Philippa Flynn's Year of Panic and Piracy

Part 1 - Chapters 1 to 2

Part 1 - Chapters 1 to 2

A sinkhole swallows her bicycle whole while she cycles through a quiet intersection. She leaps off just in time and watches the pavement open up, her bike crashing into darkness. A pedestrian calls it in. She can't stop thinking: if something that solid can fall away without warning, what is she doing in a job she hates, in a city far from the ocean, in an expensive apartment, with a relationship her friends call "that guy you sometimes have sex with"?

Less than an hour later, she tells Carl, her sixty-seven-year-old department chair, that she's handing in her notice. Carl's first concern is the budget. She offers two weeks to wrap up. He chuckles, a sound she loathes, and says they can't recruit anyone into that "tiny little closet" of an office. She seethes, remembering how she was told the office was nonnegotiable, how she never even got a name plaque. She declines the goodbye card.

As the only woman in an all-male department, she's learned not to show exasperation. She loves teaching history, but the disappointments have piled up: her four male colleagues get raises while she gets overlooked. Her administrative document becomes "Peter's document" after a male colleague adds his name. Academic culture is changing in ways she dislikes. Being a history professor is the only job she's ever wanted, but lately she's lost the passion, and that loss has bled into everything.

Two hours later, she's filed a thirty-day lease termination and texted Noah that they shouldn't see each other anymore. He replies with a simple "OK," which tells her everything. She's now panicked out of her job, her home, and the closest thing to a relationship she's known in a decade.

Amelia Leung appears

She's in her office pulling books off shelves when Amelia Leung, an English professor and her only real friend at the school, pops her head in. Amelia already knows about the notice. She assumed the narrator had applied for another job. She didn't. Amelia suggests this is just a pause until academic job listings post in the fall. The narrator opens her mouth to say "of course," but can't. Humanities departments are being gutted. She doesn't know how to do anything else, but she no longer knows if she wants to do this.

Amelia calls her the ultimate planner. The narrator admits the committee work was unwanted. Amelia asks what else she would do. She jokes about staying stupidly busy or blindingly drunk. Amelia warns her to stick with busy.

Amelia asks how she'll afford her apartment. She gave it up. Amelia asks if she's moving in with the guy she sleeps with. She gave him up too. Amelia slumps back, stunned.

Amelia asks about her grandmother's house. The narrator shows her a street view of a slate-blue three-story Second Empire house on the coast of Maine, built in 1877 on a rocky outcropping. Not squinting, it's an old, weather-worn house needing buckets under roof leaks, boarded windows, and a collapsed carriage house. She can't afford a handyman. She's unemployed. Her grandmother left her the boat, the house, and its contents, but most of the money went to her mother.

Exhibit B is the yacht: a two-masted schooner modeled after an eighteenth-century Russian cargo vessel, currently without masts, both lost in a lightning storm.

Exhibit C is Dylan Sterling, the writer her grandmother hired to help with her pirate romance novels after her cancer diagnosis. He organized notes, typed chapters, and eventually took on ghostwriting. Her grandmother invited him to live in the house rent-free. The narrator has never met him, but she pulls up his photo: wild white hair and an intense scowl. Amelia calls him "very Einstein-y" and "grumpy old mannish."

Amelia asks why he doesn't contact the narrator's parents about repairs. Her mother refuses to have anything to do with the house, except paying the annual tax bill from estate funds. The narrator owns the house, but her mother owns the property beneath it. Her mother wants to liquidate but can't while the narrator owns the house.

Amelia asks why she hasn't sold it. Keeping a house she doesn't live in, can't afford to fix, and hasn't set foot in for over six years makes no sense. She knows it. Then she pulls up the photo of the house again. It's still standing after many hard winds. Her grandmother was just as resilient. She invited the narrator to stay during childhood summers when she was struggling socially. School years were hard, but in the summers she had her grandmother, the one person who always made her feel okay being her.

She can't sell it, she says with a break in her voice, even if she never goes back.

Amelia nods and opens her arms. They embrace. Amelia tells her she kind of envies her. The narrator protests: she's jobless, homeless. Amelia says it's because she's doing something brave. The comment hits like a warm hug, and she wills herself to believe it.

They part with plans for dinner at the end of the week. She peels her name off the wall outside her office, a torn scrap of notebook paper she taped up as a joke when she first started. Removing it from the office that never should have been an office is a fitting end to Philippa Flynn's tenure. And yet, as she stands amid half-emptied shelves, a single thought engulfs her: What in the hell has she done?

News of her quitting travels fast. Two colleagues don't reply at all, and the other two send brief, bland "Good luck" emails signed off with "Best." She suspects she loathes people who sign off with "Best" even more than people who chuckle.

She had no intention of telling her family she quit without another job lined up, but she slipped and mentioned it to Louisa, her youngest sister. Before long, all four siblings are demanding she attend a baby shower, a holiday house party, and a wedding. All within a few hours' drive of Portland, because Philippa is the only one of the five who left New England. Chicago held appeal at the time: distance, distraction, a fresh start. Turns out you can run away from home, but home doesn't run away from you.

Her parents call, gasping that she's "thrown away" her academic career. Philippa regresses into a childish need to prove she isn't a failure. She tells them she's started a job hunt, that she's confident something will come through. Her parents pressure her to come home. Her siblings pressure her to come home. This goes on all month while she fruitlessly applies for retail and server jobs, sells off her furniture on Craigslist, and tries to come up with a plan that doesn't involve shacking up in a decaying house with grumpy Einstein. By the end of June all she has left is a laptop, a sleeping bag, and a near-constant sense of panic.

Eventually she is forced to embrace Amelia's suggestion. She emails Mr. Sterling, letting him know she's arriving Saturday, July 1, and plans to reside at the house until further notice. The email runs long, overly apologetic. A reply comes the following morning: "See you on the 1st DS." She instantly regrets the email, now certain she has set herself up for the worst cohabitation ever.

Tamarack Street

Three days later, Philippa is in the back of a cab, turning onto Tamarack Street and confronting her neglected inheritance. The house looks just as she remembers it, though more faded, more chipped, and more boarded up. It looms tall on its jagged outcropping, with a jutting central tower reaching four stories, despite a large pigeon nest leaving an enormous streak of bird shit on the uppermost window. Any semblance of a yard has gone completely to seed. Even in its dilapidated condition, the house has a presence. She can't look at it without feeling something, though she isn't sure what.

A memory surfaces: the last time she was here, she'd flown out for her grandmother's funeral. Grams had been generous in her will. Most of the income from her literary estate goes to Philippa's mom, but Grams set aside money for great-grandchildren's college educations. She left her siblings $100,000 each, while Philippa got the boat, the house, and its contents. No one complained about unfairness. They were all glad they didn't have to deal with the place, especially because dealing with the house meant dealing with Mr. Sterling.

The cabbie peers up at the house as he unloads her suitcases. He offers to stick around. She insists she'll be okay. Her phone rings. It's her mom. Do they know she's arrived? Is the house still standing? How is the job hunt going? Would she please reconsider not living in a death trap with a squatter?

Her parents offer her their house if she needs to stay, but they never say if she wants to. At thirty-four, she doesn't want to sleep among her little brother's collectibles while her sisters enjoy their own homes and families. She knows exactly what staying there would mean: over breakfast she'd defend her choice to pursue a low-paying teaching career in a dying field, and at dinner there'd be questions about marriage, kids, and the biological clock. She'd smile and offer quippy replies, but inside she'd be screaming.

She

Part 2 - Chapters 3 to 5

Philippa finds Dylan wasn't joking about the leftover pasta, but what she discovers in the kitchen is stranger than a shared meal. The fridge holds three nearly identical containers of red-sauce pasta, the pantry is stocked with over a dozen boxes of dry pasta, as many jars of generic tomato sauce, and little else. No vegetables, no seasonings, no Parmesan. She digs into the ziti anyway, too anxious to have eaten before arriving, while Dylan retreats to his third-floor bedroom and shuts the door for the night.

Alone, she wanders the first two floors of her deceased grandmother's house, taking inventory. The lived-in rooms are clean enough, and her grandmother's green velvet Victorian sofa remains in good shape, but the rest of the house feels like a mausoleum of objects without a life to animate them. Every door opens onto dust-coated antiques, knickknacks, fringed lamps, porcelain snuffboxes, peeling vintage books, and pirate paraphernalia everywhere. Her grandmother started writing contemporary romances, but once she shifted to swashbuckling sailors and rebellious heiresses, she committed fully. Closets burst with cutlasses, powder kegs, gold coins, iron manacles, peg legs, birdcages, maps, a rum collection large enough to inebriate all of Maine, and costumes made of polyester satin and plastic jewels. It all feels tacky and fake to Philippa now, relics not of the eighteenth century but of overwrought fantasy. Her grandmother never cared for historical accuracy, especially once she added curses, immortals, and shape-shifters to the series, but she loved Philippa's interest in the truth behind the legends.

A memory surfaces, sharp and warm: her grandmother telling her she'd make a wonderful teacher after Philippa rattled on about preindustrial maritime amputations with alarming enthusiasm. No one had told her she'd be good at anything before. The belief sank in deep, inspiring her career, and even though that career became a struggle, her grandmother was right about the teaching.

Her phone buzzes. Amelia checking in. Philippa confirms the house is still standing and that she's been there about an hour. Then Amelia asks about her housemate, and Philippa sputters out a laugh before sending a cover image from one of her grandmother's novels. The Raven and the Rake by Iris Flynn. A classic clinch cover: a crashing sea, a three-master anchored, a woman with a low-cut green frock writhing in the arms of a bare-chested, devouring man.

She had the wrong Dylan Sterling. The one who lives here was her grandmother's cover model.

Amelia reacts with a string of exclamation points and demands better stories. Philippa offers what she has: he helped with her luggage, and he let her eat his leftover pasta. Amelia wants more. Philippa promises to report if there's an Act III. They text back and forth, Amelia sharing a ridiculous story about a student demanding a grade change despite having all the information available, which makes Philippa newly grateful for her recent, terrifying, possibly temporary escape from academia. She sends pics of the house, and they laugh at her grandmother's hoarding tendencies.

After putting away the ziti, Philippa makes a grocery list: fruit, vegetables, eggs, cheese, bread, herbs, with a reminder to ask Dylan what he likes, discounting the obvious. She's a mediocre cook at best, no illusions about earning his benevolence, but she prefers cooking for more than one.

On the way upstairs, she pauses at a family photo. The eight of them huddle on the shore, the sea behind them, her grandmother, parents, and all five kids ranging from seven to seventeen. Philippa is twelve in the middle, gangly and awkward, wearing a gingham bikini top and cutoff jean shorts, holding a pail and trowel, frowning like Wednesday Addams at her surliest. Everyone else glows with ease and happiness. Her brother Riley clowns; her grandmother steadies him; her parents hold hands; her sisters smile in matching swimsuits. Philippa looks like she's in a completely different world, wrangled into the photo under duress. Catching her reflection in the glass, she sees the same frown at thirty-four, and the same sense of aloneness. She always gravitated toward aloneness but never meant it to become her default state. There's a fine line between alone and lonely, between needing escape from noise and judgment and not wanting a life built on silence. She chose summers with her grandmother, reading for days or practicing knots on the boat. She chose Chicago, where building a life meant sequestering herself with work. She wonders if she made those choices because she wanted them, or if she wanted them because of choices other people made, or if there's something else entirely, simply her, who she was always going to be. If her grandmother were still alive, the thought comes unbidden. She shuts it down.

At the second-floor landing, light seeps from beneath the third-floor door. Rhythmic footfalls echo as Dylan paces, slowly, thoughtfully, not in anger, but she worries she's stressed him out. He's lived here uninterrupted for over half a decade, accustomed to his routines. Now he has to share with a total stranger who could overturn everything. She braces herself and pads up the stairs, planning to ask about the grocery list, or thank him again, or say goodnight, just enough to avoid establishing patterns of ignoring each other. The tread creaks. The pacing stops. A shadow beneath the door goes still. She waits, picturing him frozen like a startled deer. Of course he doesn't want to be seen. He already told her not to buy him groceries. His signals were clear. She's not being friendly; she's being pushy and invasive. She counts to ten in silence, then slowly, reluctantly, turns around and returns to her lumpy bed, where she barely sleeps a wink.

For five days, Philippa throws herself into cleaning. She scrubs floors and windows, scours bathrooms, boxes up dust-collecting trinkets, launders curtains, pounds rugs, moves a pigeon's nest, and scrapes bird droppings off the fourth-story window with a kitchen towel tied around her face. She watches YouTube videos about wallpaper removal and DIY demolition for the collapsed carriage house. She contacts glaziers, researches dumpster rental, and uses the Flynn sibling group text to solicit eBay selling advice. This is the keep-stupidly-busy-to-avoid-a-breakdown plan she told Amelia about. She has a week before her sister's engagement party, she won't solve her career crisis overnight, and she needs the house to feel less neglected and more like somewhere someone actually lives.

She buys groceries and a large backpack for the two-mile coastal footpath to Blue Hill, a gorgeous walk that's less gorgeous with twenty pounds of food in hand. She makes stir-fries and salads with plenty for two, and a decent batch of chocolate chip cookies. She tells Dylan to help himself. He thanks her for the offer but keeps eating pasta, only pasta, other than the protein shakes he makes each morning after his daily run. Over nearly a week, their entire discourse amounts to: the Wi-Fi password (ZephyrsRevenge, the name of Zane Scarlett's ship), the contents of his protein shake (protein powder, frozen bananas, almond milk, end of conversation), and how far he runs ("as far as I can," end of that conversation).

By day six, she can't stand it and consults the sibling group text for advice on getting to know someone without being intrusive or offensive. The responses are predictably unhelpful. Louisa asks if this is about Sterling. Haley teases that their mom called him something else the first time she met him. Eleanor wonders how their mom didn't recognize him from the book covers, and why they never drove over to check him out themselves. Philippa explains she's trying to break his vow of silence. Eleanor compares him to Geralt of Rivia. Louisa and Haley find that hot. Haley suggests getting him to pose with one of Grams's swords. Philippa can't get him to stay in the same room for thirty seconds. Eleanor suggests getting him talking about his work, which Philippa points out is easier said than done. Maybe he has writer's block, Louisa offers. Then Louisa makes an introvert joke about light bulbs that Philippa shoots down. Riley finally joins, suggesting drinking games, and the siblings immediately bring up Philippa's embarrassing 21st birthday and last New Year's, with Louisa mimicking her sloppy "I LOVE YOU GUYS" proclamation. Riley suggests truth or dare. Louisa invites him to her engagement party. Philippa pockets her phone, wishing she'd never opened the can of worms, remembering the time her siblings hovered so obtrusively when she was fourteen that the boy she'd invited made an excuse and left after twenty minutes. She never invited anyone over again.

That afternoon, she sits at the kitchen table listing pirate collectibles on eBay. The powder kegs probably cost too much to ship, but smaller items attract bids quickly. Fake doubloons are weirdly popular. A skull-and-crossbones flag starts an instant bidding war. An engraved saber reaches $225, old keys near $150. She hopes her grandmother isn't watching from a spiritual plane, crushed at the discarding of items that sparked joy, but she left them without stipulations, and Philippa needs income for repairs. The place already feels more livable

Part 3 - Chapters 6 to 8

The porch lights are on when Eleanor drops her off shortly after 11:00 p.m., and she knows Dylan must have turned them on for her. It is a small act, but she has not lived with anyone since leaving her parents' house, and being thought of feels new. She spots the TRUTH and DARE notes still pinned to the fridge. She scribbles on a scrap of paper: dare you to text me one of your most embarrassing novel covers. She adds her number and pins it with the smiley face magnet. It feels strange that they have emailed for six years and lived together for a week without exchanging numbers.

She tiptoes up to her grandmother's office and finds the first Zane Scarlett book, A Pirate's Perfect Plunder. She laughs at the cover—Dylan/Zane, shirtless and ripped, pressing a redhead against him. The fantasy of gorgeous people lusting and looting has never drawn her in. Her hope is that these books will give her something to contribute, a reason to pick up where her grandmother left off.

She wakes the next morning with the book etched into her cheek. There is a text from an unknown number: a photo of a romance novel cover. A man sits on a locker room bench, shirtless, jeans undone, pressing a football between his legs. The title is Twisted Seductions, Book Three: The Baller's Final Score. She laughs out loud. She is now desperate to call Dylan "the Baller."

Dylan returns from his morning run, soaked in sweat. She thanks him for the cover image. His neck flushes. They tried a helmet too, he says. Too much coverage, she guesses, and the flush spreads to his cheeks. His shyness, his complete opposite to the hyperconfident alphas he portrayed, charms her completely.

She asks if he only did book covers. Mostly, he says. His friend in publishing needed a last-minute cover change, he suited the look, the money was good, and the job got him an agent. These days, he says, it is the middle-aged lifeguard or the guy buying lettuce at Whole Foods. She gapes at his dismissal. He asks if it is advertising work. He nods, saying it pays the bills when other things do not. Other things like writing, she assumes.

He says, "Your turn," gesturing toward the fridge. She moves the chickadee under TRUTH. He asks about Yale. Grad school, yes, but she only wears the shirt to sleep. She admits being published and tenured is a date killer. Dylan tells her he thinks they both know who the asshole was in that scenario. She smiles, but inwardly she is reliving terrible dates. She will miss the clarity of Noah's "U up?" texts.

She loved grad school, she tells him. Dylan does not press, and she appreciates it. She tries to coax a truth from him next; he refuses. Truth is dangerous. She suggests some dares are risky too. "It's not the same," he says. She realizes he is right. They trade a barely there smile, and the quiet understanding feels big.

She asks a question outside the game. What does he know about her grandmother's plans for the final six Zane Scarlett books? He sucks in a breath. Iris talked about the stories: a new love interest, a siren's curse, a race for treasure in the Arctic, a final face-off with Scarlett's nemesis. They discussed how Dylan might take over, but never made a formal plan. She thought she would have more time. Iris Flynn battled cancer for three years but left quickly in the end. The narrator was back in Chicago when her mother called with the news. Then Dylan adds that her mother had other ideas: the bestselling author. She gulps and asks if Dylan is a bestselling author. He makes a strangled sound. He drafted a novel in his mid-twenties; one professional editor read it and was not a fan. No bestsellers. No books. His grandmother was the only person who thought of him as a writer.

It breaks her heart a little. She asks about notes, outlines. He searched Iris's office, found nothing, gave up years ago. She slouches against the counter, defeated. When he asks if she wants to sell them to the publisher, she admits, if the notes are enough to work from, she might want to sell them the books. He blinks, and she guesses: "You want to write them, too." "I did, then," he says. "Now? I don't know." She asks if he thinks Iris wanted the books written even if she couldn't write them. He nods without hesitation. Then why leave the notes so hard to find? Maybe she worried the work would not be done well. She flinches, instantly defensive. He tells her that from what he knows, she does almost anything well. She needs a minute to compose herself. Then she says they should keep looking for the outlines. He agrees.

For the next two days they hunt, overturning drawers, shaking out books, moving furniture, tapping for hollow places. They find no outlines, but they find other rewards: conversations become less stilted, and the attic yields a treasure trove of new eBay items. Then she is forced to pause the hunt. Nearly everything she listed a week ago has sold, more than three hundred items, and she never considered how she would package and ship them. She is swearing to herself in the parlor when Dylan finds her. He noticed she had not moved in half an hour. She realizes with a jolt that she owns no pattern, no color, no concert tees. It was not a conscious choice, more a subliminal disappearing act.

She explains her packaging crisis, and without the criticism she has learned to expect from her parents, Dylan pulls out his phone and finds the nearest truck rental and a general store for supplies. She is stunned by his swift, unjudging help, and only realizes he said "we" when she sees the surprise on her own face. He offers her a ride, and she jokes: on his shoulders? He leads her to the carriage house. He pulls a tarp off a motorcycle. It is old and olive-green, with welded fenders and a cracked leather seat. It is his, he tells her; Iris liked riding on the back. He hands her a helmet, asks if she has ever ridden. No. Should she be nervous? "You should trust me," he says. Weirdly, she does.

Three hours later, they are driving to Surry, and she discovers a new interest shared with her grandmother. The sun and wind on her face remind her of afternoons sailing with Grams. It is pure and sensory, her mind going quiet while her body takes over. But she cannot ignore the spreading awareness that she is straddling Dylan's bike, her thighs bracketing his hips, her chest pressed against his back. She has always been drawn to nerdy academics. She is fairly sure she has never slept with anyone who had a gym routine.

The relationship settles into an easy rhythm over dinner. Dylan shares stories about his modeling career. The narrator unloads her frustrations about teaching, about academia becoming customer service. She notices how much more Dylan listens than talks, and how she doesn't overedit herself the way she does around her family or dates. The wine turns out to be terrible, and they pour it down the sink together. He fetches rum from her grandmother's collection instead, and the lasagna is good, and the conversation flows.

When he offers her more rum, she declines—she knows that when she drinks too much, she hugs people and spills gushy compliments. He smiles at that, and she notices the real Dylan Sterling in the creases around his eyes and mouth.

They clean up together, and though she deliberately puts space between them, she notices the gap shrinking as they work side by side. When he thanks her for dinner, she suggests they do it again sometime. He responds strangely—listing what he's not: not much of a cook, not much of a handyman, no full-time job. She's confused until she realizes he's trying to say he should contribute something. He confesses that he got used to living in the house alone, but now he feels like a freeloader. He trails off when suggesting he might leave, unable to finish the thought. She can tell with certainty that he doesn't want to go, and she knows she doesn't want him to either.

She offers him a solution: a more active collaboration. Lending a hand with the yard, the attic, removing wallpaper, replacing fixtures, someday working up to the carriage house and the boat. His shoulders relax. He agrees.

The next seven weeks fly by. Dylan still keeps to his room often and runs constantly—fifteen miles a day, it turns out. The narrator watches sunrises, reads more Zane Scarlett books, sells more of her grandmother's collectibles on eBay, and keeps hunting fruitlessly for the outlines. Under pressure from her parents, she applies for three academic jobs, all part-time adjunct positions. None are dream locations, but she needs to set something in motion. Her parents repeatedly remind her this is a problem of her own making.

Working alongside Dylan, she discovers she genuinely likes spending time with him. He's easy company, as long as she doesn't pry into forbidden territory—his writing, his family, his relationship history. But he opens up about music, about his favorite running routes, and he smiles more now. He always, always turns the lights

Part 4 - Chapters 9 to 11

Chapter Nine

At the foot of her grandmother's enormous canopied bed, Philippa kneels beside Dylan and opens the antique chest she has emptied half a dozen times over the past two months. Every time before, she has hoped something would turn up beneath the quilts and blankets, and every time she has left the room empty-handed. This time she is almost afraid to hope, but not quite. Together she and Dylan dig through the quilts more carefully than Zane ever handled Delilah Arlington's lacy undergarments. Her heart thrums at the sheer possibility.

Then Dylan finds a latch hidden in a narrow groove on his side, almost invisible between slats. It is the first time she has heard him swear, and it makes her laugh. She tells herself not to get her hopes up while getting her hopes up. The latch flips, the base of the chest pops free, and there, in a shallow compartment, are several small, well-worn leather notebooks with looped black elastic ties. At least six, maybe as many as nine. Each has a date at the top in her grandmother's tidy penmanship.

Philippa pulls one out at random and undoes the ties. “Book thirty-eight. Tempests and Temptation.” Dylan opens another. “Thirty-five. A Siren Calls.”

The notebooks are filled with character breakdowns, maps, and a detailed outline with several sections scribbled out and written over. Arrows point to new notes and new directions. Grams even sketched characters, rough and scribbly, but a world emerges from those pages: a tale about sailing headlong into a storm to find a sea monster whose heart has magical healing properties, the only cure for Scarlett's dying mother. The sea monster turns out to be a gorgeous, alluring woman cursed to live forever on a hidden island off the coast of Cuba in the Sargasso Sea. Zane, the hero, can either steal her heart and heal his mother or stay with the woman he falls in love with. Or perhaps love itself is merely temptation.

Philippa, noticing Dylan is lost in the pages, catches his attention and insists they don't need to decide what to do with the notebooks right away. They should enjoy them, and they absolutely should not tell anyone else they found them. The story would leak fast, and they would both end up in a legal battle before either of them had a chance to write the books. Dylan replies that he wouldn't have anyone to tell. For Philippa, it is more complicated: her mother heads the estate. Dylan asks whether her mother would really fight for the rights. Philippa thinks her mother would have good reason, and she wouldn't have much of an argument against her. Dylan points out that Iris didn't give her mother the notebooks. But she didn't give them to Philippa, either, not by design. Philippa reflects that Grams couldn't have anticipated she would quit her job and move back here, nor that Dylan and she would find the notebooks clued in by a random reference in the published books. Not telling her mother was a simple oversight, a consequence of Grams's rapid decline.

And yet. Grams was serious about her work, and her decisions around it were always carefully thought out. At any point she could have mentioned where the remaining books' plans were hidden. She never did. But she knew Philippa was frustrated with her job even in the first year. She knew Philippa loved this house, the only place she had ever felt at home. She watched Philippa pore over mysteries, from Nancy Drew to Christie, Poe, du Maurier, Hammett, Chandler, and Sayers. And she had a flair for the theatrical.

Then the wording of the will hits Philippa: To my granddaughter, Philippa, I leave my house and all of its contents... All of its contents. Gratitude swells in her chest until it aches. She doesn't believe in ghosts, fate, karma, horoscopes, or shooting stars, and she can't convince herself that Grams somehow guided them here. Still, she feels her grandmother's presence now: her belief in both of them. That much is real and undeniable, as is Philippa's right to decide what happens next. Maybe Dylan will write the books and regain his confidence. Maybe she will take a stab and find the something she has been craving. Maybe they will sell the notebooks to the publisher and replace the roof. But the house has stood this long with its many leaks. And if Philippa listens hard enough, toppling a few of her own stones, she swears she can hear a siren's call.

Chapter Ten

Three weeks after finding the notebooks, Philippa takes the bus to Augusta for Haley's baby shower. Dylan has been poring over Grams's notes, wrapping his head around the remaining storylines: which characters get killed off, the twists in Zane's love life, the expanding map, emerging magical creatures. Philippa has been bingeing the existing books to catch up, though she is only halfway through book twenty-one. Her parents offered a ride; she politely declined.

Two hours into the shower, Philippa has confirmed that baby showers are torture for the non-parentally inclined. She plays games: name the melted candy bar by sniffing what looks like a poopy diaper, chug from a baby bottle, pin a clothespin on anyone who says the word baby. And nearly every conversation with Haley's friends turns into the same interrogation: Do you have children? Do you want children? Just wait, you will change your mind. Becoming a mother is the best decision I ever made. Everything I do matters so much more now. No one dies wishing they worked more. Philippa holds her witty and devastating retorts behind a polite smile, escapes to the bathroom at the first opportunity, and hides away, just as she did at Louisa's and probably will at Eleanor's holiday party.

She washes her face with handmade lemongrass soap and dries her hands with a sustainable plush towel that may, she muses, contain fibers that once hugged Beyoncé's backside. Still stressed but smelling nice, she sits on the closed toilet lid and texts Amelia.

Amelia has news: Jake Reynolds, the admin head who was fooling around with student assistants, got caught making out with one on his office sofa in front of multiple witnesses. He wasn't fired. He was transferred to another department, with a raise and a better title. The administration then sent a memo ordering everyone to remove their office sofas because students might misconstrue intentions and the optics were bad. Amelia laments that she can no longer nap in her office thanks to some dude. Philippa notes wryly how often it is everyone else who gets punished when men misbehave. Their conversation turns to the "pirate king." Philippa admits things with Dylan are good and also not good. She thinks she has a crush. A one-sided crush. Does he know? God, she hopes not. At least they are finally acting like housemates. Amelia confesses she read the first book and loved it, in a way the last three Booker Prize winners never managed; she jokes about inventing a Hot Pirate Prize.

A knock at the door interrupts. It is Haley, offering cake or offering to bring a piece upstairs. Philippa opens the door to find her seven-months-pregnant sister in an explosive topknot and a sexy color-block sweaterdress with big gold hoops and three statement necklaces. The delicately inked iris on her forearm is Philippa's favorite of Haley's tattoos, for obvious reasons. Philippa apologizes for needing a break; Haley offers to cover for her so she can eat cake without playing baby games. Philippa thanks her for the diaper service gift card, which she stretches the truth about affording, because Haley and Mischa tried for over seven years to get pregnant. They laugh about Louisa's early hangovers and the old family conspiracy. Philippa realizes, with a swell of love, that her siblings all understand about her hunt for Grams's outlines without her even asking them to keep it secret. They have always kept one another's secrets, from Riley's sexuality before he was ready to come out, to Haley's graffiti phase, to Eleanor's sobbing breakdown after losing student council. She tells Haley she will be the most amazing mother. Haley jokes about Eleanor's type A parenting and her own future as the cool mom sneaking her kids into over-eighteen concerts.

Back downstairs, the party continues. Philippa is content to be a casual observer until her mother wanders in with Judy Kent, a neighbor who knew all five children growing up. Judy gushes over Haley's house, then asks how her mother did it: five kids, all so successful, beautiful homes, beautiful families. Her mother answers with a telling phrase: there have been some hiccups. Philippa slouches in her chair, knowing she is the hiccup. Her mother then praises Eleanor, Haley, Riley and Emil, Louisa and Reuben, meticulously omitting Philippa in a practiced conversational tactic. Judy, sensing the omission, asks about Philippa anyway. Her mother describes her as "always the outlier," with big dreams and trouble accepting when those dreams weren't her reality; if a job isn't perfect, if a man isn't perfect. A lilting laugh follows. Philippa's blood boils. The description is false. Perfectionism has never been her tragic flaw, and her mother's charade of harmless fun is infuriating. She wants to rage, but she refuses to make a scene at Haley's party. Instead she slips out of the living room into the kitchen, out of earshot.