Page 26 of Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

And with that, we’re off.

Chapter Nine

We kneel at the foot of my grandmother’s enormous canopied bed while I open the antique chest that’s been here for as long as I can recall. I’ve emptied it at least half a dozen times over the past two months, always hoping something would turn up beneath the quilts and blankets, always leaving the room empty-handed. I’m almost afraid to hope this time. But not quite.

After waving away a sharp shock of mothball odor, Dylan and I dig in together. We take far more care with my grandmother’s antique quilts than Zane takes with Delilah Arlington’s lacy undergarments, but my heart thrums at the sheer possibility that we’ll find something. I can’t remember the last time I felt this excited. Maybe in grad school, when I was combing the stacks in the Sterling Memorial Library, pulling two-hundred-year-old documents off a shelf, wedged inconspicuously between dusty books about maritime protocols and battle tactics.

Or maybe not even then.

We run our hands around the inside of the emptied chest. My side is smooth, but Dylan finds a latch hidden in a narrow groove on his side, almost invisible between wooden slats.

“Holy shit,” he says. It’s the first time I’ve heard him swear, and it makes me laugh.

“You think they’re really in here?” I ask, practically bouncing now.

“I think we’re about to find out.”

We take a mirrored set of bracing breaths.

I tell myself not to get my hopes up while getting my hopes up.

Then Dylan flips the latch.

The base of the chest pops free at the front.

I slide my hand underneath and lift.

And holy shit is right, because there, in a shallow compartment five or six inches deep, are several small, well-worn notebooks, at least six, maybe eight or nine, leather-bound, with looped black elastic ties. Each one has a date at the top in my grandmother’s tidy penmanship.

“Oh my god.” The words escape me in a gasp.

Dylan’s eyes are wide, and he’s unnaturally still. “They’re really here.”

“They really are.” I pull out a notebook at random, reverently undo the ties, and fold back the cover. “Book thirty-eight,” I read. “Tempests and Temptation.”

Dylan opens another. “Thirty-five. A Siren Calls.”

We start flipping pages, gently but eagerly. The notebook I’m holding is filled with character breakdowns, maps, a detailed outline with several sections scribbled out and written over. Arrows point to new notes and new directions the story should take. Grams even sketched some of the characters, and while her drawings are rough and scribbly, a world emerges. A story. A cast. A tale about sailing headlong into a storm to find a sea monster whose heart is rumored to have magical healing properties, the only cure for Scarlett’s dying mother, but the sea monster turns out to be a gorgeous and alluring woman, one who’s cursed to live forever on a hidden island off the coast of Cuba in the Sargasso Sea. Zane can either steal her heart and heal his mother or stay with the woman he falls in love with. Or is love merely temptation?

“Dylan,” I say, and when he doesn’t look up, I repeat with more insistence, “Dylan!”

He blinks himself to attention. “Sorry. What?”

“We don’t have to decide what to do with them right away. Let’s just enjoy them, okay? And also, not tell anyone else we found them. Pretty sure the story would leak fast. We might end up in a legal battle, and neither of us would have a chance to write the books.”

He lets out a soft breath of laughter. “I wouldn’t have anyone to tell.”

“I only have my family, which would be complicated with my mom as head of the estate.”

Dylan doesn’t reply right away, though I’ve told him enough about my family by now for him to understand that while my mom wouldn’t rush to sell Grams’s notebooks for financial gain, she’d find the idea that I might want to write the books laughable, and she barely knows Dylan. She can’t even bother to remember that Sterling’s his surname, despite multiple reminders. She still thinks of him as a squatter, though if she’s urging me to charge him rent, he’s my “tenant,” and if she’s referring to his appearance for any reason, he’s my “handsome guest.”

“You think your mom would fight you for the rights?” he asks.

“I think she’d have good reason to. I wouldn’t have much of an argument against her.”

“Except that Iris didn’t give your mom the notebooks.”

“She didn’t give them to me, either.”