Of everything in The Protocol of Vengeance, the hardest chapters to write weren’t the ones involving violence. They were the ones involving happiness.
Before I could write my protagonist losing his family, I had to make readers believe in that family first -its ordinariness, its warmth, the small, unremarkable moments that make a life worth protecting. An apartment with a balcony. A daughter’s seventh birthday. A walk across a city square on a day with nothing scheduled and nowhere to be. None of it is dramatic. That was the point. Grief doesn’t get its weight from what was lost being extraordinary. It gets its weight from what was lost being ordinary enough that it never occurred to anyone that it could disappear.
I spent longer on those early chapters than on almost anything else in the book, and for a long time I wasn’t sure they belonged there at all. A thriller is supposed to move. Editors will tell you to cut anything that isn’t pulling its weight toward the next plot point, and on a first read, a birthday party and a walk through Tivoli Gardens don’t pull very hard. But I kept them, and I kept expanding them, because I didn’t want the loss to land on an abstraction. I wanted it to land on people the reader had already spent enough time with to miss.
So I built the early chapters slowly, almost stubbornly, resisting the urge to rush toward the event that changes everything. I wanted a reader to know exactly what a green pedestrian light meant to this family before I took it away from them. I wanted the loss, when it came, to happen in real time -no soft cut, no chapter break to soften the blow. Just a hand torn from another hand, and then everything after. I remember rewriting that single scene more times than any other passage in the manuscript, not to make it more graphic, but to make sure it stayed exactly as fast and disorienting as loss actually is. There’s no music cue in real life. There’s no slow motion. It happens, and then the world simply continues without pausing to let you catch up.
As an engineer by training, I’m used to thinking in terms of cause and consequence -a discipline that shaped how I approached the aftermath as much as the event itself. Grief in fiction is often written as a single dramatic collapse: a scream, a breakdown, a scene the character never fully recovers from before the story moves on. In my experience, real grief doesn’t work that way. It’s structural. It changes what a person is able to tolerate, what they notice, what they can no longer stand to feel at all. It shows up in the load-bearing parts of a life you didn’t know were load-bearing until they gave way. I wanted my protagonist’s transformation to follow that same logic: not a breakdown, but a redesign. A man who cannot undo what happened, and so instead applies the only skill he has left -precision -to the unbearable problem of what to do with grief that has nowhere left to go.
There’s also a quieter grief running underneath the loud one, and I tried not to lose sight of it while writing: the grief of becoming a person you don’t recognize. Long before my protagonist does anything the reader would call unforgivable, he notices himself changing in smaller ways -losing patience he used to have, losing interest in things that used to matter, losing the parts of his personality that had nothing to do with tragedy and everything to do with simply being a person other people enjoyed being around. That loss doesn’t get a dramatic scene. It just accumulates, the way most real change does.
That’s also why the novel doesn’t let him find comfort in the plan he builds. Revenge, in this book, is never presented as relief. It’s presented as the shape grief takes when a person refuses to let it simply hurt. Whether that’s better or worse than grief left alone is a question I don’t answer for the reader. I don’t think it’s mine to answer, and I was wary of any version of the book that tried to.
If there’s one thing I hoped to get right, it’s this: that the reader would finish the book still able to picture that apartment with the balcony, and that seventh birthday, and the version of this man who existed before any of it happened. Because everything he becomes afterward only means something if you remember who he was first. Take that opening away, and what’s left is just a man doing terrible things for reasons the reader has to take on faith. I didn’t want anyone to have to take his reasons on faith. I wanted them to have watched exactly what he lost, closely enough to understand, even while refusing to approve.
I also thought a great deal about the people around him during the writing process -the friends, colleagues, and eventually the detective who watches him from the outside without access to any of what the reader knows. Grief, from the outside, so often looks like withdrawal, or coldness, or a kind of stubborn competence that reads as recovery when it’s actually the opposite. I wanted the other characters’ misreadings of him to feel plausible, even generous, because that’s usually how it goes in life too. The people around someone in that kind of pain rarely get the interior version. They get the version that shows up to work on time and answers questions in a level voice, and they draw entirely reasonable, entirely wrong conclusions from it.
Writing that gap between the interior and the exterior version of grief was, in its own way, harder than writing the loss itself. The accident happens once, on the page, and then it’s done. The gap has to be maintained for the rest of the book, chapter after chapter, in every interaction he has with someone who doesn’t know what he’s carrying. Getting that balance right -showing readers everything while showing the other characters almost nothing -took more drafts than I’d like to admit.
In the end, I don’t think of this as a book about revenge, even though that’s the word most readers will reach for first. I think of it as a book about what grief does when it isn’t allowed anywhere to go -and about how easily precision can be mistaken, by the person wielding it, for peace.
