Page 32 of Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

I realize what she’s doing half a second after she’s doing it.

Half a second after that, I wonder why I didn’t do it myself.

“Maybe? I’m not sure,” I say. “Actually, probably not. I googled him before I met him. Someone else came up, the guy I thought I’d be living with.”

Louisa shows me her screen, with grumpy Einstein scowling the scowl to end all scowls.

“You mean this guy?” she asks.

“That’s the one.”

“Yikes. Bullet dodged.” In a flash, she’s on the hunt again, thumbs flying. “This would be so much easier if you were following each other on social media.”

“You know I can’t even handle social reality.”

“Fair. Looks like he doesn’t have any accounts, either.” More typing, more searching, while I look on over her shoulder. “Ooh! I think I found him!” She inches closer so I can see her screen more easily. “D. H. Sterling. Author. Looks like he was published in Tin House, Glimmer Train, Paris Review, Grain. Loads more. Long list. Wow. The guy’s got chops.”

I stare at the screen, recalling Dylan saying he’d “placed a few stories” in lit mags. Now I wonder what else he’s been overly modest about. Maybe he runs a full marathon every morning.

“Anything we can read online?” I ask.

Louisa clicks a few links that dead-end at paywalls or site not found announcements, but eventually a story pops up. “Seven Tiny Wars” by D. H. Sterling, posted sixteen years ago. She flashes me an excited grin while I set aside my drink so I can take out my own phone and we can read together without huddling over her screen. I try to act cool about it, but my fingers fumble and my heart rate quickens as I pull up the site. It’s only a story, and a fairly old one, but it’s a peek at the history of a man who’s even more private than I am. And I do love history.

The story follows a couple in their early twenties. The two move in together right after college, crazy in love and bursting with excitement about every choice they make together. A plant for the windowsill. A bath mat. A toothbrush holder with space for two toothbrushes. But eventually the fights begin. She wants to go out. He wants to stay in. She likes to wash each dish and utensil right away. He prefers to do dishes all at once, at the end of each day. She wants to spend more for the nice sheets. He thinks they’re overpriced. Bit by bit, their utopia crumbles, until he’s left with the plant, the bath mat, and a toothbrush holder with only one toothbrush in it.

On the surface, it’s a simple story, brief and to the point, but it’s the details that get me, and the way he makes me care about something as trivial as a toothbrush holder, ending the story with a hell of a wallop, a sense of tragically misplaced hope and crushing loneliness.

I sink back in the swing as I lower my phone to my lap, completely gutted.

“Oof. Wow.” Louisa lowers her own phone. “You think it’s based on real life?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t talk about his past relationships. At all.” I retrace over three months of conversations, searching for breadcrumbs. All I can come up with is my life sort of imploded when he was about twenty-nine. The story is sixteen years old, so he wrote it at least four years earlier. Maybe he sensed the breakup coming well in advance, or maybe his life imploding was unrelated to the breakup that inspired this story, or maybe this isn’t autobiographical at all.

“Want me to do more stalking?” Louisa asks. “I have mad Google skills.”

I take another look at the story, bookmarking it so I can read it again later.

“No stalking,” I say. “I don’t want to pry into anything he might not want me to know. But if you happen to see anything else he’s published, anything he created with the intention of sharing, and you send me a link, I’d have a hell of a time not clicking on it.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Louisa says. “And, Phil?”

“Yeah?”

“Next time, can you at least ask him to take his shirt off?”

I huff as I give her a light shove. She falls onto her side, laughing at my indignation, as always. Soon enough, I’m laughing, too. My family might irritate or overwhelm me sometimes, but the September afternoon is beautiful. The air is crisp with the suggestion of an impending seasonal change. Happy kids are blowing bubbles on the lawn. And I don’t have to walk into a classroom tomorrow to stare out at two hundred students with their eyes locked on their devices, waiting to ask, Will this be on the test? so they can gauge their learning accordingly.

All in all, it’s a pretty good day.

Chapter Eleven

I was right about academic job postings, and by the first week of October, half a dozen full-time jobs in my field have been listed. No one is specifically looking for a specialist in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European history, and only two of the jobs are tenure-track, with the others one- to three-year lines with no guarantee of a contract renewal, but all six are general enough that I have the expertise to fit the job descriptions. Despite my continued reservations about reentering academia, I go ahead and apply for all six.

I toss back a couple of shots of rum after I submit the final application, attempting to celebrate after spending two long weeks on CV adjustments, individualized job-specific cover letters, DEI statements, teaching statements, carefully worded reference requests, write-ups about my research goals and accomplishments, assembling of student evaluations and syllabi and peer reviews of my teaching, and otherwise generating massive application packages, all so a search committee can look at a few lines of my CV and decide whether to interview me.

The rum feels more like a consolation than a celebration.

October also brings a change in the weather as days grow shorter, colder, and wetter. Dylan and I establish a routine of placing buckets under every leak and keeping a stack of old towels at the ready on the third floor, where most of the water trickles in. At the first crack of thunder, we’re off, knowing precisely where each bucket goes, grabbing from corners, closets, and sideboards where we keep the buckets tucked away until we need them. He had this down before I moved in, but it’s more efficient with two. Sometimes we even make it a race.