Page 35 of Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

For several seconds, I stare at him with my mouth hanging open, frantically analyzing the nuances of his words, his stance, his tone, and the all-but-imperceptible shifts in his expression.

Then I get up and put his smiley face under Truth.

“You first,” I say as I cross my arms, too.

He takes a deep breath, massaging his chin where a few days’ growth has left a dark shadow. I wait, and I’ll continue to wait. If he expects me to make a fool of myself with my grandmother’s best rum, he’s giving me something.

“Okay,” he says. “Shoot.”

I’m tempted to ask if he’s attracted to me at all. Knowing would help me decide how to proceed. I’m also tempted to ask him about the story I read, if he really had seven tiny wars with someone who left him heartbroken. And maybe I can ask him, but one step at a time.

“What does the H stand for?” I ask. “In D. H. Sterling?”

His hand drops to his side, no longer massaging his face, as the air of challenge falls away, replaced by a shifting stance and a bobbing Adam’s apple.

“Which stories did you read?” he asks.

“Just one. About the couple with the toothbrush holder.”

He nods, taking this in, studying my face while the seconds tick by, and I wonder if he’ll wriggle out of answering, requesting a dare instead. But then he blinks, swallows, and says, “Harley. The H stands for Harley. My parents were bikers.”

Chapter Twelve

In a plot twist I did not see coming, Dylan Harley Sterling gets chatty when he drinks. Not that he leaps right into revealing his deepest secrets, but after a few tumblers of rum, he relaxes into an easy conversation with minimal encouragement and without the need to rely on truth or dare.

He tells me about the indie band on his shirt, a Celtic/hip-hop hybrid that performs multitrack percussion on a single fiddle. He laughs about a time he attempted a sci-fi story for one of his writing classes and got shredded by his classmates and, worse, a time he attempted to write a song. He describes the first time he laced up a pair of running shoes and never looked back. He even tells me about “Seven Tiny Wars,” how it wasn’t based on real life, but it was based on a real fear, and writing the story was a way of living out that fear, so if what he feared came to pass, he’d be less devastated by it. This, apparently, is something he does—or rather, did—a lot in his writing.

Somewhere around 10:30 p.m., when the storm has softened into a gentle rain and we’re only checking the buckets and bins every hour or so, after we’ve finished our cold spaghetti with cold tomato sauce and cold (but fresh) tomatoes, and after we’ve poured our fourth or fifth or maybe sixth drink for the night, Dylan tells me about his parents, Warren and Betty, two Harley-Davidson lovers who spent their lives on the road, picking up odd jobs and enjoying the biker community, rather than settling down with nine-to-five careers and a house to take care of. They did their best while Dylan was in school, but he moved constantly, always the new kid, and while he knew his parents loved him, he always felt like an anchor they were desperate to pull up.

When he started at the University of Southern Maine, they were off like a shot. Contact grew sparser and sparser. A photo from Sturgis. A text from Mesa, Arizona. A Happy Birthday message from Key West. Near the end of his third year, he got a different message altogether.

“It was a boating accident,” he tells me, lying on his back on the green velvet Victorian sofa with his head on one arm and his feet kicked up on the other while I slouch in a creaking armchair, sipping my rum. The lights are still out, but candles flicker on the side tables, and the fire’s going strong, with the coffee table shoved aside to make room for Dylan’s mattress.

“It wasn’t a biking accident?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “They were so careful on the road. They had to be. It was their only real home. But boats? They didn’t know the first thing about boats, which is ironic when they couldn’t keep me out of the water. Swimming, sailing, kayaking, crew. Speed boats, though . . .” He shakes his head again, his jaw in motion, his eyes trained on the ceiling.

“I’m sorry,” I say, those old familiar, useless words, trotted out when no others will do.

Dylan’s shoulders shift against the sofa seat. “It sucked. It still sucks, twenty-one years later. But also . . .” He frowns harder than I’ve ever seen him frown, which is saying something.

“You don’t have to talk about this,” I tell him.

“No. I want to. It’s good.” His frown softens as he traces the ornate woodwork on the sofa back with his index finger. “But also. But. Also. Sometimes I think I miss a version of my parents I made up in my head rather than missing the people they really were. Like I’ve held on to the good-parts-only version, not the version that couldn’t disguise their relief when I wasn’t their responsibility anymore. They tried. They just . . . couldn’t.” His tone is matter-of-fact, but his jaw continues twitching, and his hands grow more restless.

I don’t want to be your responsibility, he told me last month.

Now, maybe, I get it.

“I don’t think that’s uncommon,” I say. “Missing an idea of someone rather than the precise reality. I think it’s a form of forgiveness, even when we don’t know we have something to forgive.” This isn’t a concept I’ve considered before, but the words feel true as they sit between us in a quiet room punctuated only by the crackling fire and the pitter-patter of rain.

“Maybe,” he says after a long pause. “But I miss your grandmother exactly as she was.”

I reel as if punched, powerless to a sudden undertow of grief, absence, and immense loss.

“She never made me feel like her responsibility,” Dylan continues, “even though she obviously hired me because I needed her, not because she needed me, at least at first. I was so . . . stuck. She never told me to get my act together. Instead, she got me thinking about how an animatronic parrot works or how many skeletons would crew a brigantine. She got me sailing again. She gave me a place to live and a reason to write, even if I wasn’t writing my own work.”

I nod and swallow, and tears prick at the corners of my eyes, but while the loss continues tugging me downward, it’s softened by something comforting and profound. Something shared. Because I feel what Dylan feels. Because we both lost someone who treated us the way we wanted to be treated, when other people tried but fell short of the mark.