Page 47 of Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

“What?” I ask, certain he’s holding something back.

He shakes his head, barely, otherwise unmoving.

I walk over to the fridge and put his magnet under Truth.

“What?” I ask again, or rather, demand.

He hesitates for what feels like an entire minute, frowning and breathing, nothing more, until, at last, he says quietly but firmly, “It doesn’t seem like what you want.”

His comment only increases my gut ache as my mom’s words ring in my ears.

It’s a job, Philippa. Not a daily group hug. No workplace is perfect.

“Assuming we can have everything we want is a shaky proposition,” I say. “Imagine if everyone only chased their biggest dreams. We’d have a world full of rock stars, astronauts, and professional athletes. Who’d collect our garbage or manage our grocery stores?”

Dylan’s brows inch up until they’re hidden under his tousled curls.

“So you’re equating a university teaching job with garbage collection?” he asks.

“No.” I cringe, caught in my own argument. I’m used to arguing the opposite stance, that having big dreams is important. I don’t know how to take the other side. “Or maybe I am, but I’ll bet some garbage collectors love their jobs, and others at least learn to enjoy them over time. For many, it’s probably just a job, sure, but a job that affords them other things they enjoy. Maybe that’s what teaching can become for me. Not my great aspirational vocation, but my job.”

He turns away from me with a very Dylan-esque grunt of disapproval, opening the bread bag and taking out slices in a way that signals our conversation has come to an end.

Irritation dances down my spine, sharp and prickly. Because there’s no way Dylan wanted to spend six years haunting the halls of this crumbling house, alone, with only his laptop and his extensive playlist for company. He wanted to write, obviously, but when that wasn’t working out for him, what did he do about it? And he’s never once talked about modeling or copywriting as something he’s passionate about. They pay the bills. That’s all. And also . . .

“So you wanted to eat mediocre pasta every night for years on end?” I ask. “You wanted to run a zillion miles in shoes that lost their arch support half a decade ago? You wanted to sleep on a hundred-year-old mattress and choreograph a bucket-placement routine?”

His jaw goes tight, and I feel myself bracing for a counterattack, but something other than anger flashes through his eyes, something that shatters my defensiveness and turns it to shame.

“Sorry,” I say. “That was harsh.”

He takes a deep breath, dragging a hand down his face to massage his jaw.

“It was fair,” he says. “Harsh, but also fair.”

The last dregs of my combativeness slip away, thank god. I hate arguing with Dylan, even though no two people get along all the time, and things haven’t exactly been low stress lately.

“I’ve been accused of not fighting for what I want before,” he says. “I didn’t take the criticism well. There was”—he pauses in that way he does, redacting as he goes—“reason not to. Circumstances that made me feel justified, at least partly. But now, I don’t know. It’s easier to see when we’re talking about my diet or shoes. It’s not laziness, exactly. It’s more like inertia, a tendency to keep doing whatever I’m already doing, even when I know better options exist. It’s just . . .” He trails off, scratching his neck before shoving his hands deep into his pockets. “How do you know when something’s worth fighting for? And when you’re just . . . fighting?”

I glance around the kitchen, with its cracked ceiling and creaky furniture. At least half of the cabinet doors don’t shut properly, and only two of the four burners work. The water pressure in the sink sucks, and the entire room could use rewiring so it can support more than a trio of sixty-watt bulbs without shorting a circuit. Outside the window over the sink, what remains of the carriage house leans precariously to one side. One more storm, and it’s toast.

“I wish I knew.” I run a hand along the chipped, laminated countertop, yet another part of this house that desperately needs to be replaced. My thoughts spiral from there. Restoring the house. Reviving the boat. Dylan’s writing career. My teaching career. Finishing Grams’s series. Living by the ocean. Building stronger relationships with my siblings. Asking a guy I like if I can kiss him. Maybe inertia stops us from reaching for what we want. Or maybe, sometimes, we’re being realistic. After all, no one gets everything they want. After enough rejections and disappointments, doesn’t everyone grow at least a little bit cautious? Then again . . . “Maybe when something’s really important, we don’t ask questions. We fight for it no matter what.”

“Hmm, maybe,” Dylan murmurs softly, quietly, while nodding to himself. It’s a big maybe, a complicated maybe, one that hides far more than it expresses.

My eyes drift toward the fridge, where two magnets sit under Truth, a bird and a smile. It’s a deceptive word, truth, because while Dylan and I are both being truthful, neither of us is fully forthcoming. I redact, too, like by not mentioning how my gut roiled at the mere thought of returning to full-time academia, somewhere out in the Midwest, far from the ocean, this house, the boat, my siblings, and even Dylan. What he holds back, I may never know.

After an awkward silence, we resume making sandwiches, me prepping and dividing veggies, him slicing cheese, in an efficient routine we must’ve established when we started working on the house together, though I didn’t realize it until now. After weeks of gradually aligning our schedules, we eat together as often as not, so I know he likes a lot of lettuce and a barely there layer of mayonnaise. He knows I like extra cheese and no mayonnaise at all. He enjoys a side of salt and vinegar potato chips. I prefer a sliced apple or a bunch of grapes. We both stick with water most of the time, straight from the tap. Neither of us can stand pickles.

They’re such small things, these details I know about him and that he knows about me, but we must’ve accumulated thousands by now. I wonder what they reveal about us, these tiny truths that don’t require a game to force the revelation, tiny truths we share, simply by being and by noticing. In this moment, that’s what feels important to me, what I’d fight for. Noticing and being noticed, not by straining to get someone’s attention, not by forcing myself into social situations that make my anxiety spike, but organically, by existing together. By caring.

I’m still thinking about this, and about whether I’ll be able to find that kind of care in a new work environment—or even in a new friendship, as hard as those are for me to make—as Dylan and I sit down at the table to eat, settling into chairs I started to think of as his and mine weeks ago. Before either of us takes a bite of our sandwich, someone knocks on the door.

I flinch so hard I nearly tip over my water glass. “Who the h—?”

“It’s for me. She’s early.” With no further explanation, Dylan gets up and heads toward the door while I watch, mouth agape, eyes blinking in surprise, until he disappears down the hall.

“Gaaaaaah!” a cheerful woman’s voice shrieks giddily from the doorway a moment later. “What’s it been? Eight months? Nine? Sight for sore eyes, Dylan. And why didn’t you tell me this place was straight out of a horror movie? The shoots we could do here! Suzy’s next music video. That perfume campaign. Give a woman some warning so she can come prepared!”