that, it felt dishonest to pretend he had any great purpose.

So, he did what he always did when he ran out of purpose. He worked.

He took a job in a rail yard first, in Erie, Pennsylvania, though the city never made its mark on him. Truth was, he had traveled from place to place so much and so often, he wasn’t always sure where he was when he woke up in the morning. It wasn’t important. Most days, getting to work and doing his job was the only thing that occupied his mind.

The foreman at the freight yard was a broad man with a ruined nose who yelled even when he wasn’t angry. He liked Benjamin because Benjamin didn’t talk back and didn’t disappear midweek like drunks sometimes did.

“Watkins,” the foreman said on the second day, as if that had always been Benjamin’s name. “You ever work a yard before?”

Benjamin shrugged. “A little.”

The foreman spat into the cinders. “Keep your head down and your fingers out of the gaps and you’ll be fine.”

Benjamin did exactly that.

At night he rented a small room above a butcher shop. It smelled like smoked fat and pickle brine. The owner’s wife gave him a tin basin for washing and told him where to find hot water. She didn’t ask anything else, which made her the best kind of landlord.

He slept hard. He woke before dawn. He went back to the yard. Days stacked on days without a single one standing out.

On Sundays he walked the streets for exercise and because a man sitting in a room all day started to feel like a trapped animal. He watched the church crowds and the families in their best clothes. He watched boys run between wagons. He watched women carry baskets and scold children who didn’t listen. He watched all of it the way a man watches a house he’ll never live in again.

At the end of the summer, when the yard slowed, he left. There was no dramatic reason. No chase. No close call. Just the familiar feeling that if he stayed long enough, someone would decide they knew him.

The following year he worked near water again, loading crates on a river dock. He hated the river more than he admitted to himself. The Ohio had swallowed a body once—Chester Morris’s body—and even though Benjamin knew that river water moved on and forgot, he didn’t.

This was not the Ohio, but water was water, and the sound of it at night made his thoughts sharper.

He lived in a boardinghouse where the hallway light flickered and the wallpaper peeled like dead skin. The rooms were full of men with careful eyes. Some were just poor. Some were hiding. Benjamin didn’t pry. He understood the rule: a man who wants privacy should offer privacy.

On a Thursday night, one of the boarders, a thin man with a neat mustache, asked if Benjamin wanted to go out.

“Out where?” Benjamin said.

“A place,” the man replied. “Not a church place.”

Prohibition had been in effect long enough by then for everyone to have opinions about it. Benjamin didn’t care either way. He’d had enough of whiskey in his long life to know it didn’t fix anything. But he went, because it was easier than refusing and because he wanted to remember what it felt like to sit among people without needing something from them.

The “place” was a backroom behind a grocery store. The clerk nodded at the mustached man and let them through. Inside there were tables, low music, and a smell like oranges and cheap liquor.

Benjamin had a drink. It was sweet and harsh at the same time. He didn’t finish it.

A woman sat down near him, alone. She was in her late thirties, maybe forty, with blonde hair, good posture, and a look about her that let others know she was a person who wouldn’t be shoved aside. She looked at him, then looked away, then looked at him again.

“You new here?” she asked.

“Passing through,” Benjamin said.

She smiled without warmth. “Aren’t we all.”

Her name was Clara. She didn’t tell him her last name, and Benjamin didn’t offer his. They talked for half an hour about nothing. The room was loud enough that they had to lean closer. Her hand touched his forearm once, casually, like a test.

Benjamin felt the touch all the way up his arm.

Later she said, “You want company tonight?”

He understood what she meant. It wasn’t romance. It wasn’t even a lie that pretended to be romance. It was the plain trade of two adults who wanted something brief and clean of promises.

Benjamin hesitated, not because he didn’t want it, but because he could still hear Samuel’s quiet grief in his mind. Samuel, seeing what Benjamin was, and what he wasn’t, and being hurt by it.

Clara read the hesitation and stood. “Suit yourself,” she said, and started to walk away.

Benjamin surprised himself by reaching out and lightly catching her sleeve. “Coffee first,” he said.

She sat again. “Coffee costs extra,” she said, half joking.

Benjamin paid for the coffee. He paid for the room. He paid because it kept the arrangement honest and because it let him leave without a knot in his gut.

He didn’t stay in that city long after that. He could have, but he didn’t want to see Clara again and risk making it something it wasn’t.

Over the next two years he drifted through smaller places for a while: a town where he shoveled coal for a hotel; a town where he fixed fences for a farmer who liked to talk about the war and didn’t mean any harm; a town where he worked in a machine shop and learned the names of tools that hadn’t existed when he was young.

Cars were everywhere now. Not just in the cities, everywhere. They rattled over dirt roads and threw up dust. Men argued about makes and models in the same tone their grandfathers had argued about horses.

Benjamin learned enough to keep a car running, not because he owned one, but because that knowledge could come in handy. A man who didn’t understand the world around him stood out.

In one town he rented a room from a widow named Mrs. Haskins. She was fifty, with short gray hair and hands that moved efficiently, never wasting a motion. She rented rooms to working men and fed them plain meals.

On his third night she knocked on his door and offered him pie on a plate. “You’re too thin,” she said bluntly. “Eat.”

Benjamin sat at her kitchen table and ate while she did dishes.

“You got family?” she asked, not looking at him.

“No,” Benjamin said.

Mrs. Haskins nodded as if that explained everything. “Most men do,” she said. “Some don’t. Those ones either stay gone or they stay too long.”

“I won’t stay too long,” Benjamin said.

She finally looked at him then, and her eyes were sharp. “I know.”

Her kindness wasn’t flirtation. It was something older. She had made a life that ran on rules and routine, and she was offering him a small piece of it for an evening. Benjamin didn’t confuse it for anything else.

He left that town a month later and thought of Mrs. Haskins more than he expected. He appreciated her kindness, such as it was. In Benjamin’s experience, kindness was in short supply.

In 1924 he worked in a lumber yard, then on a road crew, then for a short time on a farm where the owner paid him in cash and eggs. Benjamin kept his own money close. He didn’t trust banks. He didn’t trust men who smiled too hard. He didn’t trust promises that required paperwork.

He began carrying more cash than he ever would have carried in earlier decades. It made him uneasy, but it also made him free. He could leave without warning. He could sleep in a decent room when he needed to. He could buy new clothes and not look like a vagrant. He could move without begging.

He spent the following summer in a city big enough to vanish in. He took a job in a hotel laundry. The work was hot and loud, the air thick with steam. Sheets and towels moved through his hands all day, heavy and wet, then light and clean. It reminded him of hospitals without the blood.

The laundry boss was a woman named Etta who ran the room like an army sergeant.

“You slow, you’re out,” she said on his first morning. “You clean, you stay.”

Benjamin stayed.

At night he ate in cheap diners where men leaned over their coffee and whispered about stock tips like they were sharing holy secrets. He heard the word “market” over and over. He heard men brag about buying a few shares and doubling their money in weeks.

It sounded too easy. Benjamin had lived through too many “too easy” times to believe in them.

One night, walking back to his room, he saw a woman in the doorway of a building, leaning against the frame as if she owned it. She was in her forties, maybe older, with a cigarette in her hand and a tired half smile.

“You lost?” she asked him.

“No,” Benjamin said.

She studied him. “You don’t look like the usual boys who walk this street,” she said.

Benjamin kept walking, then stopped. He turned back. “I’m not a boy,” he said.

That made her laugh, a real laugh, and the sound of it startled him. It reminded him that humor could exist even in a hard place.

Her name was Lottie. She wasn’t subtle about what she did. She didn’t pretend it was romance. She also wasn’t desperate, which Benjamin respected. They talked before anything else, and in the middle of their conversation she said, “You got that look.”

“What look?” Benjamin asked.

“The look of a man who’s been alone too long,” Lottie said.

Benjamin didn’t deny it.

They saw each other three times that summer. He paid her every time, and every time she happily took his cash. She understood the arrangement and had no intention of altering it.

Lottie didn’t ask him who he was. She didn’t ask why a man his apparent age carried himself like an older man. She didn’t ask why he was careful about where he went and how long he stayed. She took what he offered and gave him company that didn’t demand a future.

Benjamin left that city in the fall and didn’t write her. He had no address he wanted tied to him. He carried the memory instead, which was safer and, in a strange way, kinder.

The years blurred. He took winter work where he could find it. Shoveling snow. Repairing roofs. Working in a warehouse where men smoked and laughed and cursed and didn’t care what anyone’s name was as long as they pulled their weight.

Some nights he sat in his rented room with nothing but a lamp and his thoughts. He tried to read, but his mind drifted. He tried to sleep, but his body—young as it looked—was still a body with nerves and appetites and a brain that didn’t know how to shut off grief.

He started carrying a small notebook, Not a diary or a record of his life. Just a place for practical things: names of people who owed him money, addresses where he could find work, train schedules, a few random thoughts. He wrote nothing that could ruin him if it fell into the wrong hands.

Even so, he kept it close, because a man who lived as long as he did needed something to hold onto, even if it was only paper and ink and a few useful facts.

In 1927 he spent a few months in a city where jazz spilled out of basements and alley doors. Young men wore bright ties. Women cut their hair short and walked like they belonged to themselves.

Benjamin watched them with a quiet kind of envy. Not because he wanted to be young—he had been young for too long—but because they believed the world was opening up instead of closing down.

He went to a club once. A man at the door asked for a password. Benjamin didn’t have one. The man laughed, not unkindly, and let him in anyway.

Inside, the music was fast and alive. The singer’s voice cut through the room like a blade. Couples danced too close and didn’t care who watched. Benjamin sat at a table with a glass of water and felt like he was watching a species he used to belong to.

A woman sat down across from him without asking. She wore a simple dress and a hat tilted low.

“You don’t drink,” she said.

“I drink,” Benjamin replied. “Just not much.”

“You don’t dance,” she said.

Benjamin looked at the floor, at the bodies moving. “Not tonight.”

She nodded like she understood, and they sat in silence for a while. When she spoke again, she said, “It’s funny, isn’t it? How people think being alive means being loud.”

Benjamin glanced at her. “Maybe they’re trying to outrun something,” he said.

“Maybe,” she said.

Her name was Ruth. She was thirty-eight and divorced, which she said bluntly, as if daring him to judge her. Benjamin didn’t judge. They spent the night together and in the morning she dressed and said, “Don’t follow me.”

“I won’t,” Benjamin said.

Ruth smiled once, quick. “Good,” she said, and left.

Benjamin lay in the bed after she was gone and stared at the ceiling. The room smelled faintly of her perfume and his own sweat and the stale smoke from the club. He felt a familiar mixture of relief and emptiness.

By 1928 he had money again. Not wealth, not comfort, but enough that he didn’t have to fear hunger. Enough that he could choose his work instead of taking whatever was offered.

He still chose work. He found a job on a construction crew, then on a dock again, then in a factory for a short time. The factory was the worst. The noise was constant. The air was thick with oil and dust. Men came out at the end of a shift looking like they’d been buried and dug up again.

Benjamin didn’t stay long. He didn’t mind hard labor. But he did mind work that made men feel like machines.

He rented rooms. He ate in diners. He watched the country talk itself into a kind of frenzy.

There were more cars. More radios. More money in circulation. Men who had never owned anything spoke like they were one good trade away from being rich. Women talked about new dresses and new music and new freedoms.

Benjamin didn’t begrudge them any of it. He had seen too many years to believe joy was something to scold. But he also saw how thin it was. How quickly it could tear.

He spent the summer in a place with a busy main street and a bank on the corner with tall windows and proud stone. Men stood outside the bank some days and talked about loans like it was an ordinary thing to borrow money to buy stock.

Benjamin listened to a man in a straw hat explain it to another man.

“You borrow, then you buy,” the straw hat said.” When it goes up, you pay back and keep the rest. Everybody’s doing it.”

“What if it goes down?” the other man asked.

The straw hat laughed. “It doesn’t go down. Not anymore.”

Benjamin kept walking.

In late September, the tone in the diners changed. It was subtle at first: a pause in the boasting, a new edge in the jokes. Then it became clearer. Men started talking about “drops” and “corrections” and needing to “hold steady.”

Benjamin heard a clerk say, “My brother says it’s nothing,” and then, a few sentences later, “My brother says maybe I should sell.”

Benjamin didn’t sell anything because Benjamin didn’t own anything tied to the market. He owned cash tucked into places only he knew. He owned a bedroll and a few clothes. He owned his own ability to leave. But he felt the air shift anyway, like a storm coming.

One afternoon, walking past the bank, he saw a line forming. Not long yet, but longer than it should have been on a normal day. People stood close, speaking in low voices. A woman clutched a purse against her chest as if it might be taken.

Benjamin paused across the street and watched.

A man stepped out of the bank, face flushed, and said loudly, “It’s fine. It’s all fine.”

Nobody moved.

A second man came out behind him and said something too quiet for Benjamin to hear. The first man’s shoulders stiffened.

Benjamin watched the line and thought of cities burning. He thought of bodies in rivers. He thought of men who believed they were safe because they wanted to be safe.

He didn’t feel fear. It was more like recognition. The world, once again, was beginning to wobble.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been serializing Forever Man for more than seven months. That’s two chapters every week for seven months, with around five or six months still to go.

The idea for Forever Man started a few years ago. It wasn’t a big revelation or a remarkable event that triggered the idea. It was just a quiet thought that I kept picking at.

I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing, but I had the thought that I was happy and really enjoying life. It’s such a simple thing. From that thought came another thought: Wouldn’t it be great if I could live forever.

It wasn’t a story yet. It was just a thought. But I kept rolling it around in my mind.

• What would it be like to live forever?

• Would it be great or would it turn into a nightmare?

• What would be the upside?

• What would be the downside?

And the more I thought about it, the darker my thoughts became. I began to realize that living forever wouldn’t be so great. You’d have to watch everyone you ever loved die. After a while, you’d start to withdraw from society. You’d have to make sure that your secret wasn’t discovered because people are not very good about accepting anything different, anything they don’t understand and can’t explain. You’d end up moving every few years, doing your best not to be noticed. Maybe it wouldn’t be a complete nightmare, but living forever wouldn’t be nearly as great as I first thought.

Now I had a story, or at least the glimmer of a story. I added it to my mental bank of story ideas and I let it marinate. That’s another way of saying I didn’t do anything with the idea, at least not at first. But last year, I decided I wanted to drag the story idea out of the mental bank to see if I could make anything out of it.

One thing I knew right off the bat was that Forever Man was going to be necessarily long. It was going to span more than 200 years and several generations. I didn’t find that daunting, but I knew it would be time consuming and would keep me from working on other projects. Like everyone, I only have so much time and I have to decide how I’m going to spend that time. In the end, I decided to devote the time to Forever Man.

I started outlining the story in the summer of 2025. I outlined 104 chapters and started writing the first few. The going was slow. It took some time to find my footing, and twice, I had to start over because I didn’t like the way the story started.

Around this same time, I began writing on Substack. I initially thought my Substack newsletter would be about my life as a writer, but I also had the desire to share some of my fiction with Substack readers. At some point, I got the bright idea that rather than sharing stories I’ve written in the past, I’d share Forever Man as a work in progress. I didn’t know much about serializing a novel, so I kind of went into this blind. I viewed it as an experiment, and figured even if it didn’t go so great, I’d still learn a lot by giving it a try.

I recently wrote an article about some of the things I learned through serializing Forever Man, so I won’t repeat those things here. Instead, what I’d like to share is the process I go through before a chapter gets published on Substack.

As I mentioned, I started out by outlining the entire book, then once that was done, I started writing the chapters. In 2025 and the very beginning of 2026, I completed the first 69 chapters of the book. I could have done more, but I strayed significantly from the original outline, and stopped writing so I could re-outline the rest of the book. That took longer than I expected, but I’ve now written another 30 chapters or so, and am just finishing up the final five or ten chapters.

Once a chapter is complete, I revise it. This is different from how I usually write. Normally, I don’t start revising until the entire first draft of the book is complete. But for Forever Man, I wanted each chapter to be presentable as soon as possible in case I got busy and didn’t have time for a full revision before it was time for the chapter to be published. I’ve gotten used to this way of writing, but it took a little time before I felt like I had established a rhythm.

When it comes time to publish a chapter, I do another quick revision, and then produce the audio version of the chapter. Deciding to include an audio version with each chapter has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I like providing audio of the chapter. I’m not sure how many people take advantage of it, but I think it provides an alternative for folks who prefer listening to books rather than sitting and reading them.

On the other hand, producing the audio chapters can be really time consuming. I wrote previously about how I’m using AI voice simulation to record the chapters. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple a uploading a chapter and pressing a button to produce the audio.

The first thing I did after deciding I was going to provide audio versions of each chapter was to get a subscription to ElevenLabs and then I generated my personal voice clone (PVC). That required that I upload an hour to an hour-and-a-half of my actual recorded voice to create my PVC. The voice you hear when you listen to an audio chapter of Forever Man sounds very much like me, but it’s not me. It’s AI.

Initially, this saved me a ton of time. If I was talented enough to read an entire chapter through without making any mistakes—meaning I wouldn’t have to spend time editing the recording—that would be the fastest way to produce the audio. Sadly, I am not that talented. But AI is. With the first 50 chapters or so, ElevenLabs worked great. It usually took me about two minutes for every minute of recorded text. I still had to oversee the recording, making sure the text was read correctly and words were pronounced appropriately, but it went fairly quickly.

Recently, something has changed with ElevenLabs. It is slow, buffers constantly, trips over quotation marks, adds the occasional weird sound, and just doesn’t work as well as it once did. I’m not sure what changed. I’m currently working with ElevenLabs support to figure out the issue. At the moment, when I record a chapter, I can only record one paragraph at a time, and it is taking two or two-and-a-half hours to record a 20 minute chapter.

I really would like to continue to use ElevenLabs to produce the audio, but I can’t keep spending as much time a I am now to record each chapter. If things don’t improve, I’m going to start reading the chapters myself and make as few mistakes as possible.

A good thing about including audio versions of each chapter is that it gives me the opportunity to revise the chapter again while I’m recording. Hearing the chapter read aloud points out sentences that could be worded better, as well as errors that I haven’t found previously.

Once the audio is complete, I upload the text and the audio to Substack, do one final revision (this is usually very minor things), and schedule the chapter for publication. But my work isn’t done yet.

On the day that a chapter is published (every Tuesday and Friday), I post it to both my personal and author Facebook pages. Because each chapter contains a link to the previous and next chapter, I have to update the link on the previous chapter, and I also have to add the link of the most recent chapter to the master table of contents.

Serializing fiction on Substack is not easy. Substack was not designed for what I’m using it for. Even so, I think it remains the best place on the internet to serialize a novel. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes both before and after a chapter is published, but it’s turned into a bit of a labor of love. I enjoy doing it, I enjoy receiving feedback on the story, and I’m grateful for how serializing has pushed me to complete chapters faster than I normally would because I don’t want to fall behind on my publishing schedule.

What am I going to do once Forever Man is finished? I have two things in mind. First, I’ll keep publishing stories on Substack, but I’m going to stick to short stories and novellas for the foreseeable future. It’s easier on me, and I think it’s what readers prefer.

Second, I’m going to do a full book revision to Forever Man and then publish it as a book. I’ve thought about publishing it as a trilogy, but I’m not sure it would work effectively. Instead, I think I’m going to publish it as a 300,000+ word saga. I’ve never published a book that long before, but I think it’s the right way to put the book version of Forever Man out into the world. But before I get there, there are still a few chapters to write, several chapters to record, and five or six months of chapters to publish.

Thanks for following along! I appreciate you reading what I’m writing!

NOTE: Haven’t started reading Forever Man yet, but would like to? Start here with Chapter 1.

Chapter 62

One Final Visit

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

Benjamin came back to the homestead in late fall, when the leaves were mostly down and the fields had gone dull. He had been away so long that the road felt unfamiliar at first, even though his feet knew every bend. The last stretch was rutted and soft from recent rain. He walked it anyway, keeping his head down, letting the woods and stone fences do what they had always done: hide him in plain sight.

The cabin appeared through the trees the way it always had. Not grand, not pretty, just stubborn. Smoke rose from the chimney like a memory. That smoke pulled at him harder than he expected. For years he had pictured the place empty, collapsed, reclaimed by weeds and weather. Seeing it alive made him slow down.

He stopped at the edge of the clearing and listened. No voices. No animals. No axe on wood. Just wind in the bare branches and the faint creak of the porch swing, moving in small, lazy arcs.

He took another step, and then another, until the porch boards were under his boots. He had no idea what he was going to say. He had walked across continents with a plan in his head. Now he stood at the door of his own past and felt like a stranger.

He lifted his hand and knocked. There was movement inside. Slow. A chair scraping, a pause, then the sound of a latch that hadn’t been oiled in years. The door opened a few inches.

Samuel filled the gap, not all at once, because he leaned into the opening like he didn’t trust his legs. His hair was mostly white now, thin at the crown. His face was narrow and worn, the skin loose at the jaw. His eyes were the same, though, sharp when they landed, careful when they stayed.

He stared at Benjamin as if his mind had to sort out what it was seeing. “Ben,” Samuel said at last, the name coming out rough.

Benjamin nodded. “It’s me.”

Samuel’s mouth moved like he wanted to smile, but his face didn’t quite remember how. He reached a hand out, then pulled it back, almost embarrassed by the gesture.

“You’re…” Samuel started, then stopped. He swallowed. “You’re here.”

Benjamin looked past him into the cabin. It smelled like it always had, of woodsmoke and boiled coffee. The table was set for one person. A coat hung on a peg by the door, patched at the elbows. A pair of boots sat under the bench, the leather cracked.

Samuel followed his gaze and understood immediately. “It’s just me now,” Samuel said quietly. “Come in.”

Benjamin stepped inside. The warmth hit him first, then the closeness. The cabin had always been small, but now it felt smaller, as if the years had pressed inward. Samuel shut the door and leaned against it for a second, catching his breath without saying so.

Benjamin watched him. There was no disguising it. Samuel was now seventy-one, and his body carried every year.

“You shouldn’t be standing that long,” Benjamin said.

Samuel waved him off. “I’m not made of glass.”

He moved to the table and sat in the chair closest to the stove. The motion looked practiced, careful, like a man who had learned exactly how to sit without paying for it afterward.

Benjamin stayed near the door for a moment, unsure where to put himself. He finally took the other chair. The distance between them was a few feet and almost a century.

Samuel poured coffee from the pot, his hands shaking slightly. He pushed a mug across to Benjamin. The mug was chipped on the rim. Benjamin wrapped his hands around it and let the heat sink in.

For a while they didn’t speak. It wasn’t awkward. It felt like the only honest way to begin.

Samuel looked at him again, slower this time, as if he was taking inventory. “You look the same,” Samuel said.

Benjamin didn’t answer right away. There was no clean answer. He settled for the truth that could fit in the room. “I’m tired,” he said.

Samuel nodded once. “I believe you.”

Benjamin took a sip. The coffee was strong. Too strong, maybe. Samuel had probably been making it that way to keep himself going.

“How long have you been alone?” Benjamin asked.

Samuel’s eyes drifted toward the corner where a small trunk sat by the wall. “Sara’s been gone two years,” he said. “Pneumonia. Took her quick.”

Benjamin felt that land inside him like a weight. He had known Sara when she was younger, when she had laughed easily and scolded Samuel for leaving his boots on the porch. He pictured her as an old woman and couldn’t quite make it line up.

“I’m sorry,” Benjamin said.

Samuel shrugged, but his throat tightened. “She was tired before she got sick. I didn’t see it. Or I did and didn’t want to.”

He stared into his mug. “Kids came back for the funeral. Stayed a week. Then they went back to their lives.”

“Where are they now?” Benjamin asked.

“Rochester. Utica. One of them went as far as Ohio.” Samuel’s voice stayed flat, but the words had an edge. “They send letters sometimes. Money now and then. They mean well.”

Benjamin heard what Samuel didn’t say: they didn’t belong here anymore. This land that had held the family together had finally loosened its grip.

Samuel leaned back in his chair. He looked tired just from talking.

“You come back from the war?” he asked.

Benjamin nodded. “France.”

Samuel didn’t ask why. He had learned long ago not to press Benjamin for the kind of truth that didn’t fit in polite conversation. Still, his eyes stayed on Benjamin’s face, searching for signs.

“You hurt?” Samuel asked.

Benjamin hesitated. “Not in a way you can see.”

Samuel’s mouth tightened. “That’s the kind that lasts.”

Benjamin didn’t answer. He looked at the stove, at the small pile of split wood beside it, at the neatness of the cabin. Samuel had been keeping order because it was all he had left to control.

Samuel set his mug down. “I’m glad you came,” he said. “I didn’t know if you would.”

Benjamin studied him. “Did you think about me much?”

Samuel let out a short breath, almost a laugh without humor. “Ben, I think about you all the time.”

That surprised Benjamin more than it should have.

Samuel’s eyes were wet but steady. “You walk in here every few years looking the same. You sit at this table and drink coffee like it’s nothing. Then you leave again and the years keep moving for the rest of us.”

He swallowed. “I used to envy you when I was young. I thought it was some kind of blessing.”

Benjamin’s grip tightened on the mug. He didn’t look up.

Samuel leaned forward. “Now I don’t envy you at all.”

Benjamin finally met his eyes.

Samuel’s voice softened. “A man’s not meant to be alone that long.”

Benjamin felt the words hit a part of him he had been keeping quiet for years. Not because Samuel was wrong, but because hearing it from someone else made it real in a way he couldn’t shrug off.

Samuel looked around the cabin. “I’ve been alone two years,” he said. “Two years and it’s already too much some nights. I sit here and I can hear the cabin breathing. I can hear the empty places.” He tapped his fingers lightly against the table. “You’ve been doing that for… what, eighty years? More?”

Benjamin nodded and sighed.

Samuel’s gaze didn’t move. “It hurts me to think about it,” he said. “And you’re the one living it.”

Benjamin stared down at his coffee. The surface had gone dark and still. “I keep going,” he said. “That’s about all I can say.”

Samuel nodded as if he’d expected that. “That’s why I need to talk to you about something.”

Benjamin looked up. “What?”

Samuel pushed his mug aside, clearing space on the table with a slow motion of his hand. “This land,” he said. “The homestead.”

Benjamin waited.

Samuel took a breath. “I’m not going to be here much longer. I can feel it. Some days I wake up and I’m surprised I’m still here.”

Benjamin’s stomach tightened. He didn’t want to hear this, though he knew it to be truth.

Samuel continued. “When I go, the land’s going to get sold. Or taken. Taxes, debt, somebody’s argument about inheritance, something. The kids don’t want it. They won’t come back and work it. They’ll sign whatever paper gets them the cleanest exit.”

Benjamin said nothing. He already saw it clearly. A place like this didn’t survive without hands on it.

Samuel leaned forward again. “But you need it,” he said.

Benjamin’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t need anything.”

Samuel shook his head. “You do. Maybe not like you need food. But you need a place that’s yours without being yours. Somewhere you can come when you’ve got nowhere else to go. Somewhere you can disappear.”

Benjamin felt his chest tighten. He hadn’t named that need, but it had followed him for decades.

Samuel spoke carefully, like he had rehearsed it. “I want to put the homestead into a trust.”

Benjamin frowned. “A trust?”

Samuel nodded. “A legal arrangement. The land won’t be in my name when I’m gone. It won’t be in the kids’ names either. It will belong to the trust.”

Benjamin stared at him. “And who controls it?”

Samuel’s eyes held. “A lawyer. A bank. Somebody official. Somebody who lives by paper. The trust will say the land can’t be sold, not without certain conditions that won’t be met. It will say the cabin stays. The land stays.”

Benjamin felt suspicion rise. “And what does it say about me?”

Samuel’s voice stayed steady. “It says there’s always a beneficiary. It says there is always a man—named in the document—who has the right to live here when he needs it.”

Benjamin’s throat tightened. “You can’t put my name on a legal document.”

Samuel nodded. “Not your real one. Not if you don’t want to. But you can pick one. Something you can live with.”

Benjamin shook his head slowly. “Sam, that’s a trail. Paper lasts. People find paper.”

Samuel’s expression didn’t change. “People find paper anyway,” he said. “They already know this land exists. They already know our family’s been here since my great-great-grandfather bought it.”

He paused. “The difference is, right now, when I die, this place will get scattered. That makes it easier for the wrong people to take it. A trust makes it harder.”

Benjamin stared at him, still uncertain.

Samuel’s voice softened. “I’m not trying to trap you. I’m trying to give you something you can count on. Something that doesn’t require you to own it. Something that can’t be taken just because you vanish for ten years.”

Benjamin looked around the cabin again. He saw what Samuel was doing. This wasn’t just business. It was a form of care Samuel could still provide, even at the end of his life.

Benjamin nodded once. “All right,” he said. “We’ll do it.”

Samuel’s shoulders sagged with relief. “Good.”

They went into town two days later.

Samuel insisted on it being a good morning, which meant they waited until the sun had dried the road a little. Benjamin rode beside Samuel in the wagon. The horse was old but capable. Benjamin wanted to tell Samuel what it was like to drive a motorized vehicle, but he didn’t want to talk about the ambulance or the war or of what he had seen. Instead, he rode in silence.

Town had changed, but not entirely. The buildings were newer. The road was more packed. There were more faces Benjamin didn’t know. Still, the place carried the same small-town habits: people glanced up as the wagon passed, then looked away as if staring too long might be rude.

They reached the lawyer’s office just off the main street. A sign in the window named the man and listed his services in neat lettering.

The lawyer was middle-aged, thin, with a careful mustache. He greeted Samuel with the polite warmth reserved for an old client.

“Mr. Wilson,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

Samuel nodded. “Morning, Mr. Carlin.”

The lawyer’s eyes moved to Benjamin. They paused there, just a fraction too long, the way people’s eyes always did. Benjamin looked back calmly. He had learned how to hold a gaze without inviting questions.

“And this is…?” the lawyer asked.

Samuel didn’t miss a beat. “Family,” he said. “Helping me with some affairs.”

The lawyer gestured them in. They sat in chairs that creaked under Samuel’s weight.

Carlin pulled out paper. He asked careful questions, most of them practical: acreage, boundaries, existing debts, tax obligations. Samuel answered the questions. Benjamin spoke only when necessary, letting Samuel be the official voice. It was Samuel’s land, after all, even if Benjamin felt something older running beneath that fact.

When it came time to name the beneficiary, Samuel looked at Benjamin.

Benjamin had been thinking about the name all night. He didn’t want something fancy. He wanted something that could be written in a ledger without drawing attention.

He said, “Benjamin Wilson.”

Samuel’s eyes flickered with something like regret and affection. “That works,” he said.

The lawyer wrote it down without comment.

Benjamin watched the pen move. That small motion made something in him tighten. A name on paper was a kind of anchor, and anchors could be used to drag a man down as easily as they could hold him steady.

But Samuel had been right about one thing: paper existed whether Benjamin liked it or not. At least this paper had been written by someone who meant him no harm.

They signed. Samuel’s hand shook, and Benjamin steadied the page with his own. The lawyer stamped the final document, then explained what would happen next. A trustee would be appointed. Taxes would be paid out of a small account Samuel would establish. The land would be protected from sale.

Samuel listened carefully, asking questions in a voice that tired as the conversation went on.

When it was done, they stepped back outside into thin sunlight. Samuel stood on the sidewalk for a moment as if he needed to remember how to breathe.

Benjamin put a hand lightly on his arm. “You all right?”

Samuel nodded. “Just winded.”

They walked slowly to the wagon. Samuel climbed up with effort, then settled in.

As they started back toward the homestead, Samuel looked at Benjamin as if he had been holding something back.

“I did one more thing,” Samuel said.

Benjamin glanced at him. “What?”

Samuel’s fingers tightened on the reins. “I set aside a little money for taxes,” he said. “So you won’t have to worry about it right away.”

Benjamin frowned. “You don’t have to do that.”

Samuel’s voice sharpened. “I’m doing it,” he said. Then his tone softened. “Let me do something for you, Ben. I can’t follow you. I can’t fix what you are. But I can make sure you’ve got a place to come back to.”

Benjamin looked away toward the trees. His throat felt tight.

“All right,” he said quietly.

That night, back at the cabin, Samuel moved slower than usual. The trip had taken something out of him. He ate little. He sat by the stove afterward, hands resting on his knees, staring at the fire without seeing it.

Benjamin washed the dishes and set them away. He checked the latch, the window, the small things a man checked when he didn’t have much else to do. He knew he was delaying the moment that was coming.

Samuel spoke first.

“You’ll go soon,” he said.

Benjamin didn’t pretend otherwise. “Yes.”

Samuel nodded. “I figured.” He stared into the stove. “I want to ask you something.”

Benjamin sat down across from him. “Ask.”

Samuel’s voice was careful. “Do you ever regret it?” he asked. “Living this way?”

Benjamin held still. There were too many answers. Some would sound like self-pity. Some would sound like lies. He chose the honest one that didn’t require explanation.

“Every day,” he said.

Samuel’s face tightened, and his eyes went wet. He looked away quickly, ashamed of the emotion.

Benjamin leaned forward slightly. “But I also don’t have a choice,” he added. “That part hasn’t changed.”

Samuel nodded slowly. “That’s the worst of it,” he said. “If it was a choice, at least you could put it down.”

Benjamin stared at the stove. He thought of Emily. Joyce. Eleanor. He thought of the faces that had softened in his memory and the ones that stayed sharp no matter how much time passed.

Samuel cleared his throat. “I’m glad you came back,” he said. “I didn’t want to die without seeing you again.”

Benjamin felt that land hard. “Don’t talk like that.”

Samuel’s mouth twisted. “It’s the truth. I’m not afraid of it. I’m tired.”

Benjamin didn’t argue. Samuel’s tiredness was different from his. Samuel’s was earned.

They talked until the fire burned down. Not about immortality or secret societies or long chases across the world. They talked about the practical things: the roof leaking in spring, the neighbor’s new fence line, the way the apple tree behind the cabin didn’t bear much fruit anymore. It was the kind of talk men used when they loved each other and didn’t know how to say it.

The next morning, Benjamin rose early. He packed quietly, keeping his movements small. Samuel was already awake, sitting at the table, drinking coffee.

“I heard you moving,” Samuel said.

Benjamin nodded. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

Samuel snorted. “I wake up three times a night just to prove I still can.”

Benjamin smiled.

They sat together for a few minutes, the cabin dim and quiet. Benjamin looked at Samuel’s hands wrapped around the mug. They were spotted now, the skin thin. Those hands had built and repaired and carried a life. Soon they would be gone.

Samuel set his mug down.

“You know,” he said, “I used to think you were lucky.”

Benjamin didn’t respond.

Samuel looked him in the eye. “Now I think you’re brave,” he said. “Not because you can’t die. Because you keep living anyway.”

Benjamin felt his throat tighten.

Samuel stood slowly. Benjamin rose with him, ready to catch him if he wobbled, but Samuel held himself upright.

They walked to the door. The morning air was cold enough to sting. The yard was damp. The trees stood bare.

Samuel stepped onto the porch and looked out over the land. “It’s quiet,” he said.

“Yes,” Benjamin said.

Samuel turned to him. “Come back,” he said. “Even if I’m not here. Come back anyway.”

Benjamin nodded. “I will.”

Samuel’s eyes held on him, as if he was trying to memorize his face one last time. Then he reached out and pulled Benjamin into an embrace. It wasn’t strong, but it was firm. The kind of hug a dying man gave when he meant it.

Benjamin held him carefully.

When Samuel stepped back, his eyes were wet. He wiped them quickly with the side of his hand, impatient with himself.

“Go on,” Samuel said. “Before I start saying foolish things.”

Benjamin swallowed. “Thank you, Samuel,” he said.

Samuel shook his head. “Don’t thank me,” he said. “Just live. That’s all you can do.”

Benjamin picked up his pack and stepped off the porch. He walked down the path toward the trees, then paused and looked back.

Samuel stood in the doorway, small in the frame, one hand resting on the wood like it was keeping him upright.

Benjamin raised a hand.

Samuel raised his.

Benjamin turned and walked into the woods. He did not look back again, because he knew if he did, he might stop. And if he stopped, he might never leave.

As the cabin disappeared behind the trees, Benjamin felt the familiar empty space open in him. The homestead was still there. The land was protected. That was a comfort.

But Samuel was fading behind him, and Benjamin knew the truth as clearly as he knew his own name. Samuel was the last family member that had known him. And he would never see Samuel again.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

This article was originally published in August 2019 on the occasion of James Baldwin’s 95th birthday. Although I missed his actual birthdate, Happy 102nd birthday, James!

Had he lived, today (August 2) would have been author James Baldwin’s 95th birthday. If you’ve never read Baldwin, do yourself a favor and pick up the short story, “Sonny’s Blues.” If you’d like to read it online, take a look at this website. The story is annotated, but still well worth reading.

My favorite passage in the story takes place at the end. The narrator is at a club watching his brother, Sonny, play piano in a band. The gig, like the story itself, starts out slow, and then builds little by little, finally reaching it’s crescendo as the story ends.

Here’s a bit of “Sonny’s Blues” from the annotated version:

“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumphs, when he triumphs, is ours. I just watched Sonny’s face. His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn’t with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him, both waiting for him and pushing him along. But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them all on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing–he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.

And, while Creole listened, Sonny moved, deep within, exactly like someone in torment. I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, his instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It’s made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there’s only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.

And Sonny hadn’t been near a piano for over a year. And he wasn’t on much better terms with his life, not the life that stretched before him now. He and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again; then seemed to have found a direction, panicked again, got stuck. And the face I saw on Sonny I’d never seen before. Everything had been burned out of it, and, at the same time, things usually hidden were being burned in, by the fire and fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there.

Yet, watching Creole’s face as they neared the end of the first set, I had the feeling that something had happened, something I hadn’t heard. Then they finished, there was scattered applause, and then, without an instant’s warning, Creole started into something else, it was almost sardonic, it was Am I Blue? And, as though he commanded, Sonny began to play. Something began to happen. And Creole let out the reins. The dry, low black man said something awful on the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horn insisted, sweet and high, slightly detached perhaps, and Creole listened, commenting now and then, dry, and driving, beautiful and calm and old. Then they all came together again, Sonny was part of the family again. I could tell this from his face. He seemed to have found, right there beneath his fingers, a damn brand-new piano. It seemed that he couldn’t get over it. Then, for a while, just being happy with Sonny, they seemed to be agreeing with him that brand-new pianos certainly were a gas.

Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.

And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny’s blues. He made the little black man on the drums know it, and the bright, brown man on the horn. Creole wasn’t trying any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that Sonny speak for himself.

Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny’s fingers filled the air with his life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now, I heard what we had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his; that long line, of which we only knew Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. I saw the moonlit road where my father’s brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

Then it was over, Creole and Sonny let out their breath, both soaking wet, and grinning. There was a lot of applause and some of it was real. In the dark, the girl came by and I asked her to take drinks to the bandstand. There was a long pause, while they talked up there in the indigo light and after awhile I saw the girl put a Scotch and milk on top of the piano for Sonny. He didn’t seem to notice it, but just before they started playing again, he sipped from it and looked toward me, and nodded. Then, he put it back on top of the piano. For me, then, as they began to play again. It glowed and shook above my brother’s head like the very cup of trembling.”

Chapter 61

Close is Not the Same as Saved

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

By late summer, Benjamin had learned the shape of the days. They started before full light. He’d wake in a crowded billet or a drafty hut that smelled of sweat, tobacco smoke, and latrines built too close to the sleeping quarters. If he was lucky, there was coffee that was black, bitter, and thin. If he wasn’t, there was only cold water and a stale heel of bread.

The Red Cross patch on his sleeve got him waved through some checkpoints and ignored at others. The Army tolerated the ambulance drivers because the wounded had to go somewhere. The officers did not like them asking questions, and the soldiers did not like them acting brave. Benjamin had learned to keep his head down, do the work, and let people think whatever they wanted.

The ambulance was a box on wheels with a canvas top that never stayed tight in the rain. The shocks were poor, so the whole thing rattled and pitched even on decent roads. When they left pavement, it turned into a hard, constant beating, the kind that made wounded men swear or cry or go silent. Most of the time there were two stretchers in back, sometimes three if they squeezed. The floor was always stained, no matter how often it was scrubbed.

Benjamin drove when he could and rode shotgun when he couldn’t. The drivers traded off, partly for rest and partly because nobody could take a full day of those roads without their hands cramping and their teeth aching from the vibration. He’d learned the French words he needed: doucement for slow, attention for watch it, médecin for doctor. The rest was gestures and tone.

They ran routes from aid stations to field hospitals. They ran routes from shattered villages to casualty clearing stations. Some days they hauled men with bandaged heads and arms in slings, men who could still talk and crack jokes through pain. Other days they hauled bodies that were warm at first and cold by the time they arrived. Benjamin had seen enough Civil War medicine to think he was prepared. He wasn’t. The equipment was better. The killing was worse.

The worst part wasn’t the blood. It was the waiting. A man would be carried out on a blanket, placed on the stretcher, and then left there while someone argued about priorities. A man would ask for water and be told no. A man would ask where his friend was and be lied to. Benjamin understood why. Lies were sometimes a kind of mercy. Still, it wore on him.

At night, when he finally had a corner to himself, he would lie there and listen to the distant guns. The sound was not like a single battle. It was like weather that never moved on, thunder that kept rolling, hour after hour. Sometimes it was close enough that the ground trembled. Other times it was far enough that he could pretend it was only the wind.

That was when he thought about Anika. He had come to Europe for her. He could admit that now without flinching. He hadn’t come for glory or duty or any of the words men used when they wanted to feel clean about violence. He’d come because there was a chance she was here, working as a nurse with Americans, and he could not let the possibility go.

The first months, he had carried the hope like a coin in his pocket. He’d touch it when he was alone. He’d tell himself, Any day now. Soon, his chest would heat, the turtle would show itself, and he’d know he was near her. Any day he’d turn a corner in a hospital tent and see her bending over a wounded boy, calm as ever, doing the work that drew her like gravity. But the weeks turned into months and nothing happened.

He asked careful questions in careful ways. He never said her name. He learned to start with the neutral facts: “a nurse from New York,” “a Seneca woman,” “young-looking but older in her manner.” Sometimes people shrugged. Sometimes they squinted and said they’d heard of someone like that, but it was always secondhand. A story from a story. A rumor that broke apart when he tried to hold it.

Benjamin always walked away telling himself not to get pulled around by nonsense or silly rumors. Still, at night, he’d lay awake listening to the guns and feel his chest as if he could force the sigil to answer. He couldn’t.

By autumn, the hope had changed. It was still there, but it didn’t feel bright anymore. It felt stubborn. Like a man walking in fog because he doesn’t know another direction to take.

The war kept grinding on.

On a wet morning in October, they were sent toward a sector that had been shelled hard overnight. The roads were churned up, and the fields on either side looked like they’d been plowed by some giant angry hand. The air stank of gun smoke and wet soil with a sharp chemical bite.

Benjamin drove, his eyes flicking everywhere. The French countryside would have been beautiful in another life with its low stone walls, bare trees, and small farms. Now, it felt used up. Even the birds seemed scarce.

They reached the aid station after a long crawl and found men waiting under a tarp, bodies laid too close, boots touching, hands limp. A young doctor with tired eyes pointed and spoke fast. Benjamin didn’t need the words. He could read the urgency.

They loaded two men first, one with a chest bandage soaked through, one with a leg that didn’t sit right. The leg man tried to joke. His voice shook. Benjamin held his gaze long enough to let him feel seen, then looked away and shut the rear doors.

He climbed back into the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel. For a moment he sat still, listening. Far off, the guns spoke again. Close enough now that the air seemed to answer them.

He thought, not for the first time, that this was the wrong place to be looking for anyone. This was a place where people disappeared and no one had time to notice. And yet, if Anika was anywhere—just as John Seneca Johnson had told him—she would be where suffering gathered.

He started the engine. As the ambulance lurched forward, he felt the familiar emptiness in his chest where the turtle should have been. No heat. No warning. Just him, the road, and the next load of broken men.

And still, despite everything, he caught himself thinking: She’s here. She has to be.

Not because he had proof.

But because he couldn’t stand the alternative.

***

The first time it happened, Benjamin thought he was imagining it. They were stopped at a crossroads waiting for a column of infantry to pass. The men moved in a steady line, heads down, rifles slung, boots sinking into mud that had been trampled too many times to count. An officer barked something in French that Benjamin didn’t catch. Someone laughed, sharp and brief, and then the sound was swallowed by the wind.

Benjamin rested his hands on the steering wheel and breathed through his nose. The engine idled beneath him, a low, grumbling hum.

Then his chest warmed. Not pain. Not pressure. Heat, slow at first, like a coal buried under ash.

He stiffened. His breath caught halfway in.

The turtle.

He didn’t need to look. He knew. He had lived with the sigil long enough to recognize the difference between memory and sensation. This wasn’t his mind reaching for something it wanted. This was the mark answering.

He swallowed and kept his face blank. The infantry kept moving. The officer glanced his way and waved them through.

Benjamin eased the ambulance forward, heart beating faster now. The warmth spread, deliberate and certain, until it felt like someone had set a hand flat against his chest from the inside.

She was close. Closer than she had been in decades.

He forced himself to drive as he had been taught, smooth, careful, nothing abrupt. The road dipped and rose. The tires slid in the ruts and caught again. With every yard, the heat sharpened, turning from warmth into something almost bright. He could feel it even through his shirt, through his jacket, like a brand pressed just shy of burning.

He told himself not to do anything foolish, that this was no different from the Civil War, no different from the times he had chased rumors across states and borders. He still had a job. He still had wounded men waiting. If Anika was nearby, she would still be nearby in an hour.

But the part of him that had crossed oceans for this moment did not listen well.

They reached the field hospital, if it could be called that. A cluster of tents, a few rough wooden frames, stretchers laid out in rows. The wounded were coming in faster than they were being moved out. Orderlies shouted. A nurse waved them toward a clear patch of ground.

Benjamin killed the engine and jumped down before the doors were fully unlatched.

As he helped unload the stretchers, his eyes kept lifting, scanning faces. Nurses moved through the chaos with practiced urgency, women in stained aprons, hair pinned tight, sleeves rolled up. Some were young, some older. Some looked hollowed out by months of this work.

None of them were her.

The heat in his chest flared brighter, insistent. He straightened, breath shallow now. The turtle was not subtle anymore. It was a signal, plain and undeniable. This way.

He stepped back from the ambulance and let another driver take over. No one questioned it. No one had the time. He moved along the edge of the tents, then past them, toward a stand of broken trees where the ground sloped down.

The sounds of the hospital faded behind him. Ahead, the guns spoke louder. The air changed. It carried smoke and cordite and something metallic that clung to the back of the throat.

Benjamin slowed, then stopped. This was wrong.

He knew it even as he stood there, the heat in his chest pulling him forward like a hand on a rope. This was beyond the aid station. Beyond where anyone sensible would wander alone. If Anika was nearby, she was near danger—as she always had been—but that didn’t mean he had to walk straight into it.

He pressed his palm flat against his coat, over the sigil, as if he could quiet it. It didn’t respond. The heat pulsed, thumping like a heartbeat.

He moved again. The ground grew uneven, pocked with shell holes half full of water. The trees thinned, stripped bare. Somewhere to his right, a machine gun rattled, then stopped. A shell landed farther off, the concussion rolling through the earth and into his bones.

He crouched instinctively, then straightened. Men were moving ahead of him now, not in formation, not orderly. Runners, stretcher bearers, soldiers falling back in ones and twos. No one paid him much attention. In the mud and smoke, a man without a rifle drew less notice than one carrying one.

The heat was almost painful now.

He crested a small rise and saw the line. It wasn’t marked by flags or trenches the way he expected. It was marked by men hugging the ground, firing toward something he couldn’t see, and by others who lay still between them. The noise was constant: rifle fire, shouted orders, the thump of artillery.

Benjamin dropped to his knees behind a low bank of dirt. His heart hammered. He could taste blood where he’d bitten the inside of his cheek.

She was here. He was sure of it. Somewhere just beyond the noise and smoke, she was working, doing what she always did, tending the wounded, refusing to leave, trusting that the world would bend enough to let her survive. The thought steadied him and unbalanced him at the same time.

He crawled forward a few yards, then a few more. The heat in his chest peaked, sharp and bright, like standing too close to a fire. His vision narrowed. He stopped thinking about cover, about angles, about anything except closing the distance.

A bullet snapped past his head and buried itself in the dirt. Benjamin froze.

Another crack followed, closer this time. He pressed himself flat, breath ragged. Men shouted. Someone screamed.

He realized then—too late—that he had crossed into a place where purpose didn’t matter. The war didn’t care why he was there. It would take him the same as any other man who stood up at the wrong moment.

He lifted his head just enough to look. The heat flared one last time, intense enough that it stole his breath.

Anika. The word formed in his mind, unspoken.

He pushed up, meaning to move, to shout, to do something that would make sense of this pull that had dragged him here.

The shot came from his left. He felt it hit before he heard it, a heavy blow that knocked the air out of him. His legs folded. He fell sideways into the mud, the sky spinning above him.

The heat vanished.

As he lay there, the noise of the battle rushed back in, loud and indifferent. Someone ran past him. Boots splashed mud onto his coat. He tried to breathe and couldn’t.

His last clear thought was simple and almost calm. I was close.

Then everything went dark.

***

Benjamin came back slowly.

There was no rush to it. No jolt. No moment where the world snapped into place. Awareness crept in the way cold does, first a dull ache, then a sharper understanding of pain, then the unwelcome return of the body.

Mud pressed against his cheek. He tried to breathe and choked, coughing wetly. Something thick filled his mouth. He spat and tasted iron and dirt. His chest burned, not with heat this time, but with the deep soreness of broken things being forced into alignment.

He lay still, eyes closed, letting it happen. Bones shifted. Not violently, but firmly, as if guided by hands that knew exactly where everything belonged. His ribs tightened. His shoulder slid back into place with a soft, nauseating click. The hole in his side sealed itself inch by inch, heatless and relentless.

He did not scream. He had learned long ago that fighting it only made it worse.

When he finally opened his eyes, the sky above him was gray and low. Smoke drifted across it in torn sheets. For a moment, he thought the battle was still raging. Then he noticed the silence.

Not complete silence—nothing in war was ever truly quiet—but the sharp edges were gone. No rifles. No shouted orders. Just wind moving through ruined ground and the distant rumble of artillery far away, already chasing some other line.

Benjamin pushed himself onto his elbows. Bodies lay scattered around him. Some were twisted in ways that made his stomach turn. Others looked almost peaceful, faces slack, eyes half open. Mud and blood were everywhere, churned together until they were indistinguishable. And he was lying among them.

He sat up slowly, testing himself. Everything hurt, but everything worked. His uniform was stiff with dried blood that wasn’t all his. His hands shook as he pressed them into the mud and pushed to his knees.

Then he felt his chest. Flat. Cool. The turtle sigil was dark. No warmth. No pulse. No answering presence.

The realization landed harder than the bullet had. She was gone.

Benjamin stayed where he was, kneeling among the dead, until the truth settled into him fully. He had followed the signal. He had crossed every line of sense and safety. He had died for it. And still, he had been too late. Or too early. Or simply wrong.

He stood eventually, moving stiffly, and took in his surroundings. The line had shifted. The wounded had been collected or left where they fell. He recognized no one. The war had moved on without him, the way it always did.

He made his way back toward the aid station, walking slowly, head down, another survivor among thousands. No one stopped him. No one asked where he had been. In the churn of men and supplies and orders, one more bloodied ambulance driver meant nothing.

By nightfall, he was sitting alone behind a tent, scrubbing his hands in a basin of cold water. The water turned pink, then red, then brown. He kept washing until his fingers were numb.

He did not look for Anika again. He did not ask questions or wander toward the front. Whatever narrow window had opened between them had closed just as quickly. He had felt it. He trusted that feeling as much as he trusted the heat when it came.

If she had been there, she wasn’t anymore. That knowledge hollowed him out.

In the days that followed, he returned to his duties with mechanical precision. He drove when told. He carried when needed. He spoke little. No one remarked on the change. War stripped men down to their functions, and Benjamin performed his well enough.

At night, he lay awake and stared at canvas ceilings or bare boards, replaying the moment when the sigil had flared. He tried to remember anything useful—direction, distance, a face in the crowd—but there was nothing to hold onto. Just heat and certainty and loss.

He began to understand something he had avoided for years. Purpose was not protection. It didn’t make him safer. It didn’t make him wiser. It didn’t bend the world in his favor. Sometimes, it did the opposite. Sometimes, it pulled him straight into the worst place at the worst possible moment and demanded payment.

He had always believed that surviving meant something. Lying in the mud among the dead, coming back while others did not, had once felt like proof that his life still had weight. Now, it felt like a burden that followed him whether he wanted it or not.

He finished the war because it was easier than leaving early. When the armistice came, he felt no relief. Just a quiet exhaustion that settled into his bones and refused to leave. He booked passage home without ceremony, without telling anyone goodbye.

On the voyage back across the Atlantic, he stood at the rail and watched the water slide past, dark and endless. He touched his chest once more. Still cold. Still silent.

Benjamin understood then that being close was not the same as being saved. And that whatever he was searching for, it could still cost him his life—again and again—without ever giving him what he wanted in return.

That knowledge stayed with him as the ship carried him west, back toward a country that still held one last tie he hadn’t yet cut, and a future he no longer trusted to give him answers.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

I started writing Forever Man last year. It was an idea I’ve been kicking around for a long time: What would life be like if you couldn’t die? That’s what started the story, but a lot of thinking took place before I put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).

I began my journey on Substack in October 2025, and after I spent a little time on the site, I started thinking about serializing Forever Man here. Honestly, I didn’t really think it through very much. I just knew that I had a novel I was working on and thought it might be a fun experiment to use serialization to share my work, get some feedback, and force me to finish the project.

So, how has that worked out so far. Let’s talk about it.

Has serialization allowed me to share my work with readers?

Yes, but not as much as I originally thought. To be honest, I probably set unrealistic expectations about how many people would read a free serialized novel. The truth is, I have very few people reading Forever Man. There are a few who follow along pretty consistently, but the numbers are small.

I’ve been told that it can be hard to tell who’s reading, and that the data doesn’t tell the whole story. That may be true. But the few times I’ve checked the data to see what percent of subscribers are opening the email and how many people are visiting the chapter page, the numbers have kind of depressed me. I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m not a numbers guy and I don’t always understand the data, but what I can understand isn’t particularly comforting.

Having said that, I have received some wonderful notes from readers complimenting the story. One reader in particular, , has consistently restacked excerpts from the chapters. Thank you for that, Matt! I appreciate you sharing my work!

If I do another serialization (I’m almost certain I will), I’ll keep my expectations in check.

Have I gotten feedback on my work?

Almost none. Again, I think this was an unrealistic expectation. I’ve had some people check in to say how much they like one aspect or another of the story, but I think I was naïve thinking that anyone was going to take the time to truly critique my work. And now that I think about it, would I really want someone I know nothing about stopping by to tell me how I could be better? Probably not. As I learned from workshops I’ve been in and relationships I’ve had with other writers where we shared our work, critique takes a certain about of trust. That kind of trust does not automatically exist between two random Substack users.

I still invite reader thoughts on Forever Man, but I don’t hold my breath waiting for it. If it comes, great. If not, I simply carry on.

Has serializing Forever Man encouraged me to finish the novel?

Yes, absolutely. When I started serializing Forever Man, I wanted to have enough chapters completed so I’d never stress over having to write one just to meet my self-imposed deadline of publishing two chapters per week. I’ve been able to do that throughout the more than seven months I’ve been publishing the serialized version of Forever Man. Serializing the novel here on Substack has definitely worked as a motivating factor to keep me writing.

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t have finished the book anyway, but serialization has absolutely kept a fire lit under me and it helped to make sure that I didn’t abandon the book in favor of another project. In that sense, serialization has been a big success.

Any other thoughts about serializing on Substack?

I do have a few thoughts:

Length of chapters

I think my chapters are too long for serialization. Although this is not based on any sort of study or anything, I think readers are looking for something in the 500 to 1500 word range when they sit down to read fiction on Substack. My chapters are routinely 2000 to 3500 words each. In other words, I’m asking the average Substack reader to do some pretty heavy lifting, reading chapters that are usually twice as long as what they prefer to read.

Part of me wants to say that, if I write another novel, novella, or short story specifically for publication on Substack, I’ll make sure the chapters are within that 500-1500 word range. However, I have long believed that a chapter, short story, novella, or entire novel should be as long as the story requires. I don’t like writing to “industry norms” or “genre conventions.” So the most I can say is, if I serialize another project on Substack, I’ll keep the word count of the chapter I’m posting in mind, but I won’t let it determine how I tell the story.

Length of the Novel

Forever Man is a saga. When it’s done, it will be somewhere in the 300,000 word range. In my opinion, that’s way too long for a serialized novel on Substack. If I knew then what I know now, I would have picked a shorter project to serialize.

In some ways, I’m grateful I chose Forever Man because it forced me to complete a very long book in a relatively short amount of time. But the tradeoff has been that most people have not had the patience or attention span to keep up with such a long book. I won’t serialize something this long again, but in this case, it has worked to my advantage.

One Chapter per Week vs Two Chapters per Week

I chose to go two chapters per week because I didn’t think it was a good idea to expect readers to keep up with a book serialized over more than two years. Forever Man is going to end up being 105-110 chapters long and at one chapter per week, it would take two years or more to serialize it. So I chose two chapters per week.

Keeping up with a two chapter per week schedule has not really been a problem, but the conclusion I’ve reached is that expecting readers to follow along for an entire year is still too long. What is the optimum length of time to serialize a project? My best guess is three to six months. I don’t have any hard evidence to back that up, but it seems right to me.

How will serializing Forever Man change my future plans?

This is the question I find most interesting. I’ve been mulling over a few ideas, and the one that I think I like best is sticking with short stories and novellas for a while. I don’t plan on serializing my next novel, but that doesn’t mean I’ll never serialize another novel. It’s just not in the plans at the moment.

I think I also want to start looking at my Substack newsletter (Why do we call it a newsletter?) as more of a business in the future. I’ve been fortunate enough to get a few paid subscribers (Hi, paid subscribers!), but so far, I haven’t given them anything extra for their money. That’s not good business.

In the future, I think most of my projects on Substack will be behind a paywall. I’ll still have articles and the occasional story for the non-paying subscribers, but I really do want to make more of a business out of the work I put into Substack. I’ll be writing more about this in the future.

Chapter 60

A Cause in Europe

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

Benjamin had taken a job in Peoria helping unload bundles of newspapers behind a printing shop near the Illinois River. The place smelled of wet paper and newspaper ink. It wasn’t the work he cared about. He only cared that it paid cash, that it didn’t require references, and that nobody asked questions beyond whether he could lift and carry.

The men on the dock moved fast and talked loud. They complained about the cold. They argued about baseball and politics and the price of meat. Benjamin kept his head down and did his share. He liked work that let him disappear into the rhythm of his arms and back. It kept his mind quiet.

When the last bundle was stacked, the foreman wiped his hands on his apron and nodded toward the open door.

“Take one if you want,” he said, meaning a newspaper. “They’re yesterday’s, but the war’s still there.”

Benjamin almost refused on reflex. Newspapers had been full of other people’s problems for most of his life. They had a way of making him feel like a ghost reading about a world he didn’t belong to. But he took one anyway and folded it under his arm.

He didn’t read it right away. He walked to a diner a few blocks off the river and took a seat by the window. The place was warm enough to fog the glass. He ordered eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee. He ate slowly, because there was no reason to rush.

Only after he paid did he unfold the paper. He read the way he always read, not for entertainment or argument, but for anything that might touch his life without warning. He glanced at the headlines, then the smaller items. The war in Europe was there, spread across columns as if it was a storm system. Borders, alliances, speeches, troop movements. Names of places he’d never seen. Numbers that didn’t feel real or always make sense.

He turned the page and kept scanning. Then his eyes stopped on a short item tucked in the middle of a column. It mentioned American volunteers and medical workers traveling overseas. It mentioned the Red Cross expanding its presence because the fighting was growing and the wounded were piling up. It named a few doctors and a few nurses who had experience with outbreaks and field conditions.

Then, one line made him catch his breath. A group of native American nurses working near the front lines. Benjamin read the line again. Then again, slower.

He could feel his pulse pick up in a way that had nothing to do with fear. It was the first clean feeling he’d had in years. It wasn’t happiness or relief. Something closer to oxygen after months of stale air.

It could be nothing, he told himself. Native America nurses didn’t automatically include Anika. There were Indian nurses in the world who weren’t her. But the story had a shape to it. A certain tone. He knew that helping others, even across the ocean, in the face of combat, was something that would attract Anika. He may never have met her, but he knew that much about her.

Benjamin folded the paper and sat with his hands resting on it like it might try to fly away. He looked out the diner window at the street. A wagon rolled past. A man hurried with his coat collar up. Two boys ran laughing, then stopped short when a woman scolded them.

Normal life. Ordinary life. For a long time, Benjamin had told himself he wanted exactly that. He wanted quiet. He wanted to blend in. He wanted to outlast the danger and the hunger and the ache. He had gotten what he thought he wanted, and it had turned into a kind of emptiness.

Now a rumor, one small sentence, had cracked the emptiness open.

He stood and left the diner. Outside, the wind had teeth. He barely noticed. He walked three blocks before he realized he had no destination. He stopped on a corner and let people flow around him like water around a rock.

He thought about John Seneca Johnson, years ago, telling him where to look if he ever wanted to find her.

Don’t look for her name. Look for what she does. Look for where people are hurting.

War was hurt on a scale Benjamin could hardly picture. If Anika was alive, if she was still the same woman with the same instinct, Europe would pull her like a magnet.

He began to move again, slower now, thinking. By the time he reached his room that night, the rumor had already become a plan.

He slept badly because his mind wouldn’t settle. It kept running ahead of him, making pictures he didn’t want to make. Anika somewhere in a field hospital. Anika moving through rows of cots. Anika keeping her face calm while men begged her for mercy. Anika turning her head and seeing him.

He told himself not to do that. He told himself that imagining it didn’t make it true. Still, he couldn’t stop.

The next morning, he saw a sign posted on the side of a building. The Red Cross was recruiting. Not just nurses. Drivers. Men who could handle a wagon or a motor vehicle. Men who could keep their heads under pressure. Men who could follow orders without freezing when things got ugly.

Benjamin had no desire to be a soldier again. He had fought once. He still had nights where he woke hearing cannon fire in his mind. He had no appetite for killing and no pride in uniforms.

But driving the wounded out of danger? Getting supplies in? Carrying men who were bleeding and shaking and terrified? That fit him. That felt like work, not war.

He could tell himself he was going for duty. The truth was, he was going for her.

He found the office the following day, a plain building with a small sign and a flag that hung stiff in the wind. Inside, a man in a simple suit sat behind a desk and looked Benjamin over like he was judging a mule.

“Name?”

Benjamin gave him one of his safe names, one he’d used before. A name that didn’t pull anyone’s attention.

“Age?”

Benjamin picked an age that wouldn’t raise questions. Old enough to be taken seriously. Young enough to be useful.

The man asked about skills. Could he drive? Could he repair? Was he reliable? Did he drink? Did he fight?

Benjamin answered calmly. He didn’t brag. He didn’t act eager. He let the facts do the work.

The man tapped his pencil on the desk. “This isn’t a parade,” he said. “You’ll smell things you won’t forget. You’ll carry men who won’t make it. You’ll be close enough to the fighting that you’ll hear it, even if you aren’t holding a rifle.”

Benjamin nodded. “I understand.”

The man studied him a moment longer. “Why do you want it?”

Benjamin could have lied. He’d lied about worse. But the truth came up in him like a hard stone. “I need something to do,” he said. “Something that matters.”

The recruiter didn’t argue with that. He pushed a form across the desk and told him where to sign.

For years, Benjamin’s time had been flat. Days stacked on days. Jobs taken and left. Rooms rented and abandoned. He had kept going because he couldn’t stop, and because stopping made him think too much.

Now he had a schedule again, but not the kind that numbed him. This schedule had direction.

He went through training. He learned procedures. He sat in rooms with other men—farm boys, factory workers, men who had never been farther than the next county—and listened while instructors explained how to load a wounded man without making his injuries worse.

He learned the basic language of medical work. He learned how to keep his hands still when people screamed. He watched other men talk big and then go pale during drills. He watched others act brave and then break down quietly at night.

Benjamin didn’t do either. He kept himself in the middle. He blended in.

He also did something he hadn’t done in a long time. He let himself hope. Not the wild kind of hope that makes a man stupid. A careful hope. A hope with rules.

He told himself: Even if you find her, she may not want you. Even if she sees you, she may not recognize you as being like her. And even if she does, this may not be the meeting you’ve built in your mind.

He told himself all of that, and it didn’t stop the feeling. The feeling was still there the day he was assigned overseas. It was there when he stood on a dock with a bag at his feet and a line of men waiting to board. It was there in the salt smell of the ocean and the shout of stevedores. It was there in the way the ship’s metal trembled under the weight of movement.

He watched America fade away as the ship eased out, and he felt a sense of leaving a life behind, not because he was running, but because he was going toward something.

The voyage was long enough to become its own small world. Men got sick. Men got bored. Men got sentimental and wrote letters home as if they were going to die tomorrow. Men played cards and argued about nothing. Men stared at the water until their eyes went blank.

Benjamin stood at the rail whenever he could. He felt the ship rise and fall, and it took him a day to adjust. His stomach turned, then steadied. He learned how to move with the motion without fighting it.

At night he slept in an uncomfortable bunk and listened to the ship groan and complain like an old animal. He dreamed in scraps. He dreamed of Emily’s face, pale under rubble. He dreamed of Joyce’s building burning. He dreamed of Anika in the cave above the gorge, unseen, near enough to heat the sigil but not near enough to see or touch.

He woke with his jaw clenched and forced himself to breathe until the tightness eased.

When they arrived in Europe, it wasn’t a grand moment. There was no music. No cheering. Just the smell of sea water and a gray sky and a busy port full of men who looked tired before they even started.

Benjamin stepped off the ship and felt the ground under his boots. The air was different. It carried smoke and a sour smell that reminded him of blood and death.

He followed the group he’d been assigned to. Papers were checked. Names were called. Orders were given in quick tones that didn’t leave room for questions.

He caught pieces of conversation. War. Supply lines. Hospitals crowded. Ambulances needed everywhere.

And then, a day later, he received his assignment: France.

He heard it in a clerk’s mouth, tossed out like it was just another word. But to Benjamin it landed with weight. France made sense to him. Disease. Poverty. Wounded men coming down from the mountains. Villages turned into camps.

He didn’t know where Anika was. He didn’t know if she was safe. He didn’t know if she was even part of the Red Cross effort. But his gut told him he was getting closer than he had in decades.

He spent the next hours moving through offices and depots, waiting while orders were processed. He carried crates when asked. He took instructions and nodded. He didn’t stand out. He didn’t complain. Inside, though, something was changing.

For years, he had asked himself what the point was of surviving when everything worth loving eventually turned to dust. He still didn’t have a clean answer to that question, but he had a reason to move again, and for Benjamin, that was almost the same thing as having purpose.

That night, in a temporary bunkhouse with other Red Cross men, he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. He thought of Anika somewhere on this continent. He imagined her hands. Her eyes. The stubborn way she moved through the world without asking permission.

When he finally closed his eyes, he felt a small, solid belief settle into him. This time would be different. When morning came, he rose early and packed his things. He was going to France. And for a change, he felt like he was walking toward something instead of away from it.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

Chapter 59

A Habit of Living

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

Benjamin stayed in his apartment longer than he should have. The city had changed shape around him in the weeks after the earthquake. Streets were blocked with rubble. Blocks that used to be solid rows of homes were now open ground, blackened and raw, with chimneys standing alone like markers. People moved through it with carts and ropes and shovels, stepping over what used to be porches and parlors and bedrooms.

The bakery was gone. Emily was gone. For days after they pulled her out, Benjamin walked to where the bakery once stood. It was just a hole in the ground, a ruined wall, and a patch of scorched boards that still held the outline of where the building had stood. But it was where Emily had been.

The lumber yard still operated, still needed his help, but he didn’t have it in him to go to work. It seemed so pointless, going on with the same old life without Emily in it. He felt a strange need to be where she was last alive, where she had drawn her last breath. So, he went to the bakery in the mornings because he didn’t know what else to do with his mornings. He went there in the afternoons because his body didn’t understand what an afternoon was without Emily downstairs. And he went there at night because he couldn’t stand the apartment with nothing moving beneath him.

People who lost someone cried until they were hoarse. People who lost a home raged. People who had been spared walked with a jittery gratitude, talking too much, laughing too loudly. Benjamin did none of it. He moved like a man who had been emptied out.

He helped when he was asked. He lifted beams and dragged boards. He carried water. He dug where someone said dig. When a man ran up yelling that there might be someone alive under a collapsed porch, Benjamin followed without thinking, shoulders down, hands ready.

In the evenings he sat on the steps of his home and watched the light die. If anyone spoke to him, he answered politely. If anyone asked about his family, he lied and kept the lie short.

Once, a neighbor—an older man with a bandage around his head—came over and offered him a bottle. “It helps you sleep,” the man said.

Benjamin took a swallow out of courtesy and handed it back. It burned and didn’t change a thing.

At night, when he finally lay down, his mind didn’t show him the quake. It showed him Emily’s face the day he first met her, tired but resolute, her hands dusted with flour, looking at him like he belonged somewhere. It showed him the way she would knock on his door with her knuckles, two quick taps, when she wanted him to come down. It showed him the way she would lean in to kiss him when she was busy, a quick touch, like a promise that they’d make time later. Now, later never would come.

He waited for the turtle sigil to warm, for some sign that the world still had a thread leading forward. It didn’t. It lay cold against his chest like a mark that meant nothing. It was visible only when it chose to be. It didn’t care about grief. It didn’t care about loss. It didn’t offer direction.

And the Society—if it existed at all anymore in his life—didn’t show itself. No men with satchels. No serpent-hand symbols. No questions asked in the wrong tone. No shadow at the edge of a crowd.

For a while, Benjamin thought the quiet might be mercy. Then he realized it was worse. At least danger gave him a reason to move. Danger gave him a problem he could solve with caution and distance. Danger gave him an enemy.

This was just empty air.

When the city started to settle into something like order again, Benjamin sold what little he had that mattered—tools, spare clothes, a chair he’d never liked—and kept the money. He didn’t tell anyone he was leaving. There was no one to tell.

He took a train east with a small bag and a flat, dry feeling inside him that made everything look the same: towns, fields, water, sky, people on platforms waving at loved ones. He watched it all pass as if he were behind a pane of glass.

He worked when he needed to. He chose jobs that didn’t ask for papers and didn’t involve a supervisor who wanted to know who he was and where he came from. He slept in rooms where nobody cared if he left at dawn. He ate when he was hungry and not because he enjoyed it.

In Oakland, he hauled lumber for a yard that had lost half its stock in the quake and was trying to rebuild its supply. The foreman was a hard man with a soft spot for workers who showed up on time and didn’t complain. Benjamin did both. He worked ten days. Then, without excuse or apology, he took his pay and left.

In Sacramento, he loaded freight at a siding near the river. The work was muddy and monotonous. Men joked and cursed. One man asked Benjamin where his wife was. Benjamin said, “Dead,” and kept moving. The man didn’t ask again.

In Reno, he took a job shoveling coal. It was the kind of work that warmed you from the inside and coated you in black dust. In the evenings the men went to saloons and gambling houses, blowing their pay on cards and whiskey and women.

Benjamin walked past those doors and went to his room. He sat on the bed and stared at his hands until sleep came.

He tried, once, to read. He bought a newspaper and took it back to his room. The words slid off his eyes. He read the same paragraph three times and couldn’t remember what it said. He folded the paper and used it to start a fire in the small stove that warmed his room.

He tried, once, to pray. He knelt by the bed because that was what people did when they wanted something from God. He realized he didn’t know what to ask for. He didn’t ask for Emily back. He knew that was impossible. He didn’t ask to die, because he knew that wouldn’t stick. He didn’t ask for Anika, because he didn’t know where to begin and he didn’t know if finding her would solve anything. So he stood up, washed his face, and went to work.

By 1907 he had learned something about himself that he didn’t like: he could keep going on habit alone. He could do it without hope or a reason. That was what frightened him, in the quiet hours when no one was watching.

In Salt Lake City, he found work repairing rail cars, basic labor that required steady hands and a willingness to follow instruction. He lived in a small room in a boardinghouse run by a woman who watched the men like a hawk, not because she feared them, but because she had lost a son and refused to let sloppiness and drink ruin anyone else in her house.

She reminded him of Emily in one small way: she didn’t waste words. When she had something to say, she said it plainly.

One night she knocked on his door with the back of her fingers. “You keep to yourself,” she said when he opened it.

“I do,” Benjamin said.

“You eat. You pay on time. You don’t make noise. I appreciate that.” She hesitated, then added, “But you look like a man who can’t find the edge of his own life.”

Benjamin stared at her for a moment. He could have lied. He could have said he was tired. He could have said he had a hard year.

Instead he said, “I lost someone.”

The woman nodded once, as if that explained everything. “Then you need one thing,” she said. “Time.”

“I’ve got plenty of that,” Benjamin said before he could stop himself.

The woman’s eyes tightened, filling with curiousity. Then she decided not to push. “Time doesn’t fix it,” she said. “But it teaches you how to carry it.”

She left him standing in the doorway. Benjamin closed the door and leaned his forehead against it, breathing slow. His chest felt tight, and he realized, with a distant surprise, that he might be on the verge of crying.

Nothing came. The tightness stayed, then faded. He went back to his bed and lay down fully dressed.

That winter he moved again. He drifted through Colorado and Nebraska. He took seasonal work, odd labor, anything that kept his hands occupied. He kept his face plain and his name changeable. He didn’t stay anywhere long enough for someone to remember his birthday, his habits, the way he looked the same month after month.

Sometimes he woke from sleep with Emily’s name in his mouth. Sometimes he woke with the memory of Joyce, too, her face lit by fire, her hands clutching Viv, her eyes wide with fear and then relief when he came through the smoke.

He had saved them, and it had cost him everything that mattered, including them. With Emily, he hadn’t even had the chance.

That was the part his mind returned to when it wanted to hurt him. He couldn’t stop an earthquake. He couldn’t stop a wall from falling. It was a useless line of thought, but grief didn’t care what was useful.

In the spring of 1908 he took work in Kansas City for a freight outfit that needed men who didn’t mind hard lifting. It was the first time in two years he stayed anywhere longer than a month. Not because he liked the place, but because the pay was good and he could sleep without hearing Emily’s voice in every quiet corner.

He rented a room in a building that smelled like boiled cabbage and lye soap. His landlady was a widow who had learned to mind her own business. The other tenants were mostly men: laborers, clerks, a few who drank too much. They came and went. They lived loud, then vanished. Benjamin kept his routine: work, eat, wash, sleep.

One evening, a woman knocked on his door. She wore a plain dress and was pretty, but had tired eyes. She asked if he had any coal to spare for her stove.

Benjamin handed her a small sack he kept under his bed. The woman thanked him. She started to leave, then turned back. “You’re kind,” she said.

Benjamin shrugged. “I had coal.”

“That might be true, but still…” She hesitated like she wanted to ask something else, then didn’t. She left.

He stood in his doorway for a moment after she was gone, listening to the hall. He realized he hadn’t felt anything about the interaction. Not warmth. Not interest. Not annoyance. Nothing. That blankness scared him more than loneliness.

In 1909 he went farther east, back toward cities he thought he might know how to disappear inside. He avoided New York. He avoided the homestead. He avoided anywhere that carried too much history.

He ended up in Baltimore for a time, working on the docks. From there he went to Pittsburgh and took work in a steel yard. The heat and noise were relentless. Men shouted over the roar of machinery. The air tasted of metal. It was the kind of work that wrung thought out of a man and left him with only physical exhaustion, which Benjamin liked.

At night he lay on his bed and felt his body settle. His muscles ached. That ache was honest. It was simple. It didn’t ask questions he couldn’t answer.

He did not touch his chest to see if the sigil was warm. He did not think about Anika. He did not think about the Society. He did not think about immortality. Instead, he thought about the next shift, the next meal, the next day.

In 1910 he moved south, not into the deep South where the war memories still clung to him, but to places that were neither one thing nor another. Cities that were growing, full of new faces, full of movement.

He took a job in Richmond for a rail repair crew. The irony wasn’t lost on him. The railroad had been a safe hiding place once, a way to keep moving without looking like he was running. Now it was just another job.

He didn’t make friends. He spoke to women only as needed. When men invited him for drinks, he declined politely and went home. He told himself he was being careful. That he was avoiding harm. That he was protecting himself. But the truth was simpler: he didn’t want to feel anything that might turn into another loss.

In 1911 he returned to the West for a time. He wasn’t searching. He just couldn’t stand the humidity and the tight streets and the way the buildings pressed close. He went where the sky was wider and the wind moved cleaner.

He worked in Wyoming on a ranch near Cheyenne for half a season. The rancher paid him fairly and didn’t ask questions. Benjamin fixed fences, broke ice in troughs, hauled feed. He slept in a small room off the kitchen. In the mornings, the rancher’s wife served coffee and eggs without chatter.

One night after supper the rancher asked him, “You got folks?”

Benjamin took a moment, then said, “Not anymore.”

The rancher nodded like he understood. He didn’t pry. He didn’t offer advice. He just said, “Then work’s good for you.”

Benjamin agreed. Work was good for him. Work was the only thing that kept him from standing still too long.

In 1912 the numbness began to crack in small ways. Not into happiness or hope. Just into something sharper than blankness.

Sometimes he would catch himself watching a family on a street—mother, father, children—and feel a quick, fierce bitterness. Not at them, but at the fact that they still got to live inside the normal rules. They aged. They changed. They died, but the death made sense in the shape of their lives.

Benjamin’s life did not make sense. Not as a whole. Not as a story. It was just a series of endings he survived.

Once, in a boardinghouse in Spokane, he overheard two men talking about heaven. One said he couldn’t wait to see his wife again. The other said he didn’t believe in any of it.

Benjamin stood in the hall, unseen, and felt something like anger flare up. If heaven existed, he didn’t know what kind of man got to go there. If it didn’t exist, then what was the point of any of it? And if he could never reach it either way—if he couldn’t die the way other men died—then he was trapped in the middle, forever.

That night he sat on his bed with his boots still on and thought, with an ugly clarity, that he might be the only man alive who had more fear of time than of death.

In 1913 he found himself in a small town outside Indianapolis, taking temporary work repairing wagons and fences. It was not a place he meant to stay. It was just a stop.

He rented a plain room above a general store. The landlady was a thin woman with tight gray hair who watched him with the habit of someone who had seen too many drifters come through. She gave him a key, told him the rules, and left him alone.

That evening, after he washed and ate a simple supper at the back of the store, Benjamin went up to his room. He sat on the bed and listened to the town settle down: people talking downstairs, a wagon rolling by, a door shutting, then quiet.

He realized he hadn’t thought about Emily all day. The thought didn’t bring relief. It brought guilt.

He realized he hadn’t thought about Anika in weeks. That realization brought nothing at all.

He realized, finally, that he wasn’t moving because he wanted to go somewhere. He was moving because stopping made him face what he was.

Benjamin lay back and stared at the ceiling. His hands rested on his stomach. His chest rose and fell. He listened to his own breath until it felt like the only sound in the world.

He could not find purpose or direction or a reason to keep going. And yet, he would wake up tomorrow. He would wash his face. He would go to work. He would take his pay. He would keep moving. Not because he had chosen it, but because he had no other choice.

At last, in the dark, he admitted the truth without trying to soften it. He was living only because he could not stop.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

At the beginning of the year, I put together a plan outlining what I wanted to do in 2026 from a writing perspective. Each month, I post a report from the previous month looking at what I accomplished, and I tweak the plan as necessary.

This report is for July 2026.

Substack and Forever Man

This category is a good news, bad news situation. Let’s start with the bad. Other than posting two chapters of Forever Man each week (Tuesdays and Fridays), I didn’t post any other articles in July. This was not intentional. I was so busy with other things that I just didn’t take the time to write non-Forever Man articles.

I’m going to cut myself a break on this one. In July, I moved to a new state and worked feverishly on new chapters of Forever Man, as well as spending some time on Second Chances. Now that the move is complete and I’ve made progress on Forever Man, I expect to post additional non-Forever Man posts in August.

As I said, I spent a lot of time working on Forever Man in July. When I started this project in January (writing actually started in 2025), I wrote an entire outline for the story, and I wrote the first 69 chapters. My plan was to stay several chapters ahead so I never ran into a situation where I had to write a chapter just before it was due to be published. I’ve done that so far, but it hasn’t been without complication.

For instance, by the time I reached Chapter 69, I had strayed significantly from the outline. So, when I went to pick up where I left off previously, the outline was virtually worthless. So in late June/early July, I began re-writing the outline. It took longer and was more difficult than I expected.

If you’ve been following along with the Forever Man saga—and you should be—you’d know that the story takes place over a 200+ year period. To make the story interesting, it’s important that Benjamin, the main character, doesn’t repeat adventures too many times. That could get boring. But there’s only so many things that can happen to him if the story is to remain believable.

What I worked on mostly with the new outline was to give Benjamin adventures that he either hadn’t experienced before, or which he handled differently. It took some time, but I finally put together an outline that took the story where it needed to go. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t quick, but it’s done.

Of course, that’s just the first step. Then I had to write the chapters based on the outline. That is currently a work in progress. I’ve completed a few, but the going is slow. Even so, I’m making good progress and should be able to stay ahead of my Substack publishing schedule.

Austin Brandt Novels

Nothing new to report on book two (Three Roads Home) of the McNally Ranch series. Once I make more progress on Forever Man and finish Second Chances, then I’ll turn my attention to Three Roads Home. I finished the majority of the book earlier this year, so I’m hopeful it won’t take too long to complete the first draft and do revisions.

North & South: Stories

North & South: Stories was published in June 2026.

Second Chances

I started working on Second Chances again in July. It still needs a lot of work, more than I thought it needed. After I get a few more chapters of Forever Man done, I’ll turn my attention back to Second Chances.

You may recall that I wrote most of Second Chances a few years ago, and then abandoned the project. But over the past few years, I’ve thought a lot about the story and wanted to find a way to get back to it. This year, I made the commitment to finish the story and publish the book. Unfortunately, when I started working on the book again, I realized that it needs more work than I originally thought.

So, it’s going to take more time to complete Second Chances than I had planned, but I’ll still get it done. I still plan on having it published by the end of the year.

Nonfiction Books

In my last report, I indicated that I was suspending plans to write The Way Forward, which is my thoughts on how we should proceed in a post-Trump America. The book still appeals to me, but I don’t think I’m going to have time to write it. And as I’ve said in the past, I never want to take time away from writing fiction in order to write nonfiction. With other fiction projects demanding my time, I don’t foresee writing The Way Forward or any other nonfiction book for the rest of this year or next year.

Audiobooks

I have to confess that I dropped the ball on holding auditions for Road Stories. That was supposed to get done in July, but still hasn’t gotten done. I will plan on doing that in August, with a tentative publication date by the end of September.

Marketing

I’ve been talking to a couple of people about taking on responsibility of marketing my books. That may start soon. Of course, I’ve always said that I don’t want to start marketing my books until I have a proper website and a way to collect names for a mailing list. The website was supposed to be completed in June, then it was moved to July, then it was abandoned. I’d like to blame someone else for this, but the truth is, it’s my fault. I misunderstood what I was signing up for, and in the end, what I signed up for was not what I wanted.

But there is some good news. I’m looking into a couple of different companies that offer automated web design specifically for authors. I hope to make a decision and build a website by the end of August. Stay tuned!

Final Thoughts

After being so busy with other things in July, I’m hoping to settle into more of a rhythm in August. I want to write a few more chapters of Forever Man, and I want to restart work on Second Chances. In addition, I plan on holding auditions for the audiobook version of Road Stories, as well as finally building a website.

I’ll be doing some traveling in August, so I likely won’t be able to dedicate as much time to writing as I’d like. Even so, I need to get as much done as possible because I have a big trip planned for September.

Onward!

Chapter 58

Almost Like Something Normal

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

In March 1892, he reached San Francisco. He expected the city to feel like a spectacle, too loud, too crowded, and too sharp. The first thing he noticed, though, was how easy it was to be unknown. People hurried past each other with their minds on their own troubles. Men shouted on corners, wagons rattled over the streets, horses steamed and stamped outside warehouses. He could have stood still for an hour and not drawn a second glance. That, more than the buildings or the bay or the steep streets, made him feel something he hadn’t felt in a long time: relief.

He rented the upstairs floor of a two-unit house on 10th Avenue, in the Richmond District, where the air carried salt from the ocean and the nights cooled down enough to sleep. The place wasn’t grand. It was clean and sturdy, with good light in the afternoons. Inside, there were two rooms, a small kitchen, and a window that looked down onto the street where children ran between wagons and shouted at each other.

He bought basic furniture—a table, two chairs, a comfortable bed—and kept it simple. He didn’t hang pictures. He didn’t spread out. He’d learned the hard way not to turn a place into something that could break him when it was taken away.

Still, he stayed.

He felt like a different man in San Francisco. There was something about the place that allowed him to let his guard down a little, to relax and live a semi-normal life. He had been traveling so much in recent years—landing in one spot only to pick up and move a year or two later—that he desperately wanted to settle somewhere, put down roots. He knew it was a foolish, maybe even dangerous, notion. Yet, San Francisco made him feel like it was possible.

Work came easy. There were lumber yards everywhere, feeding a city that never stopped building. He hired on at one within walking distance and learned the routines quickly: unloading, stacking, sorting, hauling. The foreman was a thick-armed man who cared most about whether you showed up and whether you worked hard. Benjamin did both. He didn’t talk much. He didn’t drink on the job. He didn’t start fights. He was the kind of worker most men forgot to notice until he wasn’t there.

That was how he wanted it. He did not completely stop looking over his shoulder. He never would. But the years had taught him that fear had to be managed, not obeyed. Society Athanasia could be anywhere. So could trouble. He learned where to keep his money, how to change his name when he needed to, how to leave a place without drama. He kept his face out of photographs. He didn’t join clubs. He didn’t give anyone too much of his story.

And then, in 1893, the downstairs apartment gained a new tenant.

Benjamin noticed the moving wagon first. It backed up to the curb and the driver jumped down, shouting directions to two boys. A woman stood on the sidewalk with her hands on her hips, watching them with a look that made clear she wasn’t going to tolerate sloppy work.

She wasn’t young. That was the first thing he registered. Not old, either. Somewhere in the middle, with a confident presence that came from experience. Her hair was pinned up tight, not for beauty but for practicality. She wore a plain dress, well-made, with flour dust on the hem as if she’d come straight from work.

When she glanced up and saw Benjamin at his window, she didn’t look away. She nodded once, as if to say, I see you.

He nodded back.

That would have been enough for most neighbors. But the following weekend, he met her properly. He was on the front steps, lacing his boots, when the door below opened. She stepped out carrying a basket. Bread smell followed her, warm, yeasty, and rich. She paused when she saw him.

“You’re upstairs,” she said.

“Yes,” Benjamin answered.

“I’m Emily Locke.”

“Ben,” he said. He didn’t give his last name. He rarely did.

She looked at him for a moment. Not with suspicion. With the kind of quick assessment a person makes when they’ve learned to read a room fast.

“You work at the lumber yard?” she asked.

He blinked once. “How’d you know?”

“I’ve seen you walking there,” she said, as if that solved it. “Early. Same time most mornings.”

He nodded. “You’re observant.”

“I am,” she said matter-of-factly. “I own Locke Bakery,” she said. “We supply grocers. I’m up before sunrise most days.”

“I know Locke Bakery,” he said. “You own it?”

“I do now,” she said. “I started it with my husband. He died a couple of years ago. Now it’s just me.”

“I’m sorry about your husband,” he said.

“Thanks.” Emily started down the steps, then stopped. “You eat bread?”

“I do,” he said.

“Good,” she replied. “I’d hate to live under a man who doesn’t.”

She walked away before he could answer, leaving him standing there with the strange, faint feeling that something in his life had just changed.

Over the next weeks, they fell into a quiet familiarity. It wasn’t flirtation. It wasn’t courtship. It was proximity and routine, the way two working people learn each other without trying.

Benjamin learned her schedule by the sounds: the downstairs door before dawn, the returning steps around late morning, the brief quiet in the afternoon.

Emily learned his schedule, too. She’d be on the sidewalk when he came home some evenings, wiping her hands on her apron, and she’d say, “Long day?”

“Long enough,” he’d answer.

“Want coffee?” she’d ask, as if it were a simple matter and not an invitation.

At first he declined. Habit. Caution. A man like him didn’t accept too much kindness. But after a while, he said yes.

He sat at her small kitchen table, drinking coffee that tasted strong and bitter, and listened while she talked about flour prices and deliveries and grocers who complained too much. She didn’t ask him questions that forced him into lies. She didn’t try to pry his past open. She talked about her own life plainly: a husband who had died, a business she’d kept running because she had to, the constant pressure of being a woman who owned something men thought should belong to them.

One night, months after she moved in, she said it outright. “I’m not getting married again,” she told him, setting her cup down.

Benjamin didn’t flinch, but his mind still checked for the trap. “All right,” he said.

Emily watched him carefully. “That suits you?” she asked.

He felt his throat tighten, just a little. “It does,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “Then we understand each other.”

It wasn’t a negotiation. It was a boundary. A promise of what would not be asked.

Benjamin thought of Joyce. She had said she didn’t want to get serious too. But after they were together for a while, she wanted more. This felt different, like Emily knew herself better than Joyce had, like she wasn’t pretending about what she really wanted. That alone made him feel safe with her in a way he hadn’t expected.

Their relationship did not begin with a grand confession. It began with a simple evening when Emily knocked on his door with a plate of bread and soup and said she didn’t feel like eating alone. Benjamin let her in, and they ate at his table. When she finished, she didn’t hurry away. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and looked around his room.

“You don’t have much,” she said.

“I don’t need much,” he replied.

She nodded slowly, as if she understood more than he’d said. “That can be true,” she said. “And it can also be a way to keep from losing anything.”

Benjamin felt a small jolt of discomfort, but he didn’t let on. “Hmm, you might be right.

Emily stood and walked to his window, looking out at the street. “It’s a good neighborhood,” she said. “People mostly mind their business.”

Benjamin came up behind her, not touching her yet, and looked over her shoulder. “That’s why I picked it,” he said.

Emily turned slightly. She didn’t smile like a girl. Her smile was that of a woman who had already been hurt and lived through it.

Then she reached up and touched his face with the back of her fingers, a careful gesture, as if checking whether he would recoil.

He didn’t.

That was the beginning.

The first time they slept together, it was quiet and unrushed. No urgency. No pretending. Benjamin did not have to play the part of a young man chasing heat. Emily did not have to pretend she wanted a future built on vows. They wanted closeness. They wanted the comfort of another body when the world went dark. They wanted someone to share the ordinary with.

Afterward, Emily lay beside him and said, “I don’t want anyone to rescue me.”

Benjamin stared at the ceiling. “I’m not good at rescuing,” he said. “Besides, you don’t seem like someone who needs rescuing.”

Emily turned her head to look at him. “If I was, you’d try.”

He didn’t answer, because he knew that was true.

Years passed.

Benjamin stayed at the lumber yard. Emily built her bakery little-by-little, expanding her deliveries, hiring a few workers she trusted. Some days she came home angry because a grocer shorted her. Some days she came home tired because the ovens ran too hot and the work never ended. Benjamin listened. Sometimes he offered help, and when she accepted it, he did it without making it about himself.

He did small repairs. He carried sacks. He replaced a broken latch. Once, when one of her workers didn’t show, he helped load bread into a wagon before dawn, hands cold, the city still asleep.

Emily never told him he didn’t belong there. She simply handed him a loaf and said, “Eat that,” as if it were the obvious thing to do.

Benjamin made money and saved it. He kept his wallet simple. He did not live richly, but he lived better than he used to. He bought decent clothes. He replaced his boots before they fell apart. He allowed himself the small luxury of comfort. And he rarely spoke of Anika.

Sometimes he thought about her in quiet moments, in the way a man thinks about a life he once had and can’t return to. She existed in the back of his mind like a distant light, real, but far away. He had chased her across states and borders. Nathaniel Blackstone had been killed because of that chase. He had watched the Society turn its attention to his family and kill Albert.

Emily knew Benjamin had hard memories. She didn’t ask for their details. She only understood that he carried them.

There were nights he woke from dreams that left him stiff and sweating, and Emily would roll over and put a hand on his chest, not pressing, just resting there as if to say, You’re here.

And he would breathe.

Sometimes Benjamin looked down the street at dusk, watching the fog come in, and he felt something close to contentment. It frightened him, because he knew what it meant. It meant he had something worth losing again.

He did not tell Emily about his immortality. He did not even consider it. That secret was not something you shared and kept a relationship intact, not like he had with Eleanor. So, he lived with it in silence. And for a long time, it worked.

On the evening of April 17, 1906, Emily went to bed early. She had to be at the bakery by four in the morning. She kissed Benjamin once at the base of the stairs, not lingering. Work ruled her life more than romance ever would.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.

Benjamin nodded. “I’ll see you.”

He went upstairs to his own apartment. That was how they did it. Two homes stacked on top of each other. Two lives connected without being tangled.

Benjamin slept.

He woke to the bed moving.

At first he thought it was a dream, some strange shift in his body. Then the shaking grew violent, throwing him against the headboard. A deep sound rose from the earth, like a long growl under the floorboards. The window rattled in its frame. Something crashed in his kitchen.

Benjamin sat up, heart hammering. The room pitched. He grabbed the edge of the mattress to keep from being thrown to the floor.

The shaking lasted longer than seemed possible. He heard wood groan. He heard glass break. Somewhere outside, people screamed.

Then, slowly, it stopped.

For a moment there was silence.

Then came the sound of the city reacting, shouts, footsteps, a chorus of alarms, distant collapsing like thunder.

Benjamin was on his feet before he knew he’d moved. He pulled on pants and boots, shoved his arms into a shirt, and ran down the stairs.

Emily’s door was open. “Emily!” he called. No answer. His stomach dropped.

He ran out into the street. Neighbors were spilling out of houses, some barefoot, some half-dressed, faces pale with shock. The air smelled of dust and broken wood. Down the street a chimney had fallen, bricks scattered like bones.

“Where’s Emily?” He was talking to himself, trying to get his bearings.

“She went to the bakery,” he said under his breath. “She’s at the bakery.”

He ran through streets that had changed shape. Cracks split the ground. A wagon lay on its side. People gathered in knots, staring at buildings that had leaned, fallen, broken open. Somewhere a man cried out for his wife. Somewhere a baby screamed.

When Benjamin reached the part of the city where Emily’s bakery operated, smoke was already rising. Fire.

His body went cold.

He pushed harder, weaving through rubble and crowds, ignoring hands that grabbed at him and voices that shouted warnings.

The bakery building was down. It wasn’t simply damaged. It was ruined. Walls had collapsed inward. Timbers jutted at odd angles. Brick and stone lay piled where there had been order. Fire licked at the edges of it, fed by spilled fuel and broken lines and the wind that carried flames from one structure to another.

Benjamin slowed only because there was nowhere to run. His thoughts were coming too quickly to process.

People were already there—neighbors, workers, strangers—pulling debris, shouting names, trying to find survivors. The heat was fierce even from the street. Smoke rolled out in thick waves. The sound of crackling wood and collapsing beams filled the air.

Benjamin stepped into the chaos as if he belonged there.

He grabbed a fallen board and threw it aside. He lifted broken brick with bare hands. He dug until his fingers bled. He didn’t notice. He shouted Emily’s name once, then again, voice raw.

A man grabbed his shoulder. “It’s too dangerous,” the man said. “The whole thing could come down.”

“It already came down,” Benjamin snapped, and kept digging.

Time turned strange. Minutes stretched and snapped back. Smoke stung his eyes. He coughed until his chest hurt. He found a body and forced himself not to look too long. Another man found a second body and turned away, face ashen.

“No survivors yet,” someone said.

Benjamin kept working.

Then someone shouted, “Here! Over here!”

Benjamin rushed toward the voice.

They had found Emily near what had been the rear of the building. She was partially covered by a collapsed wall, one arm visible, her hand curled as if she had tried to protect herself. Her face was gray with dust. Her hair had come loose. There was no movement.

Benjamin stopped short. The world narrowed to that stillness.

Two men were already shifting debris carefully, trying to free her. Benjamin joined them, desperately lifting wood and stone.

They pulled her free. Her body was limp in their hands.

Benjamin knelt beside her. He touched her cheek with shaking fingers. Her skin was cool under the dust, and beneath it there was no life.

He knew it before anyone said it, but a man still has to hear it to accept it.

One of the men swallowed hard. “She’s gone,” he said.

Benjamin stared at Emily’s face and felt something inside him go quiet.

Emily had been different from what he had known after Eleanor. Emily had been years. Emily had been ordinary mornings and quiet evenings, small arguments, shared meals, physical intimacy. Emily had been a life that almost looked like something permanent, something normal.

Now, she was gone.

Benjamin did not scream. He did not collapse. He simply sat there, hands resting on his thighs, and let the truth settle into him like a weight.

Around him, the city kept burning. Somewhere, people were still calling for loved ones. Somewhere, men still dragged debris. Somewhere, fire jumped from one building to another.

Benjamin looked up and saw smoke thickening the sky. He saw flames moving along rooftops. He saw fear spreading like a second fire.

He knew what the next days would bring: chaos, displacement, bodies, hunger, violence. He knew he could help. He also knew something else, something he had learned over and over.

He could not stay.

If he stayed, someone would remember him too well. Someone would notice that he never truly broke down. Someone would watch him move through disaster with the steady endurance of a man who did not have the same limits. Someone would remember his face years later and realize it hadn’t changed.

He looked down at Emily again. Her dust-covered skin. Her still mouth. Her closed eyes.

Benjamin stood slowly. His knees felt stiff, as if his body had aged ten years in a moment. He stepped back, giving the other men room. One of them looked at him, eyes searching his face.

“You know her?” the man asked.

Benjamin nodded once. He couldn’t speak.

The man’s expression softened. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Benjamin swallowed. “Me too,” he managed.

Then he turned and walked away from the ruins. He kept walking as the city cracked and burned behind him, carrying the same thing he had carried since he was a boy: the fact that he would keep going, no matter how much it cost, and no matter how many times he had to leave the dead behind. He had found a place that felt like home, and it had been stolen from him in less than a minute.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

Chapter 57

Following a Cold Trail

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

Des Moines was smaller than St. Louis in ways that mattered. The streets emptied earlier. People noticed strangers. Conversations paused when Benjamin entered a room and resumed only after he sat down and proved himself uninteresting.

He found work on a freight line hauling corn, cattle, and manufactured goods north and south, riding long hours in cars that smelled of grain dust and animals. The work was consistent, but the town itself felt exposed, like a place where a man could not linger without being counted.

Benjamin kept to himself. He rented a small room near the yard and spent his evenings reading or staring out the window. He did not seek company. He did not speak more than necessary. He had learned that in smaller places, it was safer to disappear by absence rather than charm.

After a year, he moved again.

Minneapolis was larger, louder, and more forgiving. Lumber yards lined the river. Mills thundered day and night. The city was young and hungry, more concerned with growth than memory. Benjamin found work easily and settled into another modest room, close enough to the yard that he could walk to work and avoid unnecessary attention.

Still, it was not enough. He felt watched, not by anyone in particular, but by the simple fact of his presence. He kept his habits tight and predictable. He did not linger in public spaces. He did not drink in taverns. He did not let himself be known.

It was after work one evening, near the end of summer in 1877, that he met the Ojibwe man. They stood near the river, watching the water slide past the pilings. The man was older than Benjamin looked, with weathered skin and eyes that missed very little. They spoke first of ordinary things like the weather and the way the river changed with the seasons.

Then Benjamin took a chance. He mentioned the story casually, as if it were something he half-remembered from childhood. A woman from the east, he said. An Indian woman who did not age. Who did not die. A story people told to make sense of suffering.

The man looked at him carefully. “I’ve heard that story,” he said.

Benjamin’s pulse quickened, though he did not show it. “Everyone’s heard stories,” he said. “I wondered if anyone believed them.”

“I met her,” the man said.

Benjamin turned to face him fully now. “Where?”

The man studied him for a long moment, weighing something. “North,” he said finally. “Near Mille Lacs. Last year. There was sickness. Smallpox. She came when others stayed away.”

Benjamin asked him to describe her.

The man spoke of her calmly. Young in body, old in manner. Quiet. Tireless. Kind without softness. He said she worked without complaint and without fear. When asked where she came from, she only said she went where she was needed.

“Is she still there?” Benjamin asked.

The man shrugged. “I left for Minneapolis not long after she arrived. I do not know how long she stayed or if she is still there.”

Benjamin asked his name.

“Joseph Whitecloud,” he said. “I am Ojibwe.”

That night, Benjamin packed what little he owned. He did not sleep much. The idea that Anika had been nearby—recently nearby—made the room feel too small. In the morning before first light, he left Minneapolis and headed north, toward Mille Lacs. He would see for himself.

***

Mille Lacs was not a town so much as a scattering of settlements tied together by land and water. When Benjamin arrived, the reception was not welcoming. People watched him openly. Children followed him at a distance. Men spoke around him rather than to him.

He was ignored until a young man stepped between him and a group of boys who had begun mocking him in their language. The man was lean and strong, his posture alert. He looked at Benjamin with open suspicion.

“What do you want?” he asked.

Benjamin answered honestly. He said he was looking for a woman. A woman who did not age. A woman who had come to help the sick.

The man studied him, then asked where he had heard of such a woman.

Benjamin told him about growing up near her people in the east. About hearing the story as a boy. About Joseph Whitecloud in Minneapolis.

The man nodded once. “My name is Fire Eagle,” he said. “Son of the one the white man calls Iron Walker.”

Benjamin recognized the weight of the name even if he did not understand all of it.

“I know the woman you speak of,” Fire Eagle said. “She is not here.”

Benjamin asked where she had gone.

Fire Eagle shook his head. “I do not know where Painted Turtle went,” he said. “She was heading west when she left. That is all I can tell you.”

“What did you call her?” Benjamin asked. “You used a name.”

“Painted Turtle,” Fire Eagle said. “We say Miskwaadesi. She drew turtles for the children. Painted them bright. So, we gave her that name.”

Benjamin nodded, thinking. The name the Ojibwe had given her—Painted Turtle—left little doubt that the woman they were talking about was Anika. Benjamin thanked Fire Eagle, then turned to leave.

***

He walked for days, following roads when he could and paths when he could not. By the time he reached Fargo, winter had arrived fully. Snow made travel dangerous. Horses struggled. Wagons failed. Men turned back or hunkered down.

Benjamin rented a room and waited.

Winter settled in heavily. He found small work and passed the days reading, repairing clothing, and watching the river freeze and thaw at its edges. His plan was simple: when spring came, he would go west. That is, until he heard another story.

A smallpox outbreak the previous fall. Farther north. At St. Peters Reserve near Winnipeg. A woman who arrived shortly after the sickness began.

Benjamin remembered John Seneca Johnson’s words from years earlier. He had told Benjamin that if he wanted to find Anika, he should look where suffering gathers.

When the snow melted in April of 1878, Benjamin changed direction. He booked passage on a steamship traveling the Red River north. The journey took ten days. The river wound through flat land and marsh, the water slow and heavy. Benjamin spent most of the trip alone on deck, watching the banks slide past.

Winnipeg was busy and crowded, but he did not stay. He walked north toward the reserve, then farther still when he learned the sickness had struck deeper into Ojibwe land.

He met William Asham near the edge of the settlement. An older man with strong hands and a measured way of speaking. Asham confirmed what Benjamin already suspected. Yes, there had been sickness. Yes, a Seneca woman had come. Yes, she had helped without hesitation.

“She went to Winnipeg to find more medicine and said she would return,” Asham said. “She has not yet.”

Benjamin asked if he might stay.

Asham considered him, then nodded. “There is a cabin,” he said. “Old. A trapper built it many years ago. It is empty now. You may use it.”

Benjamin stayed. Weeks became months. Months became years.

He trapped and logged. He repaired buildings. He helped when asked and stayed silent when not. The people did not fully accept him, but they trusted him. He felt no eyes on him here. No pursuit. No pressure.

Five years passed. In 1883, William Asham told him another story about a Seneca woman who did not age. “Does that sound like the woman you came here to find?”

Benjamin nodded. “It does, but why are you telling me the same story I told you?

“I heard something new,” William said. “This woman or one like her is said to be living with the Nez Perce people in Idaho, helping them.”

“Helping them how?” Benjamin asked.

A grim look crossed William’s face. He shook his head. “The Nez Perce were moved off of their land in Idaho, sent to Oklahoma. Now, they are being allowed to return to Idaho, but they are sick and do not have enough to eat. It is said that she is helping the sick.”

Benjamin packed his things that same day. He said goodbye to William, then began the walk back to Winnipeg. He waited two days for the steamboat, and rode south, back to Fargo. In Fargo, he boarded the Northern Pacific heading west.

***

Benjamin reached Idaho in late summer, thinner than when he had left Canada and more tired than he cared to admit. From Sandpoint, he bought a horse and rode south toward the Nez Perce reservation at Lapwai, following rough roads that grew worse the farther he went. He had expected hardship. He had not expected the quiet cruelty of order imposed from above.

Rather than finding a well-organized settlement in Lapwai similar to what he had seen at St. Peter’s near Winnipeg, what he saw here was illness, despair, and control in the form of an army fort on Nez Perce land.

The reservation was not a place of healing. Sickness lingered in the air, even where there were no visible signs of it. People moved slowly. Faces were drawn. Hunger showed itself in the way men stood and the way women rationed what little they had. Everything was overseen by the fort. Nothing moved without permission.

Benjamin was stopped before he could speak to anyone.

He was escorted to the Indian Agent, Charles Monteith, a neat man with trimmed facial hair and a uniform that looked freshly pressed. Monteith listened with thin patience as Benjamin explained why he had come.

“I’m looking for a woman,” Benjamin said. “A nurse. I heard she was helping the sick.”

Monteith’s eyes widened just slightly.

“You mean the Seneca witch,” he said, his voice full of derision.

Benjamin felt the words land hard. “The Seneca witch?” he asked.

Monteith leaned back in his chair. “They say she doesn’t age,” he said. “That she can’t die. Ridiculous stories. The natives are like children, believing in fairy tales.

“She was here?” Benjamin asked.

Monteith scoffed. “Surely you don’t believe such nonsense.”

Benjamin ignored Monteith’s taunt.

Monteith shook his head. “She attacked my assistant when he refused her more medicine. Scratched his face. Wasted supplies on hopeless cases. We sent soldiers after her, but she was gone.”

“Where did she go?”

Monteith smiled without warmth. “If I knew, she’d be in chains. She caused enough trouble. We don’t need more agitators.”

Benjamin stood.

He did not thank Monteith. He did not argue. He walked out.

By the time he reached Sandpoint again, the trail was cold. Anika had been there. She had been driven away. And he had no idea where she had gone.

He had intended on returning to Fargo, perhaps go back to St. Peter’s, but that type of backtracking did him little good. He had no clue where Anika had gone, and he had no plans other than to find her. He had reached a dead end.

As he viewed the train schedule in the Sandpoint depot, he considered his options. He could go wherever he wanted. He could head in any direction. He thought over his choices, then boarded a train to Portland.

***

Benjamin finished his last day in Portland the same way he finished most days there: shoulders sore and the smell of wet timber clinging to his clothes. He stacked the final load at the yard just before dusk, nodded once to the foreman, and accepted his pay without comment. The foreman asked if he’d be back in the morning. Benjamin said he wouldn’t.

That was all the explanation either of them expected.

Rain drifted in off the river as he walked back through town, the streets slick and darkening early. Sawdust clung to the hems of his trousers. Wagons rattled past, carrying lumber toward the docks, and the air smelled of tree sap and woodsmoke. He reached the boardinghouse where he’d been renting an unimpressive room and climbed the stairs one last time. Inside, he packed his things, counted his money, and climbed into bed. He left early the next morning. No one came to see him off. No one needed to.

He crossed the riverfront before the sun came up, past the glow of lanterns and the low voices of men unloading boats. Portland had been good to him in its way. The work was honest. The town didn’t pry. A man could earn his keep and be left alone.

But Portland had eyes, same as anywhere. A man with no family and no past draws attention over time, even if he keeps his head down. Questions came slowly: where he was from, how long he planned to stay, whether he had kin back east. Nothing dangerous yet. Nothing urgent. Just enough to remind him that staying too long was never wise.

So, he did what he had done most of his life. He moved on.

He worked his way down the coast in pieces—Coos Bay, Klamath, Arcata—names that blurred together after a while. In each place he took the same kinds of jobs: logging, yard work, loading lumber, repairing what needed repair. He kept his clothes plain and his talk careful. He saved what he could. He drank less than the men around him, and, on the rare occasion he stopped into a saloon, he left early.

He didn’t chase women the way some men did, but he didn’t deny himself either. If he found a widow who understood the arrangement, or a woman who wanted warmth without promises, he took it. Then he left before anyone could decide they wanted more from him than he could give.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

Chapter 56

Heading West

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

Benjamin arrived in Louisville in November of 1871 with less certainty than he had carried into any city before. He had come south without a plan beyond distance. Cincinnati was behind him. Philadelphia felt unsafe. Chicago was no longer an option at all. Louisville sat in between, close enough to the rail lines to offer work and far enough removed to feel like a place he could disappear for a while.

The river was the first thing he noticed. The Ohio lay wide and gray beneath a low sky, its surface moving steadily westward, indifferent to the city that had grown along its banks. He stood on the wharf with his coat buttoned against the chill and watched barges drift past, stacked with lumber, barrels, and coal. The water had the color of iron, and it smelled of rot and silt.

He rented a small apartment near the river, two rooms above a shop that sold dry goods. The landlord did not ask many questions. Benjamin paid a month in advance, which helped. He furnished the place sparsely: a bed, a table, two chairs, a washstand. He unpacked his things methodically, folding shirts, setting boots by the wall, placing his money and papers in the same careful order he always used. Although doing this gave him a feeling of routine, it did not calm his nerves.

Within a week, he found work at the Port of Louisville. The port was busy and growing, fed by rail lines and river traffic that carried goods east and west. Benjamin hired on as a general laborer. He loaded and unloaded cargo, hauled crates, kept records when asked. The work was hard but honest, and it paid better than most. He took the hours they gave him and sometimes more.

The men he worked alongside were rough but not unkind. Most were veterans or sons of veterans, many carrying old injuries from the war. They talked about pay, weather, and the river. Some talked about politics, about how things had changed and how they wished they had not. Benjamin listened more than he spoke.

Each evening, he walked home along the river’s edge. At first, it was habit. Later, it became something else. He would stop at the railing and look out across the dark water, half-expecting to see something rise to the surface. He knew it was foolish. Morris’s body would have traveled far by now, carried south and west, broken down by current and time. Still, the thought would not leave him.

Some nights, he dreamed of Chester Morris. Not as he had been in life, but as he had looked at the end, slumped, silent, impossible to take back. Benjamin woke from those dreams sweating, his hands curled into fists, the feeling of responsibility sitting heavy in his chest.

He had wanted Morris stopped. He had told himself that much was justified. But wanting something and arranging for it were not the same thing, and the distance between them weighed on him now.

Louisville was a strange place in the years after the war. It had stayed with the Union, but the city carried itself like a place that had lost something it did not want to lose. Reconstruction hung over it like a bad smell. Federal authority was resented. Old hierarchies strained against new laws. Benjamin saw it every day.

Black men worked the docks alongside white men, but they were paid less and spoken to harshly. Some foremen treated them with open contempt. Fights broke out over nothing. Insults turned physical quickly, and when they did, no one seemed surprised.

Benjamin kept his head down and his mouth shut. He had learned long ago when to speak and when not to. Still, there were moments when the anger in him stirred, sharp and unwelcome.

The worst came in the summer of 1872. It was late afternoon, the heat heavy and wet. Work had slowed, and a few men had gathered near the warehouses, resting in the shade. Voices rose suddenly. Benjamin turned and saw a group of white men surrounding a Black man near the edge of the yard. Words were exchanged, the talk getting louder. Someone laughed. Someone shoved.

The first punch came out of nowhere. The black man went down, and they fell on him. Fists, boots, shouting. It happened fast and then slowed, stretching into something ugly and deliberate. No one stepped in. A few men turned away. Others watched with tight faces and said nothing.

Benjamin moved before he had time to think better of it. He pushed through the edge of the group and shouted for them to stop. One man turned on him, eyes wild, breath sour with drink.

“Mind your business,” the man said.

Benjamin opened his mouth to answer, but the moment passed him by. A heavy boot came down on the black man’s head, and something changed in the sound that followed. The body stopped moving. Someone cursed. Another man backed away, suddenly pale.

The crowd broke apart as quickly as it had formed.

Benjamin stood there, breathing hard, his hands useless at his sides. The man on the ground did not move. Blood pooled beneath his head, dark against the dirt. No one knelt to help. No one called for a doctor.

Later, someone said the man had died. No charges were brought. Typical.

Benjamin did not sleep that night. He sat at his table with the lamp turned low and stared at the wall. He thought of the war, of men dying for causes they barely understood. He thought of Albert, of how easily life had been taken from him, drained away as if it meant nothing. He thought of Morris, and of the way revenge had promised something it could not deliver.

By morning, he knew he could not stay. Louisville paid well, but it asked too much. It asked him to watch and say nothing, to accept violence as ordinary. He had done enough of that already in his life.

He finished out the week, collected his pay, and gave notice. The foreman barely looked up when Benjamin told him he was leaving.

“Plenty of work elsewhere,” the man said.

Benjamin packed his things that night. He did not walk to the river. Instead, he sat in his room and tried to understand what he wanted next. He was tired of reacting, tired of drifting from place to place without purpose. He did not expect peace—not anymore—but he wanted a place where the weight on his chest might ease, even slightly.

St. Louis came to mind. It was larger than Louisville, more established, with work that paid well and enough movement to allow a man to blend in.

Benjamin left Louisville the next morning with a single bag and no intention of looking back. As the train carried him west, he watched the land roll past and felt the Ohio recede from him mile by mile. The dreams did not stop, but they softened. The image of Morris floating past on the current began to fade.

He did not know it yet, but Louisville would mark a line in his life. Everything before it had been about survival. Everything after would be about choice. And with the change, Benjamin allowed himself to hope—quietly, cautiously—that he might yet find a place where the river did not follow him home.

***

St. Louis met Benjamin with noise and motion. The Mississippi was wider than the Ohio, darker too, carrying whole trees in its current when the water ran high. The city rose along its western bank in layers: wharves, warehouses, rail spurs, brick buildings climbing up from the river as if they had been stacked there deliberately. Steamboats crowded the docks, their whistles cutting through the air at all hours. Freight moved constantly: barrels, timber, iron, grain.

Benjamin arrived in August of 1872 and found work within three days. The bridge being built dominated everything. Even before he understood its scale, he could feel it pulling the city toward it. Men talked about it in boarding houses, in taverns, on the docks. It was the first bridge of its kind, they said. Steel arches. A span no one had attempted before. A bridge that would finally tame the river.

Benjamin hired on with a construction crew working on the eastern approach. The work was dangerous and relentless. Men labored high above the water, hauling materials, setting rivets, guiding massive components into place. Accidents were common. Falls happened. Equipment failed. More than once, Benjamin watched a man carried off the site, broken or dead.

The pay reflected the risk. Benjamin kept his head down, did what he was told, and earned a reputation for being reliable. He did not rush. He did not complain. He listened carefully and followed instructions. The foremen appreciated that. They gave him consistent work.

His days settled into a rhythm: long hours on the bridge, evenings in a rented room, meals taken quickly and without ceremony. He slept deeply most nights, exhausted in a way that felt earned rather than punishing.

St. Louis felt different from Louisville. There were still racial tensions, still arguments and fights, but the city did not feel consumed by them. Reconstruction existed here too, but it did not dominate every interaction. People were more concerned with trade, expansion, and money. The bridge itself seemed to absorb much of the city’s attention, giving men something forward-looking to believe in.

Benjamin did not go looking for company, but it found him anyway. He met Ida Lee Brophy on a late afternoon walk along the riverfront. He had finished work early due to a delayed shipment and decided to stretch his legs before heading back to his room. Ida stood near the railing, watching the water with an expression that suggested she was thinking rather than sightseeing. She spoke first.

“Do you know how many men have died building that bridge?” She did not turn to look at Benjamin as she spoke.

Benjamin paused, then answered honestly. “I know it’s more than they admit.”

She nodded, as if he had confirmed something she already believed. Then she turned to face him.

Ida was forty-eight years old, though she carried herself with an ease that made age feel irrelevant. Her hair was dark with streaks of gray she did not bother to hide. She dressed well but plainly, favoring practical clothes over ornament. Her eyes were sharp, and there was an amusement behind them that felt inviting.

“My husband died last year,” she said, as if continuing an earlier conversation. “Not on the bridge. Pneumonia. They printed his name in the papers, said he was a titan of industry. Wrote a whole story about him. But was he really any more important that the men that died on that bridge to make someone else rich?”

Benjamin did not know how to respond, so he did not pretend to. He listened.

They walked together along the river, talking about small things at first. The heat. The noise. The way the city never seemed to sleep. Ida asked him about his work, and he answered, saying he worked on the bridge. That made Ida laugh.

She told him about her husband’s business dealings and the money she had inherited. She spoke of it without pride or embarrassment, simply as a fact.

“I spend most of it now trying to make the world less foolish,” she said.

Benjamin smiled at that.

Their walks became regular. Sometimes they spoke of politics. Ida was open about her support for women’s suffrage. She attended meetings, funded pamphlets, argued with men who dismissed her outright. Benjamin did not argue with her. He listened and asked questions. He found that he agreed with much of what she said. She liked that he did not treat her opinions as a novelty.

The relationship grew quietly at first, then faster. They began having dinner together. Then nights. It was not a secret, exactly, but it was noticed. A woman of Ida’s age and standing openly involved with a man who appeared much younger raised eyebrows. Ida did not seem to care.

Benjamin did, not because of judgment, but because of time. He knew how this would end. He always did. Still, he allowed himself to enjoy it. Ida was intelligent, warm, and decisive. She challenged him without trying to control him. She did not ask about his past in ways that demanded answers. When he deflected, she let him.

For a while, it was easy to pretend that this could last. Benjamin supported her causes openly. He attended gatherings with her, stood beside her when she spoke, lent his quiet presence to her work. She appreciated that he did not try to overshadow her or distance himself from her advocacy. It made him different from the men she was used to.

As months passed, her questions shifted. She did not ask for marriage at first. She spoke instead of shared futures. Of traveling together. Of homes. Of permanence. She asked where he saw himself in five years, ten.

Benjamin felt the familiar tightening in his chest. He delayed. He changed subjects. He told himself he could find a way through this that did not involve leaving her behind. But the truth remained, unmovable.

The bridge opened on July 4, 1874. The city celebrated. Fireworks lit the sky. Crowds gathered on both sides of the river. Benjamin stood among them, watching the arches glow in the light, feeling a strange mixture of pride and detachment. He had helped build something that would last, something solid and permanent.

That night, he told Ida he was leaving. He did not make excuses. He did not offer half-truths. He said only that he could not give her what she wanted, that staying would be a lie. Ida listened without interrupting. When he finished, she nodded once.

“I thought as much,” she said. “I hoped otherwise.”

They did not argue. They did not bargain. They spent the night together one last time, not clinging or pretending. In the morning, they said goodbye. There were no tears or recrimination. Benjamin set out for Iowa that afternoon.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

Chapter 55

Covering Tracks

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

For a few seconds, nobody moved. The only sound was the fire breathing in the hearth, low and crackling. It made the room feel wrong, as if the cabin hadn’t gotten the news. Chester Morris sat in the chair, shoulders rounded forward, head tilted down, lifeless.

Dennis stood with his mouth open. His face had gone gray under the lamplight, like all the color had drained out of him at once. He looked at Morris, then looked at the poker he’d dropped on the floor, then looked back at Morris again, as if his mind couldn’t keep the pieces in one picture.

Benjamin watched the blood start to move. A line formed at Morris’s hairline, ran down the side of his face, and collected at his jaw before dropping onto his collar. It didn’t gush. It didn’t spray. It just kept coming, constant and quiet.

“I didn’t…” Dennis said. His voice cracked. “I didn’t mean…”

Ronald moved first. He stepped to Dennis and grabbed his shoulders, turning him slightly away from Morris, the way a man might turn a child away from a dead animal in the road.

“Don’t,” Ronald said. “Don’t stare at him. Dennis, look at me.”

Dennis’s eyes flicked toward Ronald for half a second, then went back to Morris as if pulled.

“He’s dead,” Dennis whispered.

Ronald swallowed hard. Benjamin saw the muscle in Ronald’s throat jump. Ronald was trying to be calm, but his hands trembled where they held Dennis.

“Everything’s okay,” Ronald said, though he didn’t sound like he believed it. He leaned past Dennis and stared at Morris’s stillness. “It’s okay.”

“But he’s dead?” Dennis asked.

“He’s gone,” Ronald said. “But it’s okay.”

Dennis’s knees bent. Ronald tightened his grip so Dennis wouldn’t drop. Dennis’s breathing turned quick and thin, the breath of a man running without moving. His eyes went wide and wet. “I killed him,” he said, louder now, like he needed it to be heard by somebody who could take it back.

“You didn’t mean to,” Ronald said. “You were trying to shut him up. That’s all.”

Dennis jerked his head. “I hit him. I hit him hard.” His voice rose, sharp and panicked.

Ronald pulled him closer, forearm across Dennis’s back like a brace. “You didn’t mean it. You didn’t know this would happen.”

Dennis started to shake. Not a little tremble. A full-body shaking that looked like cold, though the room was warm.

Benjamin’s chest tightened, the old reflex of leaving, of running, of stepping away before anyone could connect him to what had happened. He had lived on that reflex for decades. It was one of the few habits he trusted.

But he couldn’t do it now. If he panicked, they would panic. If he ran, they would run. If they ran, someone would see them. And if someone saw them, questions would start. It could pull Benjamin into something he couldn’t outrun: jail, a cell, men watching his body too closely, his secret exposed.

Benjamin forced himself to breathe slow. He made his voice flat, calm, and solid.

“Dennis,” he said. “Listen to me.”

Dennis’s eyes snapped to him. A desperate look. Like a man reaching for a rope thrown into deep water.

“We can’t stay here like this,” Benjamin said. “We do the next thing, and then the next thing. That’s how we get through it.”

Ronald kept his grip on Dennis but looked at Benjamin. His eyes were cautious, but there was relief in them too, relief that someone was taking charge.

“What’s the next thing?” Ronald asked.

“We can’t leave him here,” Dennis said. “My brother…”

Benjamin interrupted. “We’re not going to leave him.”

Dennis’s desperation seemed to get a second wind. “I’m going to prison,” he said. “They’ll hang me.” What calm Ronald had instilled in him was now gone.

Ronald’s arms tightened around Dennis. “Nobody’s hanging anybody,” he said, though it sounded like something he was trying to convince himself of.

Benjamin breathed in deeply and let out a long sigh. He held up his hands like he was trying to calm a child or a wild animal. “Dennis, you’re not going to jail.” His voice was flat and even. “Not if you do what I tell you.”

Dennis swallowed hard. His shoulders slumped a bit. “What do we do?”

Benjamin looked toward the dark window, toward the Ohio River beyond the trees.

“We put him in the water,” Benjamin said. “We make it look like he fell. Like he drowned.”

Dennis blinked rapidly. “We can do that?” It wasn’t clear if Dennis was asking a question or confirming what Benjamin had just said. Either way, the panic was out of his voice. He was starting to breathe normally again.

“We can,” Benjamin said. “And we will.”

Ronald stared at Benjamin for a long moment, weighing him, thinking about what kind of man Benjamin was, and whether following him would be their salvation or the start of something worse.

Benjamin saw the gears working in Ronald’s head. He nodded confidently, though confidence was not something he was feeling.

Then Ronald nodded as well. “All right,” he said. “Tell us what to do.”

Benjamin pointed at the door. “First thing is we don’t raise our voices. We don’t run. We don’t act like men who just killed somebody.”

Dennis’s eyes filled, then spilled. He wiped his face with the heel of his hand, smearing tears across his cheeks.

Benjamin went to the chair with careful steps and crouched slightly, looking at Morris’s face without touching it. Morris’s eyes were half-open, unfocused. Benjamin felt a small, ugly satisfaction, and he hated himself for it. Albert’s face rose in his mind, young, ordinary, not immortal, not special, just unlucky to share Benjamin’s name.

He pushed the thought away, not because it didn’t matter, but because he needed to stay clear-headed.

Benjamin straightened. “We move him,” he said.

Ronald swallowed. “How?”

“Under the arms,” Benjamin said. “Dennis takes the feet.”

Dennis recoiled. “I can’t…”

“You can,” Benjamin said, and his voice hardened just a little. “You can because the other choice is leaving him here, and that’s worse.”

Dennis stared at him, his breathing picked up pace again, then he nodded.

They went to Morris together.

Ronald hooked his hands under Morris’s shoulders. Morris’s head slumped sideways, cheek pressing against his collarbone. Dennis grabbed Morris’s ankles with both hands like he was afraid to touch him too much. Benjamin took Morris around the middle, one arm under the back, the other around the ribs.

Morris was heavy. Dead weight in the truest sense. His body bent where it wanted, not where they needed it. They had to stop twice just to adjust their grip.

Dennis gagged once, turned his head, and swallowed hard.

“Don’t throw up,” Ronald said. Not unkindly. Just blunt.

Dennis made a choked sound. “He’s… he’s soft,” he said, horrified.

“He’s just a man,” Ronald said. “A dead man.”

Benjamin kept his eyes on the floorboards, on the threshold, on the job. When they dragged Morris through the doorway, the night air hit them cool and wet.

Outside, the world felt too open. Too big. The trees stood black against a darker sky. The river was somewhere close, a moving sound, low and steady like a distant train.

Dennis stumbled but caught himself.

“Keep it together,” Ronald said.

Dennis nodded hard, lips pulled tight.

They moved down the slope toward the river. The ground was uneven. Leaves slick underfoot. Benjamin could feel his boots sliding and corrected each step carefully.

When they reached the bank, the river looked like oil, dark and thick. It moved with slow confidence, as if nothing in the world could interrupt it.

“On three,” Benjamin said.

Ronald and Dennis nodded.

They pushed together.

Morris slid into the water with a dull splash. For a moment his body floated, turning once on its side as the current caught it. His face broke the surface briefly, pale and slack, then rolled away. He drifted downstream without any struggle at all.

Dennis made a choking noise and stepped back hard, as if the sight might grab him. He brought his hand to his mouth.

“It’s done,” Ronald said, though his voice didn’t sound sure. “You hear me, Dennis. It’s over.”

Dennis nodded, his hand still over his mouth.

Benjamin watched until Morris became just another dark shape in the current, then disappeared completely. He turned back to Ronald and Dennis.

“This never happened,” Benjamin said.

Ronald nodded once. Dennis nodded too fast, too desperate.

Benjamin stepped closer to Dennis. Not in a threatening way, but with confidence, like he meant business and Dennis needed to hear him. “Dennis, you listen to me.” His voice was steeled, insistent “You tell no one. This never happened. You weren’t here tonight. You didn’t see me and I didn’t see you. None of us can ever talk about this. Ever. Understood?”

Ronald put his hand on Dennis’s shoulder. “We understand,” he said. “Right, Dennis?”

“Right,” Dennis said. “We understand.”

They walked back toward the cabin in silence. The fear had burned some of the noise out of them. Dennis’s steps were clumsy, like he was walking in boots that weren’t his.

At the edge of town, they split without ceremony. No friendly words. No handshake. Just men trying to get away from the place where their lives had turned.

Ronald kept a hand on Dennis’s shoulder as they went, guiding him like a younger brother.

Benjamin watched them disappear into the dark and felt a hard twist inside himself. He had pulled them into this. He had bought them drinks. He had chosen them because they were big and willing. He had told himself he needed help. That Morris had to be stopped. That Morris deserved it.

Now Dennis would live with this. Ronald too. Benjamin could run from places. He could leave faces behind. Dennis couldn’t leave his own mind.

Benjamin returned to the Gibson House alone.

The hotel was quiet at that hour, but not asleep. A lamp burned behind the desk. Someone coughed in a distant room.

Benjamin climbed the stairs carefully, not rushing. He didn’t want to look like a man fleeing anything.

In his room, he packed fast. He didn’t pack like a traveler enjoying the work of folding. He packed like a man expecting a knock at the door at any minute. Shirt. Socks. Spare trousers. His shaving kit. The few papers he kept close. His money. He checked his pockets twice, then checked them again. His hands were cooperative, but his mind kept jumping ahead, imagining Morris’s people—if he had any—when they realized he hadn’t returned to Philadelphia.

Benjamin took a deep breath and sat on the edge of the bed for a moment. He felt sick. Not from fear. From the fact that this had become his life: hiding, running, covering tracks. Men hunting him for his blood.

Benjamin put his face in his hands and pressed his palms hard against his eyes. He saw Joyce and Viv in the firelight, their faces streaked with soot. He saw Albert hanging upside down in a barn, blood drained clean. He saw Morris’s slack face floating in the river.

He lowered his hands and stared at the wall. He had wanted justice. He had wanted revenge. He had told himself it was righteous. Now it felt like mud, like something that stuck and wouldn’t wash away. Morris deserved to be punished for what he had done to Albert, but this didn’t feel like the punishment he had imagined. It was too messy. Too many loose ends. Too many other people destroyed in the process.

He stood again and finished packing.

Before dawn he left the Gibson House and moved to a rooming house across town. It wasn’t nice. The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and chamber pots. The bed was uncomfortable. The blankets thin. But it wasn’t connected to Chester Morris or Benjamin Watkins. And that was the point.

He slept a few hours and woke to pale morning light creeping through the window. He washed his face, combed his hair, and looked at himself in the small mirror above the washstand.

He looked like a man in his late twenties or early thirties who hadn’t slept well. Not like a murderer, whatever that looked like. He was the kind of man the world ignored, which was exactly what he needed.

He was at the station before the sun was completely up. He kept his head down. He didn’t linger. He bought a ticket and listened to the announcements, watched the people, watched the uniforms. No one looked at him twice.

The train he chose was the Louisville & Nashville line bound for Louisville, because it was the first leaving the station that day. Louisville would get him farther south without putting him back into the places where the war still lived in the minds and on the tongues of the locals, or so he hoped. It would put miles between him and Cincinnati. Miles between him and the river.

He stepped aboard the train without hurry, found a seat, stowed his bag, and sat with his hands on his knees like an ordinary traveler. As the train pulled out, Cincinnati slid past the window: brick buildings, muddy streets, people starting their day as if nothing had happened. Benjamin watched it recede and felt the strange combination of relief and dread.

Relief, because he was moving again.

Dread, because he knew this wouldn’t end.

Morris was dead, but Morris had not been alone. Men like him didn’t work without backing. They didn’t take risks without money behind them. Benjamin had cut one thread, but the web remained.

He leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. He told himself he would not think about Dennis. He told himself he would not think about Morris’s body in the river. He told himself he would not think about the way the night had sounded.

But the images came anyway. When he opened his eyes again, the city was gone and the countryside had taken its place. Fields. Trees. Distant barns. Ordinary life. Benjamin watched it roll by and understood something he didn’t want to understand: He could run. He could vanish. He could start over. But the past didn’t vanish with him. It rode beside him, quiet as a shadow. And somewhere down the line—weeks, months, maybe years—someone would come looking again.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

Chapter 54

Setting a Trap

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

The tavern sat a block off the river, low-ceilinged and loud, its windows fogged from heat and breath. Benjamin had passed it twice on his way back to the Gibson House before finally stepping inside. He did not need the drink. What he needed was people, ordinary men who would not ask careful questions, who would not notice how closely he watched the door.

The place smelled of stale beer and tobacco smoke. A fiddler scraped at a tune near the back wall, badly and without apology. Men crowded the tables, boots hooked on chair rungs, voices rising and falling in uneven bursts. No one looked twice at Benjamin when he entered, which was what he wanted.

He took a seat at the bar and ordered whiskey. The bartender slid the glass toward him without comment. Benjamin took a small sip and let the burn settle. He had learned over the years not to drink fast when he was thinking.

To his right, a pair of men leaned shoulder to shoulder over their drinks, laughing hard at a joke one of them had told. Benjamin smiled to see two men having a laugh in such an exuberant fashion. One of the men noticed him smiling and turned toward him.

“You look like you could use company,” the larger of the two said, turning on his stool. He was broad through the chest and shoulders, his shirt pulled tight across him, sleeves rolled to the elbow. His face was open, almost boyish, with a heavy brow and a jaw that looked like it had been broken once and healed crooked.

The man beside him was nearly as big but carried himself differently. He was less loose, more watchful. He had a thick mustache and eyes that flicked from Benjamin to the bartender to the door and back again, as if he’d learned the habit from hard experience.

“Don’t mind Dennis,” the mustached man said. “He talks to fill space.”

Dennis grinned at that, unoffended. “Someone’s got to.”

Benjamin smiled faintly. “I don’t mind,” he said.

“I’m Ronald,” the mustached man said, offering a hand. “This is Dennis.”

Benjamin shook both their hands. Dennis’s grip was enthusiastic, bordering on painful. Ronald’s was firm and measured.

Benjamin introduced himself.

Dennis squinted at him. “You ain’t from around here.”

“No,” Benjamin said. “Just passing through.”

Ronald nodded. “That explains the shoes. Too clean.”

Dennis looked down at Benjamin’s boots and laughed. “He’s right. You ain’t walked Cincinnati enough yet.”

Benjamin took another sip of whiskey. “I’m working on it.”

Dennis slapped the bar. “That’s the spirit.”

Ronald leaned back on his stool, studying Benjamin with mild curiosity. “What brings you through?”

“Work,” Benjamin said, which was true enough. “And time.”

Dennis frowned slightly. “Time for what?”

Benjamin shrugged. “To wait.”

Dennis opened his mouth, then closed it again, as if deciding not to push. Ronald caught the exchange and stepped in smoothly.

“You eat yet?” Ronald asked.

“Not tonight.”

Ronald raised two fingers at the bartender. “Three whiskeys,” he said. “And whatever chili’s left.”

Dennis beamed and raised his drink in a toast. “I’ll drink and eat to that.”

Benjamin didn’t object. He had learned long ago that refusing generosity often made men suspicious.

They drank. The chili arrived in chipped bowls, thick and meaty. Dennis talked while he ate, telling a rambling story about a barge that had broken loose upriver and smashed into a pier. Ronald corrected him occasionally, quietly, without embarrassment.

“You work the river?” Benjamin asked.

“Sometimes,” Ronald said. “When there’s work.”

Dennis swallowed a mouthful of chili. “And when there ain’t, we make do.”

“With what?” Benjamin asked.

Dennis spread his hands. “This and that.”

Ronald smiled thinly. “He means labor. Moving things. Guarding things. Standing around looking like we mean business.”

Dennis nodded enthusiastically. “We do that real good.”

Benjamin let the silence sit for a moment. He could feel the shape of the conversation shifting, the way it always did when men sensed opportunity.

He set his empty glass on the bar. “I might have use for that,” he said.

Dennis’s eyes lit up. Ronald didn’t move, but his attention sharpened.

“Depends what you mean,” Ronald said carefully.

“I mean that someone is looking for me,” Benjamin said. “And I’d rather he didn’t find me alone.”

Dennis laughed. “That’s it?”

Ronald glanced at Dennis, then back at Benjamin. “You talking about a debt?”

“No.”

“A jealous husband?”

“No.”

“A lawman?”

Benjamin shook his head. “Just a man who thinks he’s entitled to something that isn’t his.”

Dennis snorted. “They always do.”

Benjamin met Ronald’s gaze. “I don’t want trouble. I just want witnesses. And a little muscle, if it comes to that.”

Dennis puffed up slightly. “We got muscle.”

Ronald held up a hand. “Slow down.”

He studied Benjamin’s face, searching for something like panic, bravado, maybe desperation. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him.

“You buying?” Ronald asked.

Benjamin slid a coin across the bar. “For the night.”

Dennis grinned. “I like him.”

Ronald picked up his glass again. “We can talk,” he said. “But not here.”

“Fair enough,” Benjamin said.

They drank in companionable silence for a while after that. Dennis grew louder, friendlier, telling a story about a dog he’d once owned that had bitten a tax collector. Ronald laughed at the right places, keeping Dennis from drifting too far.

Benjamin watched them both. Big men. Simple pleasures. Loyal to each other in a way that felt earned.

When the fiddler stopped playing and the room shifted toward closing, Ronald stood and stretched.

“You staying nearby?” he asked.

“At the Gibson House,” Benjamin said.

Dennis whistled. “Fancy.”

***

They stopped just outside the tavern, the door swinging shut behind them with a thud that cut off the noise inside. The night air was cooler, carrying the smell of the river. A gas lamp flickered at the corner, throwing uneven light across the street.

Benjamin’s demeanor became serious. “So, are you both in?”

“Let’s be clear first,” Ronald said. His tone was calm, practical. “What you’re asking for isn’t drinking company.”

“No,” Benjamin said. “It isn’t.”

Dennis rocked slightly on his heels, hands shoved into his pockets. “You said someone’s after you, and you want us to help you deal with him.”

“That’s right.”

“And you want us nearby,” Dennis said. “Just in case.”

Benjamin nodded. “I want you with me. Same room.”

Dennis blinked. “Same room?”

Ronald gave him a look. “Means we’re there if something happens.”

Dennis considered this, then shrugged. “Fine by me.”

Benjamin reached into his coat and took out his wallet. “Twenty dollars each,” he said. “Four days. I pay half up front.”

Dennis’s eyebrows lifted. “Each?” he asked.

“Each.”

Ronald didn’t react right away. He did the math silently, then nodded once. “Four days,” he said. “Another four after that costs you another twenty per man.”

Benjamin didn’t hesitate. “Understood.”

Ronald extended his hand. Benjamin shook it.

Dennis watched for a moment, then stuck his own hand out. His grip was hard and eager. “We stay at the Gibson House,” he said. “We don’t leave you alone.”

“That’s the idea.”

Ronald tilted his head. “If this man shows up?”

“We handle it,” Benjamin said. “Together.”

Dennis grinned. “Good.”

Benjamin counted out the money and handed it over. Ronald took it, folded it once, and tucked it into his coat.

“We’ll meet you there,” Ronald said. “First thing in the morning and we’ll stay with you for four days.”

Benjamin nodded. “Room’s paid.”

Dennis started down the street, already talking. “Never stayed at a place with carpets before.”

***

They had spent an entire day at the Gibson House without incident. When daylight faded into night, the hotel settled into its nighttime rhythm. Footsteps faded in the hall. Doors closed. Somewhere below, laughter drifted up from the bar and then died away. By ten o’clock, the hotel felt weary and ready for bed.

Benjamin sat in the chair by the window, coat still on, hat resting on the dresser. He could see the street below, the gas lamps throwing soft circles of light onto the pavement. Every passing figure drew his attention, every pause or glance making his shoulders tighten.

Ronald and Dennis took turns watching with him. Dennis paced more than necessary, crossing the room and turning back, his boots thudding softly against the floor. Ronald leaned against the wall, arms crossed, patient and alert, his eyes moving only when something warranted it.

Benjamin didn’t tell them much. He didn’t need to. He knew Morris would come. Men like Morris didn’t stop once they believed they were close. They followed leads until they either collected what they wanted or destroyed what stood in their way. Albert’s death had proven that.

Benjamin thought of the barn. The rafters. The blood that hadn’t been there. If Morris came through that door, Benjamin would not hesitate.

***

They heard Morris before they saw him. A firm knock. Not loud, but insistent. The kind of knock made by someone who expected the door to be opened.

Benjamin rose from the chair without a word. Ronald shifted his weight. Dennis stopped moving altogether.

Benjamin opened the door.

Chester Morris stood in the hall, hat in hand, coat buttoned, his expression calm and mildly pleased, as though he had arrived precisely where he expected to be. His eyes flicked past Benjamin into the room, taking in Ronald and Dennis without surprise.

Morris unbuttoned his coat and began to reach inside. Ronald stepped forward and grabbed him. Dennis moved just as fast, seizing Morris’s other arm and slamming him back against the wall. His hat fell to the floor.

Morris struggled, more out of instinct than panic, but the two men were stronger than he expected. Ronald twisted his arm behind his back. Dennis drove a forearm into Morris’s chest, knocking the breath out of him. Ronald reached inside Morris’s coat and pulled out a pistol. He handed the gun to Benjamin.

“Easy,” Morris wheezed. “This isn’t necessary.”

Benjamin closed the door.

They moved Morris quickly, down the back stairs and into the waiting carriage Ronald had arranged earlier that evening. Morris said little after that. His eyes narrowed, staying on Benjamin as the city gave way to darkness.

The cabin sat alone near the river, its windows dark, the air thick with damp leaves and rot. Inside, the fire had already been lit. The room smelled of river water and woodsmoke.

Ronald and Dennis forced Morris to sit, tying his feet to the chair and his hands behind him. Benjamin stood a few feet away, arms at his sides, feeling the weight of the moment settle in his chest. This was the man who had killed Albert. The man who had planned to do the same to him.

Even so, Benjamin did not know what to do next. In theory, killing Morris was the thing to do. In practice, he could not make himself do it. He stared at Morris for a moment and then turned away.

“You’re hesitating,” Morris said softly, testing the word like a blade. “That’s a mistake.”

Benjamin didn’t answer.

Morris turned his attention to Ronald and Dennis instead, his voice shifting, smoothing out. “Gentlemen, you don’t need to be involved in this,” he said. “I can make it worth your while.”

Ronald frowned but didn’t speak. Dennis tilted his head, listening.

“I’ll give you a thousand dollars,” Morris went on. “He trades places with me.” He nodded toward Benjamin. “Bring him to my employers. You’ll never have to work again.”

The room went quiet.

Benjamin felt it. The change. The calculation.

He stepped forward, needing to say something to keep Ronald and Dennis on his side. “He killed my brother,” he said. He tried to remain calm as he said it, but the pain of his words came through.

Morris laughed. “Brother?” He looked at Benjamin with open amusement. “Don’t you mean your grandson?”

Dennis stiffened.

Morris kept going. “This man is eighty-four years old,” he said, his voice rising. “He doesn’t age. He doesn’t die. His blood is worth more than anything you can imagine.”

Dennis stared at him.

Benjamin’s eyes widened. “What? Are you out of your mind?” Benjamin was putting on an act, trying to win back his comrades. “Look at me. Do I look like I have a grandson?”

Morris leaned forward, his voice rising. “He’s immortal. That’s why rich people pay me. Because it’s true.”

Dennis’s face darkened. “You think we’re stupid,” he said.

Morris ignored him. “Imagine the lives you can live with a thousand dollars.”

Dennis’s face was beet red. “Stop it!”

“I’m telling you, he’s immortal. Just untie me and…

Dennis grabbed a nearby fireplace poker, raising it, ready to strike. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! The poker came down hard against the side of Morris’s head. Dennis raised it again and brought it down again. And again. The sound was dull and sickening and final.

Ronald wrapped his arms around Dennis and held him in a bear hug for a moment. Dennis was breathing hard and he let out a sound like a whimper.

“It’s alright,” Ronald said. “You’re alright.”

Benjamin had stepped away from Morris as Dennis was beating him with the poker. Now, he stepped forward to look at Morris. He was slack in the chair, his head lolled forward, blood running into his collar. Benjamin put his hand to his mouth to extinguish a gasp. He stared at Morris, bloodied and motionless.

Ronald released his hold on Dennis and bent to check on Morris. His hands went to the man’s neck, searching for a pulse. He looked up slowly, his eyes meeting Benjamin’s. His voice quivered. “He’s dead.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

Chapter 53

Escape from Philadelphia

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

The train pulled out of Chicago Union Station just after dawn, the wheels taking hold with a familiar jolt as steel met steel and the platform began to slide away. Benjamin stood in the aisle of the second car, steadying himself with one hand on the seatback while the motion settled. He wore his uniform jacket open, his cap tucked under his arm instead of on his head, his gloves folded and pushed into his coat pocket.

The burns were still there. They were no longer raw in the way they had been the night before, but his skin felt tight and angry, stretched thin across his face and hands. The cap brushed too close to his temples when he tried to put it on earlier, sending a sharp pulse of pain down his jaw. The gloves were worse. Pulling them over his fingers felt like forcing cloth across fresh scabs. He had stopped trying.

For now, he would work bareheaded and barehanded. That alone would draw looks, but not questions, not yet. The morning crowd was tired and distracted. Most people were more concerned with finding their seats and stowing bags than with a conductor’s appearance.

He moved down the aisle, checking tickets, nodding to passengers as he passed. His voice sounded unrushed and calm when he spoke. He kept his tone neutral, businesslike, the way he always did. No one needed to hear strain in it.

A man near the window complained about the heat. Another asked if the dining car would be open before noon. A woman traveling alone wanted to know how long the stop in Fort Wayne would be. Benjamin answered each question in turn, keeping his hands loose at his sides, careful not to flex his fingers too much.

The wind off the lake had followed the fire through the city all night, and even now, miles away, he could still smell smoke on his clothes. It clung to the wool of his jacket and the cuffs of his shirt. He wondered if it would ever leave.

When the cars had settled into their rhythm and the last ticket was punched, Benjamin stepped into the small space between cars and leaned against the wall. The motion of the train pressed gently against his balance. He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed through his nose, slow and deliberate.

Joyce’s face came back to him without effort. What if she came looking for him, either to try to patch up their damaged relationship or to find out if he had survived his injuries? What would he say when she saw that his body was uninjured, his face unscarred. How would she react?

He didn’t think she would come looking for him, not soon. She had lost her home, her furniture, everything she and Viv owned. Her days would be busy with finding a place to stay, replacing her and Viv’s belongings, trying to piece together something stable out of the ash. If she came looking for him—and he wasn’t sure that she would—it wouldn’t be for a while. That knowledge brought him no great comfort, but it did give him space.

The train cut eastward through the outskirts of the city, the buildings thinning, the air clearing. Sunlight crept in through the windows, pale and weak at first, then stronger as the smoke fell behind them.

Benjamin opened his eyes and straightened. He flexed his fingers experimentally. The pain had dulled. It was still there, but it no longer flared at the smallest movement. He tested his jaw, rolling it slightly from side to side. The skin pulled, but it didn’t split. That was progress.

He waited another hour before trying the gloves again. This time, he eased them on slowly, one finger at a time. The leather was soft from use, shaped to his hands. The discomfort was sharp but brief, like pressing against a bruise that had begun to fade. When the gloves were fully on, he held his hands out in front of him and waited. The pain settled.

He put his cap on next, lowering it carefully, adjusting the band until it rested just above his ears. The fabric brushed his temples without sending that earlier spike of agony. He exhaled, satisfied that his body was better. Not healed. Not yet. But closer.

He returned to his duties, walking the length of the train again. This time, fewer eyes followed him. The uniform looked right again. Familiar. Unremarkable.

As the morning wore on, his body continued to loosen. The tightness in his shoulders eased. The ache in his back softened. By midday, the worst of the pain had retreated into a distant awareness, something he could ignore if he didn’t focus on it.

He knew what that meant. He had known it would happen. Still, the speed of it unsettled him every time.

By the end of the first day, he would look like a man who had never been burned at all.

He wondered what Joyce would say if she could see him now. If she would stare at his face, searching for the scars she expected to find. If she would reach out, cautious, to touch his skin and then pull her hand back in disbelief.

That was the danger. Not the fire. Not the pain. The aftermath.

If she came looking for him—if she found him in Philadelphia or Chicago—how could he explain what his body would not show? How could he stand in front of her, whole and unmarked?

He pushed the thought aside. There would be time enough for it later.

For now, the train ran on schedule. The rails sang beneath his feet. The routine held.

By the time the sun began its slow drop toward the horizon, Benjamin felt almost like himself again. His movements were easy. His breathing unhindered.

He stood at the end of the car and watched the countryside pass, fields and towns blurring together, each one briefly visible and then gone.

***

The train rolled into Market Street Station late Wednesday morning, steam hissing as the brakes took hold. Benjamin stepped down onto the platform with the rest of the crew, the familiar sounds of the station closing around him, porters calling out destinations, wheels rattling over brick, the low murmur of travelers moving with purpose.

He felt confident on his feet. Stronger than he had any right to be. His skin still held a faint tenderness if he pressed too hard, but there were no open wounds, no stiffness in his joints. His hair, though shorter than before, lay flat beneath his cap. To anyone looking at him now, he was simply another railroad man coming off a long run.

He adjusted his jacket, checked his watch, and walked toward the exit with the other conductors. Philadelphia still felt like a place he could disappear into. He liked that about it. The streets were busy without being frantic, the people too focused on their own concerns to study a stranger too closely.

Outside the station, he paused for a moment, letting the city orient him. Carriages lined the curb. A newsboy shouted headlines he barely heard.

He was thinking about getting back to his apartment—about a bath, clean clothes, a quiet afternoon—when one of the station clerks caught his eye.

“Mr. Watkins,” the man called. “Mr. Newell would like to see you.”

Benjamin stopped.

“That so?” he said, keeping his tone light.

“Yes, sir. Said to let you know as soon as you came in.”

Benjamin nodded. It struck him as slightly odd. Newell didn’t usually summon conductors without reason. Still, nothing about it felt immediately threatening.

“I’ll stop by,” Benjamin said.

Newell’s office was only a short walk from the station. Benjamin crossed the street, climbed the familiar steps, and pushed through the front door. The waiting area was quiet, the clerk seated at his desk with a ledger open in front of him.

The clerk looked up. “Mr. Watkins.”

“I was told Mr. Newell wanted to see me.”

“Yes,” the clerk said. “Should only be a few minutes. Mr. Newell is in a meeting with Mr. Morris.”

The name landed hard.

Benjamin looked up. “Mr. Morris?” he asked.

“Yes,” the clerk said easily. “Chester Morris. He handles special projects for Mr. Hopkins.”

Benjamin felt the air leave his lungs. He knew that Hopkins was the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And Morris was the man who killed his grandson.

There was likely more than one Chester Morris in the world, but what were the odds that two of them would come into his life? This didn’t feel like coincidence.

For a moment, the room seemed to pulse in waves. The desk, the door, the clerk, all of it felt suddenly unreal, like a stage set that had shifted without warning. Benjamin forced himself to breathe normally, to keep his expression neutral.

“I see,” he said.

The clerk went back to his ledger, unaware of the weight his words had carried.

Benjamin sat there for several seconds, his mind moving faster than his body. Morris was here. In the same building. Just a few feet away.

Every instinct told him to act. To close the distance. To end it. But the setting made it impossible. Too many eyes. Too many witnesses. Even if he succeeded, he would be arrested. Tried. Locked away. And if that happened, they would eventually know his secret. That is, unless Society Athanasia got to him first and drained his blood the same way they had done to poor Albert.

He stood. “I’ll step out for a few minutes,” he said to the clerk. “I need to take care of something.”

“That’s fine,” the clerk replied. “I’ll let him know you were here.”

Benjamin didn’t answer. He turned and walked out of the office at a measured pace, not allowing himself to hurry until he was down the steps and back on the street. Once there, he moved fast.

He took the shortest route to his apartment, cutting through alleys and side streets, his thoughts sharp and focused. If Morris knew he worked for the railroad, then he knew where Benjamin lived. It was only a matter of time before he asked questions about a conductor who had been badly burned one night and returned to work whole the next morning.

Benjamin unlocked his door and went straight to the trunk at the foot of the bed. He packed quickly, choosing only what he could carry easily. Clothes, papers, the lists he kept hidden between the lining and the wood, the money he had saved. He left behind everything else.

When he finished, he stood still for a moment, listening. Nothing.

He left the apartment and did not look back. Instead of returning to Newell’s office, he crossed the city to a small hotel, paid for a single night in cash, and took a room on the third floor.

He sat on the edge of the bed and let the reality of it settle.

He had been within a few steps of Chester Morris. And he had walked away.

The thought made him nauseous. He told himself it was remembering the way Albert had died that hurt—not cowardice. He had survived this long by knowing when to move and when to vanish.

That night, he slept lightly, waking at every sound. By morning, his decision was made.

He would leave Philadelphia before Morris came looking for him. Where he went after that would come later. For now, distance was the only thing that mattered.

***

Benjamin rose before dawn. The hotel hallway was quiet, the air cool and stale. He washed at the basin, dressed carefully, and checked his reflection in the mirror. His face looked ordinary again. Too ordinary, perhaps. Too unblemished, unscarred. Too much proof of what he really was.

He left the hotel with his bag over his shoulder and walked back toward the station while the city was still half asleep. A pale light crept along the edges of the buildings. Somewhere, a baker was already at work. The smell of bread followed him for half a block before fading.

At the ticket window, he asked what trains were leaving soonest.

“Cincinnati,” the clerk said. “Departs in twenty minutes.”

Benjamin nodded. That was good enough.

He purchased a ticket and boarded without fanfare. He took his place with the other passengers. The train pulled out on schedule, iron wheels grinding into motion as Philadelphia slipped behind them. Once he was certain Morris was not on the train—and that no one was watching him with undue interest—he relaxed slightly. Not enough to let his guard down, but enough to breathe.

He reached into his coat. The folded paper he’d taken off of Ross’s body at Devil’s Hole was still there, creased and soft from handling. He smoothed it open again and read through the names slowly.

Wealth. Influence. Power.

Half the names meant nothing to him, but one did.

Richard Hopkins. President of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Benjamin closed his eyes briefly. So that was it. The “special projects.” The quiet access. The way Morris moved through the world without fear of consequence. The Society hadn’t just infiltrated institutions, they were sitting at the head of the table.

He folded the list and put it away.

Disappointment gnawed at him. He had been so close. He told himself it wasn’t fear that had driven him away from Newell’s office. It was sense. Strategy. Survival. But the truth was harder to swallow. When faced with the man who had murdered his grandson, he had chosen flight.

The thought sat heavy in his chest.

And yet, as the miles passed, another thought took shape beneath it. Morris had made the first move. He had come looking. That meant Benjamin no longer had to guess where the danger lay.

Knowing that gave him something he hadn’t had before: leverage.

As the train neared Cincinnati, Benjamin pulled a sheet of paper from his bag and wrote carefully:

Mr. Newell,

I regret to inform you that a family emergency has required my immediate attention in Cincinnati. I am uncertain when I will be able to return to duty. I apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your understanding. Please forward my next paycheck to me at the Gibson House Hotel, where I am registered.

Respectfully,

Benjamin Watkins

He folded the letter and waited until he crossed paths with one of the conductors he knew only in passing. He introduced himself, explained the situation briefly, and asked the favor.

“Of course,” the man said readily. “I’ll see it gets to him.”

Benjamin thanked him and stepped down onto the Cincinnati platform a short while later.

The Gibson House stood a few blocks from the station, solid and respectable, its lobby busy with travelers and clerks. Benjamin took a room without comment, paid in advance, and closed the door behind him.

He sat his bag on the bed and exhaled. For the moment, he was out of Morris’s reach.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

Chapter 52

Flames and Regret

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

Benjamin woke to the smell of smoke. At first it didn’t register as danger. He lay still on the narrow hotel bed, eyes open, listening to the sound of the wind gusting and the distant clatter of wagons somewhere below.

Then he breathed in again. This time the smoke was unmistakable.

He sat up, the sheet falling away from his chest, and swung his feet to the floor. The room was dark except for a thin band of light at the window. It wasn’t the yellow of a streetlamp or the pale wash of the moon. It was red. Dull and uneven, like a reflection off water, but he knew there was no water outside his window.

Benjamin crossed the room and pushed the curtain aside. The sky to the south was glowing. Not flickering, not moving the way lightning did, but steady and wrong. A wide smear of red-orange light rose above the rooftops, low and thick, pulsing as if the city itself were breathing fire. Smoke rolled across it in heavy bands, driven sideways by the wind. Even from this distance, he could see sparks lifting into the air and vanishing.

He leaned out the window and listened. The city sounded panicked and desperate. Shouts carried on the wind, uneven and urgent. Somewhere a bell rang, once, twice, then again, faster this time. Another bell answered it farther away.

Benjamin stepped back from the window. Fire. Not a small one. Not a kitchen blaze or a single building gone wrong. This was too wide, too bright, too alive. The wind shoved at the smoke hard enough that it pressed against the buildings like weather.

He dressed quickly, though his mind was already running ahead of him. Shirt, boots, coat. He paused only long enough to grab his hat, then stopped again, hand hovering over the door latch.

Joyce.

He went back to the window and tried to orient himself. He knew where her building stood relative to the main roads. He followed the line of the glow with his eyes, tracing it across the darkened city.

It was the right direction. He felt it settle in his chest then, not panic but certainty. The kind that left no room for argument. The fire was in the direction of Joyce’s apartment.

Benjamin opened the door and stepped into the hallway. Other doors were opening now. A man in his nightshirt stood blinking under a gas lamp, staring down the stairs. Someone shouted from below that there was a fire on the South Side. Another voice answered, louder, saying it was spreading fast.

Benjamin didn’t wait to hear more. He took the stairs two at a time, boots striking hard against the wood. The air grew thicker as he descended, smoke already finding its way indoors. By the time he reached the street, the wind hit him full in the face. It was hot and dry, carrying ash that stung his eyes.

The glow was brighter now. People were pouring out of buildings, some half-dressed, some dragging trunks or bundles, some empty-handed and wild-eyed. Horses screamed somewhere to his left. A man ran past him shouting a name over and over, his voice breaking each time he said it.

Benjamin turned south and began to run. The hot wind shoved at him, as if trying to slow his advance. Embers skittered along the street like insects, glowing briefly before dying underfoot. Overhead, sparks lifted and vanished into the smoke.

He did not think about the argument. Not about the words Joyce had thrown at him or the ones he hadn’t said. That had already happened. That was already behind him.

All that mattered now was distance and time. The fire was moving. And Joyce and Viv were in its way.

By the time Benjamin reached Joyce’s block, the street was already lost. Flames had climbed the length of the building fronts, feeding on wooden awnings, signage, anything that caught. The wind drove the fire sideways, pushing it from one structure to the next as if the city were made of kindling laid out in rows. Smoke poured low across the street, thick enough to turn the gas lamps into dull, useless halos.

Benjamin slowed only long enough to get his bearings. Joyce’s building stood four stories tall, brick on the front, wood everywhere else. The upper windows glowed orange from inside. Curtains burned first, then the frames, then the rooms beyond them. A crowd had gathered in the street, people shouting, pointing, calling out names. Someone was trying to organize a bucket line, but the wind tore the water apart before it reached the flames.

Benjamin pushed through the crowd.

A man grabbed his sleeve. “You can’t go in there!”

Benjamin shook him off without stopping. “My family’s inside.” It was the easiest lie to tell.

The front door stood open, smoke pouring out in thick waves. Inside, the stairwell was already burning. Flames licked up the banister, crawling along the walls, feeding on old varnish and dry wood. The heat hit him hard the moment he crossed the threshold, forcing the air out of his lungs. He pulled his coat over his mouth and nose and went in.

Each step up the stairs burned. The wood beneath his boots sagged and shifted, hot enough that he felt it through the soles. Smoke pressed down from above, turning the stairwell into a narrow tunnel of heat and darkness. He stayed in the middle of the stairs as best he could, avoiding the burning walls and banister, moving by memory more than sight.

Third floor. He knew the layout. He had walked these stairs dozens of times. He turned left at the landing and forced himself forward through the smoke.

“Joyce!” he shouted. His voice came back thin and broken.

He tried again. “Joyce! Viv!”

A door opened ahead of him. Joyce stumbled out, coughing, hair loose around her face, Viv clutched tight against her chest. Joyce froze when she saw him, disbelief cutting through her panic.

“Benjamin?” she said hoarsely. “What are you…”

“There’s no time,” he said. “We’re getting out.”

She shook her head, frantic. “The stairs…”

“I know.”

The heat was worse here. Flames had already begun to eat into the ceiling at the far end of the hall. Benjamin grabbed the edge of the bedsheet from Joyce’s room and tore it free. He soaked it quickly in the washbasin, water sloshing onto the floor, then wrapped it around Joyce’s shoulders, pulling it tight.

“Keep this over your face,” he said. “Don’t let go.”

He did the same with Viv’s small sheet, wrapping her as carefully as he could before lifting her into his arms. She was crying now, muffled and scared, her small body trembling against his chest.

Benjamin didn’t hesitate. He stepped back into the stairwell.

The flames roared louder now, fed by the wind rushing through broken windows below. The air burned. Each breath scraped his throat raw. He leaned forward, shielding Viv with his body, Joyce close behind him, one hand gripping the soaked sheet, the other gripping his coat.

Halfway down, a beam collapsed above them, showering sparks and embers. Joyce screamed. Benjamin pushed forward, forcing his way through heat so intense it blurred his vision. His coat caught fire at the hem. He felt it, sharp and immediate, but he didn’t stop.

They burst out into the street in a rush of noise and wind and shouting.

Hands reached for them. Someone took Viv. Someone else pulled Joyce away from the doorway. Benjamin staggered forward, coughing hard, lungs burning, vision swimming.

Joyce grabbed his arm. “Your face,” she said, horror flooding her voice.

He pulled away instinctively, the movement sending pain through him like a blade. He could feel the damage now, the skin on his face tight and raw, his hair burned close to the scalp, his hands blistered and bleeding.

“I’m fine,” he said, though it cost him effort to speak. “Stay back.”

He turned before she could say anything else.

“There’s more people inside,” someone shouted.

Benjamin went back in.

The second trip was worse. The stairwell had begun to collapse. Flames poured upward unchecked now, roaring like a living thing. He climbed anyway, forcing himself through smoke so thick he could barely see his hands. He found the elderly woman—Joyce’s next door neighbor—collapsed near her doorway, gasping weakly.

“It’s all right,” he said, voice rough. “I’ve got you.”

She was light in his arms, lighter than she should have been. He wrapped another soaked sheet around her and carried her down, each step a trial of balance and will. The heat tore at him. His skin burned. The pain was constant now, overwhelming, but he kept moving.

They made it out moments before the stairwell gave way completely.

Outside, Joyce knelt beside the old woman, pressing her hands to the woman’s chest, trying to get her to breathe. Benjamin dropped to one knee a few feet away, the world spinning hard around him. The noise of the fire blurred into a single roar.

Joyce looked up and saw him. She crossed the space between them without thinking and dropped beside him. “Benjamin,” she said. Her voice broke. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have…”

He shook his head weakly. “It doesn’t matter.”

She reached for him again, and this time he didn’t pull away. Her hand trembled as it hovered near his burned face.

“You need help,” she said. “You need a doctor.”

He knew that was true.

He also knew he couldn’t stay.

Benjamin pushed himself to his feet, legs unsteady beneath him. “I have to go.”

Joyce stared at him, confusion mixing with fear. “Where are you going?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he turned and disappeared into the crowd, slipping around the side of the burning building, moving fast despite the pain, despite the dizziness threatening to pull him down.

Behind him, Joyce called his name.

He didn’t stop.

Benjamin did not run. He couldn’t have, even if he wanted to.

He moved away from the fire in short, uneven strides, keeping to the darker edges of the streets, letting the chaos cover him. The wind drove smoke in long, choking sheets, and sparks skittered along the cobblestones like small balls of fire come to life. Bells rang somewhere to the south. Shouts rose and fell, carried and torn apart by the gusts.

His body was failing him. Each step sent a sharp reminder through his legs and back. His face felt tight and swollen, his eyes burned, and the skin on his hands had split in several places, raw and slick. He could smell himself, burned hair, scorched cloth, the sickly-sweet odor of damaged flesh.

He kept his head down and his coat pulled close, not because it hid the injuries, but because it gave him something to hold onto.

Two blocks away, he had to stop. Benjamin leaned against the brick wall of a closed shop and bent forward, coughing until his vision darkened at the edges. When he straightened again, the world spun and slid away. He waited it out, breathing shallowly, counting heartbeats until the dizziness passed.

This was the danger. Not the fire. Not the pain. The danger was that he might collapse in the open, surrounded by people who would remember exactly how badly he looked when they helped him up, or worse yet, when he died right before their eyes.

When he reached his hotel, the lobby was empty. The clerk was gone, likely out in the street with everyone else, watching the city burn. Benjamin climbed the stairs slowly, one hand on the rail, forcing himself not to rush. He did not want to fall where someone might hear him.

Inside his room, he closed the door and locked it. Only then did he let himself sink down onto the edge of the bed.

The mirror across the room caught his reflection, and he turned his head away before he could take it in fully. He already knew what he would see. Skin blistered and torn. Hair burned short and uneven. A face that would draw stares, questions, concern. Faces like that did not heal overnight. Faces like that stayed scarred and disfigured for a lifetime.

He stripped off his coat and shirt with careful movements, biting back a sound when cloth stuck and pulled at damaged skin. He poured water into the basin and washed what he could, the sting sharp enough to make his hands shake. When he was done, he wrapped himself in a thin towel and lay back on the bed.

The pain settled in. It was not dramatic. It did not come in waves. It was constant, deep, and consuming.

Benjamin closed his eyes and focused on breathing. He had learned this long ago, how to endure without panicking, how to let the pain exist without letting it decide what came next. Somewhere beneath the damage, he could already feel the slow, familiar work beginning. Heat along the bones. A tightening, then easing. The first quiet signs of repair.

It would take hours. Maybe most of the night.

He did not sleep much. When he did, it came in short, broken pieces. Dreams tangled with memory and smoke. Joyce’s face, streaked with soot and fear. Viv’s small arms wrapped tight around his neck. The roar of fire rushing up a stairwell.

At one point he woke certain someone was knocking at the door. He lay still, heart pounding, listening. Nothing. Just the distant crackle of the city burning and the wind battering the windows.

By morning, the pain had dulled. Not gone, but manageable. His skin still burned red and tender, but the worst of the damage had already begun to recede. He sat up slowly and looked at his hands. The blisters had closed.

He touched his face cautiously. The swelling had gone down. The skin was tight and sore, but intact.

His hair had begun to grow back, uneven and short, like it had been badly cut.

Benjamin sat there for a long time, letting the truth settle in. They had seen him.

Joyce had seen him clearly, how bad it was, how fast he had moved, how he had gone back into the building when no sane man would. Others had seen him too. The old woman. The neighbors in the street. They would talk. They would remember. There would be no returning. No quiet explanation. No gradual distancing.

Benjamin feared that Joyce would look for him. If she did and she found him whole and unmarked after seeing him so badly burned, the questions would begin. Questions he could not answer.

Benjamin dressed slowly, choosing clothes that covered as much skin as possible. He packed what little he owned, moving carefully, deliberately. When he left the room, he did not look back.

Outside, the city was changed. Entire blocks lay blackened and smoking. Charred walls stood where buildings had once been. People moved through the streets stunned and hollow-eyed, carrying what little they had salvaged. The air smelled of ash and wet wood and something deeper, heavier.

Benjamin walked past Joyce’s street without stopping. He did not look up at the building. He already knew what he would see. By the time he reached the station, his face had begun to settle into something passable. Reddened, yes. Sore. But not the ruin it had been hours earlier. A coworker glanced at him and gave a short laugh.

“New haircut?” the man asked.

Benjamin nodded once and grunted a reply. He boarded the train.

As the wheels began to turn and the city slid away behind him, he understood something with a clarity that hurt more than the burns ever had. Joyce and Viv were lost to him. He could never see them again. Never talk to them. Never go back.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.

Chapter 51

Doing What Needs to be Done

You can find the table of contents for Forever Man here

You can read the previous chapter here

You can read the next chapter here

Joyce Garrett’s apartment sat on the third floor of a brick walk-up on Wells Street, above a tailor shop that always smelled faintly of steam and wool. Benjamin knew the stairs by heart now, the worn spots in the center of each step, the loose banister that wobbled if you put your weight on it, the sharp turn at the second landing where the hallway light never quite reached.

He climbed with his hat in his hand, as he always did. Not because anyone demanded it, but because Joyce liked the small courtesies. He’d learned that about her early. She noticed things. Not in the fussy way of a woman keeping score, but in the way of someone who had lived through disappointment and now paid attention to what was real.

A child’s voice carried down the stairwell. “Ma, is it him?”

Joyce answered from inside the apartment. “Not yet.”

Then a pause, and the child’s voice again, closer this time, like she had moved toward the door. “I heard the steps.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Joyce said, though there was no sharpness in it.

Benjamin smiled to himself and knocked once.

Joyce opened the door wearing a dark blue dress with sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Her hair was pinned back, practical but neat. There was flour on one hand, and when she saw him her face softened in a way that was hard for him to get used to. She never acted like seeing him was ordinary.

“You’re right on time,” she said.

“I try,” he replied.

She stepped back to let him in. The apartment was warm, in the comfortable way of a place where someone lived carefully and kept the stove fed. The table in the small dining room was set with mismatched plates. A pot simmered on the stove. The air smelled like onions and beef and something sweet baking in the oven.

Vivienne appeared at the edge of the doorway. She was eight, small for her age, with dark hair that curled at the ends no matter how Joyce tried to tame it. She wore a nightgown already, though it wasn’t yet dark outside, and she had a serious expression that belonged on an older face.

Benjamin dipped his head. “Hello, Viv.”

She studied him for a moment the way she always did, then decided whatever she saw was acceptable.

“You brought it?” she asked.

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small paper-wrapped bundle. “I did.”

Her eyes widened. “Peppermints?”

“Two,” he said. “Like we agreed.”

Viv took the bundle and held it to her chest as if it might be taken away.

Joyce crossed her arms and looked at Benjamin. “You spoil her.”

“I don’t think two peppermints qualifies as spoilage,” he said.

Viv looked between them. “It’s not spoiling. It’s being fair.”

Joyce shook her head. “Go put those away. Supper’s almost ready.”

Viv trotted off toward her room, not running, but moving with the quick purpose of a child who knows an important task has been assigned.

Joyce closed the door and turned back to Benjamin.

“You look tired,” she said.

“I’m fine,” he answered, then corrected himself. There was no point in lying about things she could see. “The train was full. More families than usual.”

“Are you back out tomorrow?” she asked.

“Monday morning,” he said. “Same as always.”

Joyce nodded once, as if filing that away. “Take your coat off. Sit.”

Benjamin hung his coat on the hook by the door. Joyce was already back at the stove, stirring. She moved with the steady rhythm of someone who had cooked a thousand meals. She wasn’t a fancy cook, but her food was good. It filled the room and made a person feel like he belonged there.

Benjamin sat at the small table. The wooden chair creaked under his weight.

“You’re early enough to help,” Joyce said without turning around.

“I knew there would be a price.” He chuckled.

“Set the bread out,” she said. “And cut it. Don’t make it thick. Viv complains when it’s too thick.”

Benjamin stood and went to the counter. There was a loaf wrapped in a cloth. He unwrapped it and cut slices the way he’d learned to do in his mother’s cabin long ago, thin enough to stretch, thick enough to hold butter. He put the slices on a plate.

Joyce watched him for a second, then went back to her pot.

Viv reappeared—peppermints put away somewhere—and climbed into her chair. She sat straight, hands in her lap, as if it were a special occasion and not just another Sunday.

Joyce brought the pot to the table and served them. Beef stew, heavy on potatoes and carrots, thickened enough that it clung to the spoon. She set a small dish of pickles near Viv’s plate because Viv liked them.

They began to eat.

For a little while, it was ordinary. Viv told Benjamin about her schoolwork. Joyce corrected her once, gently, when she exaggerated a story about a boy who had tried to pull her braids. Benjamin asked a few questions, not because he needed the information, but because he’d learned that this was part of being there. You listened. You cared. You didn’t sit silent like a visitor waiting for permission.

Viv asked him the same thing she asked every Sunday. “Did you see the lake?” she asked.

He smiled. “Yes.”

“Was it big?” she asked.

“It was big,” he said.

“Did you see boats?” she asked.

“I saw some boats.”

Viv chewed, satisfied, then asked, “Did you see any pirates?”

Joyce gave a small sigh. “Viv.”

Benjamin didn’t mind. “No pirates,” he said. “But I did see a man with a beard so long it could’ve hidden one.”

Viv’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“Really,” Benjamin said.

Joyce watched him as he said it. There was amusement in her face, but also something else, something thoughtful. She knew he was good with Viv. She knew Viv liked him. It was part of what made this arrangement more dangerous than it should have been.

After supper, Joyce sent Viv to wash her hands and get ready for bed. Viv disappeared, then reappeared in the doorway.

“Are you staying?” she asked.

Joyce glanced toward Benjamin.

Benjamin felt the question land in his chest. He answered carefully. “I don’t stay here, Viv.”

“You do sometimes,” she said.

“Well, not tonight.”

Viv’s face fell, quick and honest. “Why not?” she asked.

Joyce stepped in before he could. “Because he has to sleep at his hotel.”

Benjamin nodded. “And because you need to sleep.”

Viv frowned at both of them, like she knew there was more being said than what she understood.

Joyce softened. “Come here,” she said.

Viv walked over. Joyce bent and kissed the top of her head. “Go on. Brush your teeth, then bed.”

Viv looked at Benjamin one more time. “You’ll be back next Sunday?”

Benjamin held her gaze. “I will.”

She took that answer like a promise she could store away. Then she went to her room.

Joyce began clearing dishes. Benjamin rose to help, but she waved him off.

“Sit,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

He sat again. He waited. He listened to the small sounds of the apartment like the clink of plates and the faint creak of floorboards as Viv moved in her room.

When Joyce came back, her hands were wet. She dried them on a towel and sat across from him. For a moment she just looked at him. Not flirtatious. Not playful. Plain.

Benjamin had learned what that look meant. It meant she was about to say something that mattered.

“Benjamin,” she said.

He didn’t answer right away. He didn’t want to sound nervous, but he was. “Yes?”

“I’m going to say something and I don’t want you to dodge it,” she said.

“I won’t,” he replied.

She nodded once, like she was holding herself together. “This isn’t enough anymore,” Joyce said.

Benjamin stayed still.

Joyce continued, her voice calm but tight around the edges. “I know what we agreed. I know what this started as. Sundays. Supper. Maybe sometimes…” She stopped herself and looked down at the table for a second. Then she looked back up. “But you’ve been coming for months now. You’ve been part of this home. Viv thinks of you as…” She stopped again, then finished in a quieter voice. “As something stable.”

Benjamin’s mouth went dry.

Joyce pressed on. “I’m not asking you to be her father. That’s not fair. I’m not even saying the word.” She leaned forward slightly. “But I am saying that I’m tired of living like you’re a guest who comes through once a week and then disappears.”

Benjamin swallowed. “Joyce…”

“Don’t,” she said. Not harsh, but firm. “Let me finish.”

He nodded.

Joyce took a breath. “I want you here. More than Sundays. More than whatever this is.” She held her hands together, fingers interlaced, knuckles pale. “I want a life that makes sense. I’m not a girl. I’m not playing a game. I’ve been a widow for eight years. I’ve done it alone and I can keep doing it alone.”

Benjamin knew she could. That was one of the reasons he respected her.

“But I don’t want to anymore,” Joyce said. “Not like this.”

Benjamin sat very still. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat.

Joyce’s eyes didn’t leave his face. “You could move here,” she said. “Chicago. You’re already here every week. You could find work. Or you could take a different run. Or I could come to Philadelphia.” She said that last part like she’d been holding it back. “I could come. Viv could come. We could rent a place. I could find work. There are schools. There’s a city full of people who don’t know my name or my history.”

Benjamin’s mind reached for excuses the way it always did when a door began to close. Work. Logistics. Money. The railroad. Any of the small, safe excuses that sounded reasonable and kept people from asking deeper questions.

But Joyce had known him long enough to see that coming.

She shook her head slightly. “Don’t tell me you can’t because of work. That’s not the truth.”

Benjamin felt the room tighten around him, as if the walls had moved an inch closer.

“What is the truth?” Joyce asked.

He looked at her. Her face was open, but she was braced for pain. He could see it.

Benjamin had been through war. He had watched men die in ways he still saw at night if he let himself. He had survived things that should have killed him, and often did. Still, this moment made him feel smaller than any battlefield ever had.

He spoke carefully. “I can’t give you what you’re asking for.”

Joyce didn’t look away. “Why?”

He could have lied. He had lied to women before. He could have said he wasn’t ready. He could have said he didn’t want to burden her. He could have said he was broken by war and didn’t know how to be a husband. Some of those things were partly true. But he knew Joyce would sense a lie. And he didn’t want to insult her with something thin. “I can’t build a life with you,” he said.

Joyce’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Because you don’t want to.”

Benjamin shook his head once. “That’s not it.”

“Then what is it?” she asked, and now there was more force in it. Not shouting, but pressure.

Benjamin hesitated too long.

Joyce’s face changed. “You’re going to do that,” she said quietly. “You’re going to sit there and look at me like I’m a problem to solve.”

“That’s not fair,” Benjamin said before he could stop himself.

Joyce leaned back in her chair. “Isn’t it?”

Benjamin rubbed his palm against his thigh under the table, a small movement to keep himself from reaching for something that wasn’t there.

“I care about you,” he said.

Joyce’s mouth tightened. “Do you?”

“Yes,” he said. “And I care about Viv.”

Joyce looked away for a second, like she needed air. When she looked back, her eyes were wet but resolute. “Then why are you keeping us at arm’s length?” she asked. “Why do you come in here and sit at my table and let my child laugh at your stories and then leave like none of it matters?”

“It matters,” Benjamin said.

“Then prove it,” Joyce said, and now her voice cracked. “Stop treating me like I’m something you can visit.”

Benjamin felt something inside him begin to give way, not because she was wrong, but because she was right. He spoke softly. “Joyce, I can’t stay.”

Joyce stared at him, like she didn’t understand the words. “Can’t,” she repeated.

Benjamin nodded.

Joyce’s voice sharpened. “You don’t have a wife.”

“No.”

“You don’t have a child.”

“No.”

“You don’t have anyone in Philadelphia waiting on you,” she said.

Benjamin didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

Joyce pushed her chair back slightly. “So what is it? Another woman?”

“No,” he said quickly.

“Then what?” Joyce demanded, and now she was standing. “Do you think I’m asking for too much? A man who eats my food and lies in my bed and talks with my child. Do you think it’s too much to ask him where this is going?”

Benjamin looked up at her. He saw the anger now, but it wasn’t wild. It was hurt that had found its feet. “I never promised you marriage,” he said, and as soon as he said it he knew it sounded cold.

Joyce’s face flushed. “No,” she said, voice low. “You didn’t. You never promise anything, do you?”

Benjamin stood, too, though he didn’t move toward her. He kept space between them, instinctive and careful. “I tried to keep this simple,” he said.

Joyce laughed once, sharp and bitter. “Simple.” She wiped at one cheek with the back of her hand like she was angry at herself for crying. “You think what I’m asking for is complicated. You think my wanting a life is some kind of trap.”

“I don’t,” Benjamin said. “I think it’s…” He stopped. He searched for words that didn’t sound like excuses. He lowered his voice. “I think you deserve someone who can be here. Fully.”

Joyce’s eyes flashed. “That’s a fine speech,” she said. “A noble speech. Do you practice it on the train?”

Benjamin’s chest tightened and he inhaled sharply. “Joyce, please.”

“Please what?” she asked. “Please let you keep doing this? Please let you keep coming here once a week and acting like it’s charity? Like you’re doing me a favor by giving me your Sundays?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Joyce stepped closer. Not threatening, but close enough that Benjamin could smell the soap on her hands.

“You told me you were lonely,” she said quietly. “You told me you didn’t want a woman clinging to you. You said you needed space. I respected that.”

A lump formed in Benjamin’s throat.

Joyce’s voice rose. “And then you let me care anyway. You let me imagine.” She gestured toward the small room, the table, the lamp. “You let my child imagine.”

Benjamin felt something hard and bitter rise in him, not at Joyce, but at himself. He had told himself he was being careful. He had told himself he was keeping things contained. But the truth was simpler: he had wanted it. He had wanted the warmth and the food and the touch. He had wanted a home for a few hours a week, even if it wasn’t his.

Joyce’s eyes filled again. She spoke softer now, her voice barely containing her hurt and anger. “If you can’t, then say it straight,” she said. “Don’t hide behind kindness.”

Benjamin took a breath, then exhaled, making his voice calm. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t build a life with you.”

Joyce stood very still. The room went quiet except for the barely audible sound of Viv shifting in her bed in the next room.

Joyce’s voice was almost a whisper. “Then you need to go.”

Benjamin didn’t move.

Joyce’s jaw clenched. “Go,” she said again, louder, and now there was steel in it. “Not later. Not after you sit here and stare at me like I’m dying. Go now.”

Benjamin swallowed. “Joyce…”

“No,” she snapped. Then she lowered her voice again, probably for Viv’s sake. “Just go.”

Benjamin’s hands hung at his sides. He wanted to fix it. He wanted to say something that would take away the hurt without offering false hope. He wanted to tell her what he couldn’t tell her. He wanted, for a brief, stupid moment, to agree, to say yes, I’ll stay, I’ll move, I’ll try.

But he saw the road ahead as clearly as if it were laid on the table between them. Joyce would grow older. Viv would grow up. Joyce would start to notice things that didn’t add up. Neighbors would notice, too. The questions would come slowly at first, then harder. And if the Society ever found him again, Joyce and Viv would be in the middle of it.

Benjamin picked up his hat and took his coat off the hook.

Joyce stood near the table, arms folded, looking toward the floor now as if she couldn’t bear to watch him leave.

He paused at the door. “Joyce,” he said softly.

She didn’t look up.

“I never meant to hurt you,” he said.

Joyce’s voice was tight. “And yet here we are.”

He opened the door.

“Benjamin,” she said suddenly.

He turned.

Joyce finally looked at him. Her eyes were wet and bright with anger. “Don’t come back next Sunday,” she said.

Benjamin felt the words hit like a fist.

“I won’t,” he said, and he meant it. He didn’t mean he wanted it. But he meant it.

He stepped into the hallway and pulled the door shut gently behind him. The stairwell was dark. The hallway lamp was low. As he descended, he could still taste the stew in his mouth, and it made him feel sick. Not because the food was bad, but because it reminded him how easy it was to feel normal for a few hours.

Outside, Chicago was unseasonably warm, but windy. The street was busy with people coming and going from shops and taverns. A carriage rattled past. Somewhere a group of people laughed, the sound spilling into the street and then fading.

Benjamin walked without thinking at first. His hotel was a few blocks away, but when he got there, he kept walking, hoping the movement would clear his head and order his jumbled thoughts.

He kept seeing Joyce’s expression when he said no. He kept hearing Viv’s question—You’ll be back next Sunday?—and his own answer. I will.

Although he hadn’t intended it, he had lied to the child. That sat in him heavier than anything Joyce had said.

By the time he was all walked out and back at his hotel, his body was nearly as fatigued as his mind. He climbed the stairs to his room and shut the door. He didn’t bother lighting the lamp. He undressed in the darkness and lay on the bed. Moonlight streamed through the hotel window.

He had done the thing he had to do. He had cut off his relationship with Joyce before it could become something he couldn’t escape. He knew he had made the right decision, the safe decision. Yet, it didn’t feel safe or right, not in his heart. His heart was telling him he had made a mistake, that he was giving up something good. His head knew better.

He told himself this was the worst of it. That the pain would settle. That Joyce would heal, because she had survived worse than a man who wouldn’t commit. That Viv would forget him, because children forget. He told himself all of that because he knew it to be true, and because he needed to believe it.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.