Page 23 of Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

I also search for nonteaching jobs related to my field, such as work at museums and architectural restoration firms, but everything requires qualifications I don’t have, or it doesn’t pay a living wage. My parents repeatedly ensure I understand that this is a problem of my own making. I remind myself that patricide and matricide are not viable career alternatives.

Dylan and I clean up the yard, yanking overgrown weeds and trimming away trees that have encroached on the house. As it turns out, I really like spending time with Dylan. He’s easy company, as long as I don’t pry into off-limits subjects like his writing, family, or relationship history. He doesn’t initiate much, but once he warms up and settles into a conversation, he’ll talk in depth about virtually any kind of music, and he’s especially forthcoming when I ask about the bands on his T-shirts. He tells me all about some of his favorite running routes, revealing that his average daily distance is around fifteen miles. He also smiles more often than he did in our first couple of weeks together, and I confirm that he does, in fact, have dimples, two of them, perfectly situated in the centers of his cheeks. He laughs more often, too, more than just a garbled grunt, and he always, always turns the lights on for me if I’m out past dark.

I get a glazier out to replace the busted windows so we can finally remove the shattered panes and shabby plywood that were tripling the winter heating bills and making the house look like a squatter’s den. A roofer assesses the leaks and suggests replacing the entire roof rather than patching it piecemeal. I can’t afford this, but he gives me an estimate, so I know how much to save up. Dylan and I also remove the wallpaper in a spare bedroom, treating the space like a trial run for the rooms we actually use. The process is tedious and messy and takes way longer than the chipper YouTube demos suggested, but it’s deeply satisfying to see fresh, clean walls when we’re done. I’d planned to paint them ivory, a clean slate now that the flamboyant peonies have been peeled away, but I decide on a buttery yellow instead, my first baby step in bringing color into my life not by chance but by choice.

“Iris liked yellow, too,” Dylan says as we admire our work.

“Iris liked all the colors,” I amend, unable to picture her wearing fewer than four at any given time. She loved prints, chunky vintage jewelry, overly generous scarves, whimsical shoes that seemed straight out of fairy tales, and any excuse to wear a hat. She’d be so disappointed with my inadvertent descent into grim shades of gray. “What was it like writing with her?”

Dylan’s lips curve into a warm but sheepish smile, lightly dimpling his cheeks.

“Inspiring. Tiring. Amazing,” he says. “She was so prolific, and she knew what she wanted to write before we sat down in her office each morning. Sometimes entire scenes poured out of her. Other times, she’d flip through her notes about what needed to happen next, and we’d write a scene together. I was the faster typist, so I was usually the one at the laptop, but she never treated me like her secretary, even though a lot of the time, that’s exactly what I was.”

“You were always ‘the writer,’” I remind him, now wondering why I never asked her about him, beyond the rare bits of information she offered up on her own.

Dylan steps up to the room’s big bay window, where freshly laundered toile curtains shift in the sea breeze that’s airing out the new-paint smell, and the evening light is soft on his face.

“In her last months,” he says, “when she needed more rest, I’d draft a scene from her notes or ensure subplots were tied up. We’d read through what I wrote. She’d change details, adjust wording that didn’t feel like hers, but as long as I adhered to her story, she trusted me.”

“Yeah. I get that,” I say, because I do. I also get why that kind of trust matters.

Dylan takes a seat on the edge of the bed, and I drop into a creaky but beautiful bentwood rocking chair I’ve always loved. While the last of the daylight fades, he tells me more about his work with my grandmother. How delighted she was with her most fantastical ideas, her ghosts, gods, curses, underwater cities, and ships made of ice, mist, or fire. How she chewed the ends of her pencils when she was thinking or laughingly reheated her tea six or seven times before she remembered to drink it. How she’d take a notebook down to the ship on a good day and curl up on the green velvet sofa on a bad day. How they’d brainstorm details of a scene together, and she was always excited if Dylan’s ideas were better than hers, which he’s quick to admit didn’t happen often. There’s so much I didn’t know. So much I never thought to ask.

She thought she’d have more time.

Me too, Grams. Me too.

While working on the house, Dylan and I continue with truth or dare. He always picks dare, but I usually pick truth. We start with unimportant truths, like how Gary Lightbody from Snow Patrol was my first celebrity crush, or how I hid the turtleneck sweaters my mom always bought me, unable to stand having anything around my neck, even in winter on the Maine coast. Over time, my truths deepen. I tell Dylan about my failure to meet my family’s expectations and how I secretly dread every celebration of my siblings’ personal or professional successes, even while I’m sincerely happy my siblings are happy. I describe my relationships with Harrison and Noah, even though Dylan won’t tell me the first thing about his dating history. And I admit, once I realize it for myself, that the absence of color in my wardrobe, while mostly a reflection of my waning enjoyment of the life I was living in Chicago, is probably also related to my grief.

Coming up with dares is challenging, but I use them to gently break Dylan out of his seclusion. He holds a full three-minute conversation with a woman selling homemade honey at a weekend farmers market in Blue Hill. We attend a bingo night at a Masons’ lodge in Penobscot, where we’re the youngest attendees by about thirty years, though the regulars welcome us with full enthusiasm, and Dylan even wins a round. He also “volunteers” for an adorable read-to-kids event at a nearby library. And on an especially gorgeous, warm, breezy evening, we kick aside the moldy sails so he can pose on the prow of the ship with his face tipped toward the sunset and a sword at the ready, and then I upload the photo to the Flynn siblings’ group text.

I do not ask him to strip down for the shot.

In the first week of September, I hit the jackpot with the eBay sales when I list some of the more valuable antiques we found in the attic. Apparently, there’s a competitive market for old nautical records, rare coins, astrolabes and compasses, paste jewelry, military uniforms, and blunderbusses. The historian in me wants to keep everything that’s actually historic, and I’m selective about what I sell, holding on to the most unique personal items, such as sailors’ diaries and stunning antique clothing a real heiress and her scandalous paramour might’ve worn. Even examining the items for damage feels like I’m communing with people from the past, but in most cases, increasing my income outweighs my academic curiosity or my sentimentality.

Dylan’s at a photo shoot in Portland when the bidding ends, but I hear his motorcycle on the gravel drive late in the evening, before the usual creaks and groans of the house invite him in and amplify every footfall. He finds me grinning over my laptop at the kitchen table.

“Looks like someone got good news,” he says as he steps into the room.

I explain about the sales, tripping over my words in my excitement.

“It’s not enough to replace the roof,” I say. “But with another round or two of sales, it might be. And in the meantime, I’ve decided to splurge. Just once. To celebrate.”

Dylan’s brows shoot up with interest. “Celebrate how?”

I glance at the website I have open on my screen. Then I look at Dylan, biting down a grin I can’t possibly repress. It’s silly to be this excited, but right now, I’m okay with silly.

“Tell me, Dylan Sterling. How have you been sleeping lately?”

“It’s not that bad,” Dylan says.

“It is that bad,” I counter.

“If I only sleep on the far left, I can’t feel the worst lumps.”

“Do you only sleep on the far left?”

Dylan goes quiet, frowning up at the ceiling. Seems safe to assume his answer is no.