In the note at the front of Kin & Keeping, I told you how one reader's question sent me back to Connor Kelly and Samuel Fisher. What happened to them? I want to go a little further here, without giving anything away. Because the book I finished isn't the book I started.

The first version I sketched picked Samuel and Connor up about fifteen years down the road. Diane, Samuel's mother, had only gotten more argumentative with time, and in that version she went looking for trouble. Loud, public trouble. The kind that finds its way into the papers and from there into Connor's career. I pictured the two of them trying to keep their own house quiet while the world turned the volume up, and what that strain would do to them.

Then there was the other idea. Samuel's biological father. I wanted to go back and find out how he and Dale knew each other, how he and Diane ended up together, and what that did to Dale. Samuel and Connor would dig it out piece by piece, a little detective story for two grown men who had spent an entire book learning how to hide.

But as I sorted through the sketches, neither one felt interesting enough to carry a whole book.

What I kept coming back to was something I'd mentioned almost in passing. Samuel has sisters. I'd let them sit at the edges of Static & Signals, and Amy was the one closest to Diane. But late in that first book, I'd given Amy one small moment. A nod, really. A flicker of understanding where her brother was concerned, maybe even empathy.

So I went exploring.

I imagined Amy breaking free of her mother. That stubborn, individual streak of hers, which, if I'm honest, isn't so different from her brother's. And then I imagined her with a child. Repeating history. She didn't know who the father was. Could have been any of several guys. Maybe a dozen. She didn't know, and she didn't care.

That was what turned her. She decided she wanted Samuel in her life, and she wasn't going to walk her mother's road again.

For a while I thought that was the book. Samuel and Amy finding their way back to each other. A brother whose life with Connor had been splashed across every magazine in the nineties, a sister who'd watched it from her mother's side of the room, and how that would even work between them.

But it felt limiting.

And then it hit me.

Samuel and Connor found each other in about the oddest way two kids possibly could. Underneath all of it, though, theirs was a simple story. Two boys learning to love themselves, and each other. Every teenager in that spot, gay or straight, feels like the whole world is watching. Looking for every flaw. Correcting every move. Telling them what to do, how to do it, and why. No questions. And if they don't fall in line, they're shunned. Written off as a freak. A sinner.

For Samuel and Connor, that was literally true. TV. Magazines. Talk shows. Their faces were everywhere. And this was 1994, before Ellen came out, before The Birdcage, when you almost never saw a gay couple on screen who were healthy and loving, let alone two teenagers trying not to freak out over what they felt for each other.

Now jump to 2008. Samuel and Connor are hitting thirty. The world really is changing. Two men getting married has become something people can talk about without a laugh track behind it.

And there's Amy, with a boy named Noah. No father. No brothers or sisters. No grandmother he knows. Just a couple of uncles he doesn't know are famous, and wouldn't care if he did.

So how do Connor and Samuel learn to be uncles?

Static & Signals was about family as something you find, and something you earn. Kin & Keeping flips that around. This time Samuel and Connor are the family somebody needs. Noah needs them, and he needs them most while his own small family is going through the heaviest changes it will ever face.

It's not a gay story. Nor is it a story about acceptance. Samuel's younger brother, Tyler, makes a discovery of his own along the way, but by Tyler's time it isn't anything he's remotely worried about.

It's a story about two men stepping up to be the fathers they needed to be, and about looking at Noah and seeing their family.

Which brings me to what's next.

Static & Signals opens in the summer of 1938, at a limestone quarry outside St. Louis, with a ten-year-old girl running as fast as her legs can carry her. That girl is Helen, Connor's grandmother. Readers have come to know her as a woman who keeps her own counsel. Everything they know about her brothers, Tommy and Bobby, they know the way Helen tells it. Carefully. And never all of it.

The last book in the trilogy is theirs.

Thank you for coming back to Connor and Samuel with me, and for letting Noah in. There's one more story to tell, and it's the oldest one.

— Michael