Page 14 of Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

I open my mouth to say of course, but a sigh emerges instead. “I don’t know.”

This time, when Eleanor nods, I feel like she understands everything. How much I came to hate my supposed dream job back in Chicago. How deeply I missed the ocean. How often I’ve crossed that barely perceptible line between alone and lonely. And how hard I’ve struggled with the growing disparity between the life I thought I’d be living and the ways my life has unfolded instead. I’ve downplayed all of it to my family, but they know me too well.

Haley and Riley step onto the porch together, both holding summery drinks with fancy garnishes. She’s in a bold-print stretchy minidress that shows off her tats and baby bump. He’s in soft, pale, beautifully tailored linens. His fiancé told him he looked handsome in linen on the day they met, and he’s been an ardent flax devotee ever since.

“There you both are.” Haley plops down on the arm of my chair. “Dad thought you left.”

Eleanor tsks. “I would’ve said goodbye first.”

Haley nods in my direction. “Yeah, but Phil wouldn’t.”

I swat her thigh with the back of my hand. Then I get up and offer her my chair. She could probably balance on the arm for hours, perfectly poised, after a lifetime of dance classes, but hogging one of the only two chairs with a pregnant woman nearby feels wrong.

“We’re working through Phil’s existential crisis,” Eleanor says.

I shoot her a scowl. Here we were, having a quiet moment of honest conversation, something I often enjoy with any one of my siblings, but once they group up, I’m lost.

“Who says I’m having an existential crisis?” I ask.

“Aren’t you?” she throws back.

“I’m just”—goddammit, what am I just?—“considering a career pivot. That’s all.”

Riley crosses the porch and leans back against the railing, stacking his ankles and looking Great Gatsby–esque, with his rakish mop of light-chestnut curls fluttering in the breeze and his polished brogues on display. At thirty-one, he’s already a licensed physician specializing in internal medicine and earning half a million a year. His fiancé is a pediatrician at the same hospital and is the sweetest, most loving man in the world. Our parents are so proud.

“What does a history professor pivot to?” Riley asks. “Writing textbooks?”

“Or biographies of dead presidents?” Haley suggests.

Eleanor scoots forward on her chair. “What about working at a museum?”

Haley matches her optimistic tone. “Or being a consultant on period movies?”

I tuck myself into the corner of the porch, letting my siblings brainstorm with enthusiasm, as though I could start any of their suggested jobs tomorrow with only a phone call and a smile. As though plenty of people skilled in those careers wouldn’t be first in line. As though the jobs pay a living, steady wage. As though I’d be happy in them, simply because they involve history.

While my siblings shout out more unrealistic job titles—archivist! heritage home tour guide! reenactor! American Girl doll designer!—my parents’ warnings about pursuing a history PhD without a second concentration in business, marketing, or anything else with “real earning potential” ring in my ears. I understand them now in a way I didn’t at eighteen or twenty-two, but also, if everyone only pursued careers with “real earning potential,” who would paint murals, design chairs, landscape urban gardens, and compose symphonies? Life isn’t only about making money. It can’t be. It isn’t for any of my siblings, even though their interests are more stable than mine: government, medicine, software engineering, and data science. I’ll find a way to afford groceries and a roof over my head. Preferably a roof that doesn’t leak.

“Are we plotting Philippa’s new career?” Louisa asks as she joins us on the porch.

I sink farther into the corner. All four of my siblings together can be a lot.

Eleanor fills Louisa in on the discussion so far. Louisa perks up, though she’s by far the perkiest of the five of us, even at her most sedate, so the change is barely discernible.

“Why don’t you write the rest of Grams’s books?” she asks.

I choke out an uncomfortable laugh. “The pirate books?”

“Exactly! The Zane Scarlett ones. Numbers thirty-five through forty.”

“You’re kidding, right? Even Grams didn’t know what would happen in them.”

“Yes, she did. She outlined everything before she died.”

“I thought that was a rumor,” Eleanor says.

“It was. It is,” I say. “If there was any truth to it, we’d know by now.”

This elicits murmurs of agreement as we piece together memories with each other about the months after our grandmother’s death, when book thirty-four came out with its cliff-hanger ending and the internet blew up with speculation about how Iris Flynn really intended to end her series. Within the family, we all heard her talk about story points to come. Zane and Euphoria finally parting ways so he could meet a new romantic lead. A quest for the kidnapped heir to a besieged throne. Zane besting the dogged officer who’d been pursuing him since book one, or discovering his father was some sort of sea god, embroiling him in a war between deities while he grappled with his unexpected immortality. She was full of ideas, but her editor had no clear information to work from, even after our mother scoured the house for notebooks or files. If she’d found anything, another writer would’ve written and published all six books already.