The Long Way Back · Book One
The Long Way Back
He got a second chance. Becoming someone else was the hard part.
James Vandael dies at seventy-nine: decorated, disciplined, and emotionally absent. Then he opens his eyes in the room that raised him, in his twenty-year-old body, in 2003. He remembers a whole life that has not happened yet.
So he builds a better one. He passes the entrance exam, moves to Leuven, studies medicine, makes money quietly, trains on the mat until the old violence has somewhere to go. He is faster, sharper, and more useful than anyone around him. He knows what is coming.
What he does not know is how to be seen. Marieke, a cardiology researcher, reads the system he has built and asks what he does after the performance ends. Lizzy, back in Gent, remembers the boy before the discipline. His mother recognises the son trying to become a shelter. And the deeper he goes, the clearer the real question becomes: discipline saved him once, but a life run entirely on control is just another locked room.
A slow-burn, adult, emotionally precise novel about the cost of using a second chance well. Book one of a trilogy, complete at twenty-two chapters.
From the notebook
Lines from the book
"I had hidden inside discipline because discipline never asked me to be loved."The Long Way Back
"A man who is only disciplined when empty is not disciplined. He is merely untempted."The Long Way Back
"Believing people always costs something. That is why most people only pretend to do it."The Long Way Back
"And the next morning, I began again."The Long Way Back
Next in the trilogy
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