Jake Brusey’s Inner World
- Phyllis Horne
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Why He’d Risk Everything for Mia
We hear a lot about world-building in the fiction world these days. For me, writing a woman-in-peril thriller worth every minute you'll spend reading it meant building an authentic inner world for every character.
A fictional character’s personality, voice, reactions, and choices have to make sense. That’s what makes them feel real to us. I don’t exactly build characters—I uncover them. I listen to who they are emotionally, intellectually, and experientially. Then, based on how human hearts, minds, and souls actually work, I do my best to make sure all that authenticity shows up in the story.
Take Jake Brusey. On the surface, he's a bar owner in small-town Louisiana who decides to help a woman on the run. Simple enough. But why would someone who's spent his whole life avoiding his criminal family suddenly risk everything for a stranger?
The answer lives in Jake's inner world.
Jake grew up knowing he was somehow related to the Marcellas crime family. He's not sure exactly how—the connection is distant, and his father spent more time teaching Jake how to live his life without getting caught up in that syndicate than he did explaining the family tree. Jake developed what he calls his "Gandhi thing"—passive resistance as an art form. When members of the criminal family asked him to deliver messages, he'd have 4-H calves to tend. When they needed packages delivered, his mother was feeling poorly. He never said no; he just always had something more important. By seventeen, they'd stopped asking. This wasn't some random character quirk. This was his way of building a life outside of crime.
His mother died of cancer when he was sixteen. Then, when Jake was eighteen, his father refused to pay protection money for Enola's to the Fortiers. So, they burned down the family business that had stood for 150 years. His father could have escaped but stayed to fight the fire. Breathed too much smoke. Never recovered. “They didn’t murder him,” Mia says. “But they killed him.”
Now every choice Jake makes clicks into place. His careful boundaries. His quiet independence. Ten years on, the way his extended family members speak to him with deference at weddings and funerals—their respect and recognition of what standing apart costs.
When Mia first walks into his life, something about how she carries herself, deftly refuses to reveal her name, smiles and looks away—it resonates with Jake. Even if he doesn't recognize it as the source of his interest. His attraction.
When he learns more, Jake doesn't see just a woman in trouble. He intuits a chance to rewrite his father's story—his own history—with someone who might escape what his dad couldn't.
That's why he breaks his own rules. Goes to someone he knows as "Uncle" Boudreaux Marcellas for help. Accepts that someday the favor will be called in.
Because Jake's inner world—built from loss, shaped by resistance, haunted by what passive choices can cost—makes this moment inevitable. He's not making a plot-convenient decision. He's acting from the deepest truth of who he is.
That's what inner world building does. Characters become real not through description or dialogue, but through the invisible architecture that makes every choice feel like the only choice they could make.
Jake falls in love with Mia because his inner world demands it. And you'll fall in love with Jake because everything you experience with him is authentic.
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