The Endgame follows a grieving man who must decide whether restoring the consciousness of the woman he loved into a synthetic body can truly bring her back. What is the most rewarding aspect of writing a series?

The most rewarding part is watching a character grow across a scale a single book can’t give you. In The Endgame, when this man is standing at the edge of a decision that huge – bringing back the woman he loved, or the shell of her – he’s carrying the weight of everything that came before him into that moment. Every choice he made earlier in the story feeds into it. He’s not a fresh character reacting to a single crisis. He’s the sum of everything I put him through before this point.

That’s what a series lets you do. You get to build consequence over time instead of chapters. A reader who’s followed him since Book 1 feels the weight of that choice differently than someone opening the book cold, because they’ve watched him lose things gradually, not all at once.

The other reward is more personal. Five books gave me room to keep asking the same question from different angles, what makes someone them, and whether a copy of consciousness is a continuation or an ending. I didn’t have to answer it in Book 1. I got to sit with it.

Bel’s resurrection as June gradually becomes more unsettling. How did you develop that transformation while preserving Marcus’s emotional connection to her?

I built that transformation slowly, almost invisibly, because that’s how these things actually happen to some people. Marcus doesn’t get one moment where June stops being Bel. He gets a hundred small ones, a phrase that lands wrong, a memory she describes with the wrong weight behind it, a silence where Bel would have filled it with something warm. Each one is small enough to explain away. Together they build into something he can’t ignore.

The hardest part was keeping his love for her intact while the ground under it kept shifting. He’s not falling out of love with what used to be Bel. He’s discovering that what came back isn’t fully her, and that gap is not his fault or hers; it’s just the cost of what he asked for. There’s unfinished business between them that resurrection couldn’t close. If anything, it opened more of it, because now he’s grieving a version of her that’s standing right in front of him.

I wanted readers to feel his hope curdle in real time. Not because June is a villain, but because she’s a reminder that some people, once lost, don’t come back the way you need them to.

Some of the book’s most tense moments occur during ordinary activities such as sharing coffee, having dinner, or taking a drive. How do you create suspense in scenes where nothing obviously dangerous is happening?

That kind of suspense comes from where you put the reader’s attention, not from what’s happening in the scene. Marcus is already jaded by the time we’re watching him share coffee with June or sit across from her at dinner. He’s seen enough small inconsistencies that his guard never fully comes down. So even when June does something completely ordinary, he’s reading it for what it might mean. That’s a trait a lot of people carry once trust gets damaged. You start scanning for confirmation instead of just being present.

Also, I wrote those scenes from inside his hypervigilance. The coffee doesn’t need to be poisoned for the scene to feel dangerous. His mind is doing that work for the reader. A pause before she answers a question. The way she holds a fork slightly differently than Bel used to. None of it proves anything, and that’s the point. He’s caught between wanting the changes to mean nothing and needing to know if they mean everything.

Suspense built that way costs the character something real. Marcus isn’t in physical danger during those scenes. He’s in a state where his own perception has become the threat. He can’t trust what he’s watching, and neither can the reader.

If The Endgame could leave readers with one central question about technology and humanity, what would you want that question to be?

I’d want them left with this: if you could bring back someone you love, and what came back looked at you with their eyes and spoke with their voice, at what point does it stop being about them and start being about you? Marcus never really answers that question in the book. He just keeps living inside it.

Technology gave him the option most people never get: a second chance at something death usually makes final. But the option itself became its own kind of test. It didn’t ask whether he could bring her back. It asked what he was willing to accept in her place, and how long he could keep telling himself that was enough.

That’s the question I want to sit with readers after they close the book. Technology in this story never forces Marcus’s hand; it just hands him the tools and steps back. The humanity part is what he does with them, alone, without anyone checking his judgment. That’s the real danger the series keeps pointing to. Not machines making decisions for us, but machines making it possible for us to make decisions we were never built to carry alone.

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