By the Book (The Last Picks #7)

Chapter 16

Even in August, the nights can be chilly on the Oregon Coast. The cool air felt good on my face as I strode away from the Breakwater, weaving a path through the evening crowds. It was the usual stuff you saw around here—a pair of elderly gentlemen in matching sailboat-print button-ups inspecting their shopping bags; a little girl squealing with delight as she got her face painted; a couple of paramedics I knew by sight, if not by name, who were checking on a florid-faced woman. A few times, when the timing was right and the sound of voices ebbed between the crashing waves, calliope music floated in the distance.

Bobby caught up with me before I got to the end of the block. He didn’t say anything; he just kept pace at my side.

I walked for a while. We passed Fishermen’s Market, where people were still lined up and waiting to order. (Word of advice, never get between a family of four and their Captain’s Platter of fried seafood—I would have been trampled, except Bobby caught the back of my jacket and hauled me clear.) Out on the pier, a bell was ringing, letting everyone know someone had won one of the games of skill and chance. Mr. Li waved at us from his vendor tent. When the waves broke, I could feel the faintest hint of the spray on my cheek, salty and bracing. Bobby took my hand and laced our fingers together.

And then walking wasn’t enough anymore. I stopped. I looked out at the water. The sun had shrunk to a red dot, about to sink beneath the waves, and the sound of all that water moving, rhythmic and restless, made me feel like the whole world was shifting.

“I’m fine,” I said.

Bobby rubbed my back.

“I’m just so angry,” I said. “I can’t believe they’d do something like that. Actually, I can believe it. This is classic them. Nothing matters but what they want. They’ve got a conference, sorry it’s your birthday. They’ve got a workshop, sorry about Homecoming. Dottie visited this amazing temple, and we want to explore it with her, so here’s two hundred dollars for groceries until we get back. Call the police if you need anything.”

Ignoring my feeble resistance, Bobby pulled me into a hug. His hair was soft, and he smelled like that clean, sporty, masculine scent that I’d come to associate with him. It was different, watching the waves over his shoulder.

“I love you,” he said, barely loud enough to reach my ear.

I nodded.

He tightened his arms. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be sorry. They need to be sorry. They should be ashamed of themselves, as a matter of fact. Acting like that in front of you. You’re the person I chose. You. If they want to be in my life, they need to get on board and not—not call you ‘the new one.’ God, I am so sorry, Bobby. All that nonsense about the consulting business and moving out to the farm. Do you want to break up with me? Just push me into the water if you do. I’ll go quietly. I won’t even cry for help, I’ll just burble softly as I sink under the waves.”

Bobby whispered sweetly, “I find that hard to believe.”

Actually, it wasn’t a whisper. It was his normal voice.

And it wasn’t all that sweet, come to think of it.

“Hey!”

But when I tried to get free, he tightened his arms around me, and he held me for a while. Long after I’d given up trying to escape from the meanest boyfriend in the universe.

“What can I do for you right now?”

“Nothing. Thank you.”

He huffed a little laugh that sounded surprisingly tangled.

“Oh,” I said. Because Bobby’s default was to make everything his responsibility.

“I feel like I’m exercising a lot of self-control right now by not offering to go put your parents in a headlock.”

“Actually, that would be amazing. Can you give them noogies while you’re at it? No, wait, does the sheriff’s office still believe in a public stockade? Is there a supply of rotten vegetables? What does the town charter say about tar-and-feathering?”

“Sometimes I forget you were alone a lot as a child,” he murmured.

“Bobby!”

“Don’t yell in my ear.”

“Be more supportive. And kissy.”

He did kiss me then, and he tucked my hair behind the arm of my glasses as he asked, “Do you want to go home?”

“No.”

“Okay. Do you want to go to the Cakery?”

“No.”

“Okay. Do—”

“Wrong answer. You’re supposed to insist we go to the Cakery because I deserve it. And you’re supposed to buy me a sheet cake. The kind that serves thirty.”

“I don’t think they keep those lying around. They’re a special order.”

“Chocolate with vanilla frosting. No, vanilla with chocolate frosting. You know what? You’d better go halfsies.”

“You’re a very complicated human being,” he said. “You know that, right?”

In my best Fox voice, I said, “I am a writer. I contain multitudes.”

He ran his hand down my back, his fingers bumping along my spine. And then he said, “We can’t leave your parents here.”

“We could. We could abandon them. We could be negligent gay dads and leave them at—at a movie theater.”

“Do you want me to drive you home first and come back for them? Or—” But Bobby stopped, and his silence had a tense wariness I wasn’t familiar with.

When I twisted around, my dad was standing farther down the boardwalk. The streetlights were popping on, and they glinted off his glasses and put silver in his hair. His shoulders were stooped. He had, like a true dad, worn cargo pants. I was fairly sure one of those enormous pockets held a full-sized paperback, and the other one probably had the kind of pocketknife Boy Scouts dream of.

“I’ll let him know I’m going to drop you off first,” Bobby said, his arms dropping away from me.

“No,” I said.

The waves came in. The air, wet and chill, raised goosebumps on the back of my neck.

“Dash—” Bobby began.

“I’m tired of pretending everything’s okay. I’m going to talk to him. I’m going to be an adult.” And then I said, “Please don’t ever tell anyone I said that.”

For a boyfriend who had unflagging reserves of love and patience and, um, smooches, Bobby looked like even he might be close to finding his limits.

“I meant what I said.” I said it as much for myself as for Bobby. “I meant it, and I should have said it a long time ago. And I want to tell them the rest of it. How I feel. How they make me feel.”

“I understand,” Bobby said, “but maybe it would be better to have that conversation after you’ve cooled down.”

“No, if I don’t do it now—” I stopped and shook my head. “No. I’m going to talk to him.” Just in case things didn’t go the way I hoped, though, I said, “I want you to bury me with Keme’s Switch.”

Bobby sighed.

“And I want Indira to shave her head in mourning. And I want Fox to burn one of their corsets in my honor. And I definitely want you to stay single for the rest of your life. Like, don’t even think about trying to find happiness again. Oh, and I want Millie to take a vow of silence.”

“A vow of silence would be nice right about now,” he muttered.

“Bobby!”

“Wasn’t there something about quiet burbling?”

Outrage prevented me from making any words, so I settled for a squawk.

He chafed my arms and said, “I know you’re nervous. You don’t have to talk to him now. If you want to wait—”

I shook my head. I gave his hand a squeeze. And then, I moved down the boardwalk to meet my dad.

My steps rang out hollowly under me, sounding clipped and hard against the backdrop of the surf. The moisture in the air made the light refract, so that tiny rainbows bent and played around the streetlamps. The same rainbows streaked along my dad’s glasses. His hands hung at his sides. He was wearing, I saw with something like despair, hiking boots.

When I reached him, I didn’t say anything, and the surge of the waves came between us.

Then he said, “Can we talk?”

I nodded. And then I said, “I’m not going to apologize, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“No, that’s not…No. I want to apologize. I’m so sorry, kid—Dash.”

I waited.

“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “We didn’t think about how that might make you feel. We didn’t think about what you wanted. It was invalidating, like you said. God, I feel like such an idiot.” He fell silent, maybe waiting for me to correct him, but when I still didn’t say anything, he said, “We were trying to help. I know that doesn’t make it any better, but I want you to know we never meant to hurt you.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll tell Phil what you decided.”

I nodded.

“And we’ll get out of your hair,” my dad said. “I really am sorry, Dash. Bobby seems like a good man. I’m happy for you.”

But he didn’t walk away. And I felt like my joints had been welded shut, like I couldn’t move without breaking myself into pieces.

When my dad spoke again, his words barely carried over the crash of the surf, but I could hear his voice breaking. “You’re my son, Dash. I love you more than anything in the entire world. And if you don’t know that, don’t know that you’re the most important thing in my life, that I’m proud of you every day—” His speech attenuated until it was a thread about to snap. He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “If you don’t know that, then that’s my failure as your father.”

“You were always gone,” I said. “Everything else was more important than me.”

He nodded. “That was a mistake. We were young, and we were excited about our success. But that’s no excuse. I shouldn’t have done that.”

The wind off the water ruffled my hair. I straightened my jacket. My anger, which had been bright and self-righteous, was now smoldering and sullen and unsatisfying when faced with the grief etched on my dad’s face. Being an adult, I decided, was the worst.

“Do you really think we wish you were someone else?” my dad asked.

“Obviously. I’m a huge disappointment.”

“Dash, you’re not—you could never be a disappointment.”

“Really? Because I don’t have a novel published. I haven’t traveled the world like Dottie. I’ve never won any awards like you and Mom.” The words that had been pent-up inside me tore their way free. “Do you know what it’s like, being your kid? It’s like everyone expects something. For me to be brilliant. For me to be a great writer. For me to be different and exceptional and successful. Why do you think I can’t ever finish anything? Heck, I can’t even start anything.”

My dad opened his mouth to say something, then stopped himself. He stood there for several long seconds. And then he hugged me.

I wasn’t sure the last time my dad had hugged me. Or touched me, for that matter, besides those manly handshakes. It was disorienting to realize I was taller. My dad had always taken up so much space in my imagination, but now, his body pressed against mine, I realized he was thinner than I remembered. The feel of his bones made me think he was old. I didn’t hug him back. But I didn’t pull away either.

“Your mother and I love you , Dash.” His voice was thick as he pulled me against him. “You. The person you are. This wonderful, amazing person right here, the one who is brave and kind and generous, who took a tremendous risk because he refused to settle for day-to-day unhappiness, and who never, ever, ever gives up, because every time life has knocked you down, you’ve picked yourself up and tried again. You’re smart, you’re resourceful, you’re so—so competent.”

A laugh wrenched its way out of me.

“You are,” my dad said. “My God, when we were trapped in that room in the library, your mother and I were worse than useless. Not only did you keep your head, and not only did you come up with the only practical solutions for getting us out of there, but you did it while you were having an epic fight with your idiotic, self-centered parents. You’re so strong, Dash. And you’re such a good person. How could I not be proud of you?”

The sun slipped below the water. And just like that, all the fire went out of the world, and the night was cool and silver.

With a gruff and manly cough, my dad squeezed me one last time and let me go. I ran my sleeve across my eyes. He pretended to clean his glasses.

Part of me wanted to let the rest of it go, to embrace the gentleness of this moment. But I still had a child’s hurt inside me, and my next, knee-jerk comment was “I notice Mom couldn’t be bothered to apologize.”

“We agreed it would be best if I talked to you—”

“Hogwash,” I said.

(I didn’t actually say hogwash. I used some of Talon Maverick’s choicest vocabulary.)

“When she calms down—” my dad began.

“She’s not going to calm down because she meant it. She meant everything she said. And everything she did. Dad, I—I’m really grateful for this. For the chance to talk to you. To tell you how I feel. And for you listening to me, and for you telling me—” That you love me sounded like bad copy for a Father’s Day card. “—um, what you did.” I tried to break off there, but more kept coming. “God, why does she have to be like this? Why does she have to be so… her ?”

“Your mother is a complicated person,” my dad said. “She’s a wonderful woman. She’s an incredible writer. She’s so dedicated to her craft. She’s quite possibly the smartest person I’ve ever met. But that doesn’t mean she’s always an easy person.”

“That’s an excuse,” I said. “She chooses to be this way. She chooses to act like this. Let me guess: the stuff with Phil, the book deal, me taking over Talon Maverick—that was all her idea, wasn’t it? She always has to get what she wants, and it doesn’t matter how anyone else feels. She’s—she’s cruel. And she’s manipulative. And she’s cold.”

My dad’s silence stretched out, and as it grew longer, I wished I could call my own words back—they hung in the air between us, childish and callow and small.

But it was worse when he spoke.

“Her father is dying,” he said. “She’s struggling.”

The way he said that— her father , not your grandfather —probably tells you everything you need to know. I’d never met my mom’s dad. I hadn’t seen a picture of him until college, when I’d done some half-hearted googling one night. I’d never tried to contact him because, from as early as I could remember, I’d been told he was bad. Cruel. And manipulative. And cold. He’d cut my mother off in college—cut her off completely, no money for tuition or rent or groceries, completely and totally, between one day and the next—because she wanted to have a part-time job editing a student journal. He’d left her at risk of being forced to drop out of school, of being evicted, and of starving. As far as I knew, my mom hadn’t had any contact with him since—almost forty years of total silence.

And because I will forever be Dashiell Dawson Dane, the word that dropped out of my mouth was “Oh.”

“Your mother loves you, Dash.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“She loves you so much,” my dad said softly, “that I think it scares her. You’re very similar in some ways.”

“No, we aren’t.”

“You both have this tremendous emotional range. You feel things so deeply. You care and you love and you hurt so much.”

“I don’t, actually. I desensitized all those parts of myself with meaningless violence and video games.”

My dad quirked a smile. “And you both have your defense mechanisms to avoid dealing with those feelings.”

“Since when is a sense of humor a defense mechanism?” (He said ironically.)

Voices rose in the distance—happy voices, the ghosts in the night of a group of people who were having an easy, uncomplicated night. Laughter. The familiar tones of people who take each other for granted in the best possible way.

“Is she okay?” I asked.

“I don’t know. No. I don’t think so.”

I tried to pluck meaning out of those words, out of all the things he hadn’t said. Finally, I spoke again. “She said she collapsed when she was on tour. She said the doctors weren’t any help.”

“She’s exhausted,” my dad said. “She hasn’t been taking care of herself.”

“She didn’t even mean to tell me—it slipped out, and then when I asked, she wouldn’t talk about it.” That childlike hurt surfaced again. “Why can’t she just talk to me? Why does she have to be this way?”

My dad rubbed my back, and once again, I wished I could take the words back. Because what about Bobby? It was hard for him to talk about his feelings, but I didn’t hold that against him. But then, with Bobby, I didn’t have years of my own pain and resentment—years of feeling like I’d been abandoned, that there was always something else more important, and that therefore there was something wrong with me. Because otherwise they’d have chosen me.

Maybe I’d changed more than I realized, because I felt, for the first time, a kind of agency that was new to me. It must have had something to do with living on my own, with taking risks, with finding someone who loved me, and yes, probably with solving all these murders. It didn’t make the past any different. I’d been hurt. I’d been disappointed. My parents hadn’t been who I’d wanted them to be. But slowly, whether I liked it or not, I realized that I was starting to see my parents in a way I never had before. It was easier to understand that they were people too. That, in their own way, they’d probably tried their best. And that they’d fallen short. And that they had their own griefs and disappointments, their own difficult pasts. I’d never thought—never, not until now—about what it must have been like for my mom, everything that had happened with her dad, when she’d been young, when she’d needed his help. And I realized that, in this moment, I had a choice.

Being an adult really was the worst.

It took me longer than I’m proud of to ask, “Where is she?”

When I found her, my first thought was that there was something childlike about how she sat on the pier, her arms resting on a hawser, her legs swinging in the open air. The damp had settled into her hair and glistened slightly when she turned her head at the sound of my steps. Her face was unreadable, and I thought again how I’d called her cold.

I sat, and without meaning to, I found myself copying her pose. The boards were rough under me, the hawser bristly. Water sloshed below us against the piles, lost down in the dark. I swung my legs. The drop couldn’t have been more than twenty feet, but at night, when I couldn’t see, it felt much longer.

“I always think I’m going to lose a shoe when I do this,” I said. “I did lose a shoe once when Bobby and I were on a hike. He had to scramble down this ravine to get it. I mean, he didn’t have to. But he did because he’s Bobby, and that’s the kind of thing he does.”

My mom looked out at the shoreline, which was quickly dissolving in the encroaching fog. When had this gulf opened up between us, I wondered. When I’d been a teenager was the automatic answer. When developmentally, I was already trying to individuate, to separate myself from my parents, to be different from them. It had been a little too easy. All the years of hurt had been there, waiting for me—ready for me to mine for my own adolescent ego-massaging. But I hadn’t always felt this automatic defensiveness. One of my earliest memories was of my mom playing a game with me. If the game had a name, I didn’t know what it was. It was just telling a story, taking turns coming up with the next part. And I remembered, with that clarity of a strong emotion in childhood, how happy she’d been.

“That would be a good final image,” my mom said. The words startled me out of my thoughts. “The shoe falling into the water. Carried away by the tide.”

“Or a good opening one,” I said.

“A girl’s shoe,” my mom said. “Mary Janes.”

“Only they weren’t for a human girl. They belonged to a doll.”

“One of those life-sized dolls.”

“Ew,” I said with a laugh—only in part because life-sized dolls was about the most generous euphemism I could think of.

“She’s the victim,” my mom said. “The doll. That’s how it starts.”

“But somehow it’s also tied to a real murder.”

She was smiling, her eyes still fixed on the spot where sea met land. The rumble of a diesel engine grew louder out on the water. Then it faded away again.

“Do you know why I don’t outline?” I asked.

My mom made an unflattering noise—not quite a snort, but close. “Because, my child, you are your father’s son, and you’re genetically incapable of outlining.”

I burst out laughing, and to my surprise, a smile curved my mom’s mouth—or a shadow of a smile, maybe.

“You never wondered why we don’t co-write?” my mom asked drily.

“But you did, didn’t you? I thought you wrote that standalone thriller together.”

“And it almost cost us our marriage. The day we finished that manuscript, I packed my bags and spent six weeks in a motel outside Atlanta trying to become a documentary filmmaker.”

More laughter rolled out of me.

“I was terrible at it, as you might imagine,” my mom said. “For some reason, documentary audiences do not appreciate unreliable narrators.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“Your father was kind enough to take me back,” she said, and it was impossible to tell if her little laugh meant she was joking. “He’s always been kind. I’m glad you got that from him.”

“My best writing,” I said slowly, trying to talk my way to what I wanted to say, “and I’m using the word best loosely, always seems to happen when I get out beyond my comfort zone, when I’m doing something new, or something that’s just frankly terrifying. When I’m living in the moment of making something, and I feel connected to it, even if I don’t know what the whole thing is about. I’m sure plenty of people still do that kind of work even with an outline, but for me, it doesn’t happen that way. That’s why I don’t use an outline.”

“People who don’t use outlines have more frequent problems with plot holes. And they run into dead-ends.”

“Oh yeah, one hundred percent. But my point is that this is my life, and I’m in the thick of it, and I feel alive, if that makes any sense. I know from the outside it looks like I’m flailing, but I’m not. Or at least, not all the time.”

That made her laugh again. “I was always slightly surprised you didn’t spend more time on outlines. There’s an entire subspecies of writers who have perfected the art of procrastination by outline. People spend their whole lives not writing a single word because they want to have the whole thing planned from the beginning.” She slanted a look at me. “But I suppose those same people don’t walk out the door one day and move to the other side of the country.”

There were a lot of things I could have said to that. I finally went with, “No, probably not.”

“You’ve always had so much courage, Dashiell. You’ve always been so determined to be true to yourself. Those are rare and admirable qualities.”

“Thank you.”

“I could wish, however, that those qualities translated a little more frequently into action,” she said with a wry twist to the words. “Although having seen what you go through in this town, I’m not sure I want you to have any more action of any kind. I’m half-tempted to throw you in the RV and take you back to the farm against your will, just to keep you safe.”

“Nowhere is safe, Mom. That’s pretty much the point of every book you write.”

“Why,” she asked with that same wry twist, “do you think I write so often about mothers?”

Water splashed beneath our feet. The fog rolling in was damp against my cheek.

“Bobby seems like the kind of person who would use an outline.” My mom’s attempt at crispness broke the silence. “Not that he would get bogged down in it. But he seems very…structured.”

“Are you kidding? He has an app on his phone that he only uses to track his workouts. There are so many numbers, Mom. So many grids and columns and—and goals .”

Maybe it was the horror in my voice that made my mom laugh again. “He clearly cares about you. The way he looks at you, Dash…” She trailed off, and when she spoke again, I couldn’t decipher the note in her voice. “I’m not sure you understand the burden it is, to have someone love you like that. And I think you love him too.”

“I do. I worry—I mean, what if it doesn’t work? What if this is a plot hole or a dead end? I love him so much, but we’re so different. With Hugo, we shared the same interests, we liked the same things. On paper, it was perfect.”

“And look how well that worked out,” my mom murmured.

In spite of myself, I grinned, but it didn’t last long. “I guess I’ve been thinking about that lately. About how different Bobby and I are. How we handle things. I don’t know. I want it to work, but what if it doesn’t?”

“If it doesn’t,” my mom said, “then you still tried, and you worked hard, and you will have learned something. But I think you’ll be surprised. You were never like this with Hugo, Dash. I can’t speak to your feelings or to his, but I can say from the outside, it looks different. It feels different. I’m very happy for you.” That attempt at briskness returned to her words. “And he survived meeting your terrible, selfish parents and hasn’t run screaming, which I think speaks highly of him.”

Again—there was so much I wanted to say. But what came out of my mouth was “Dad told me your father is dying.”

“He is. Apparently, for real this time.” She touched her hair, and the tiny, iridescent pearls of moisture that the fog had put there trembled. Her voice grew distant. “My parents were not easy people to live with. They were both functioning alcoholics, although how functional was up for debate. My father made a great deal of money without any appreciable skill that I could ever detect. My mother was exactly what he wanted her to be—until they opened the gin. When I left that house, I promised myself I would never go back. I wasn’t going to live that life for another day. And when I had my own children, they’d never have to know what it was like. It was a relief when my father cut me off—he wanted me to join a sorority, meet a nice man, and get married to someone who would make a great deal of money without any appreciable skill. When I wanted to work, when I wanted to live, he went insane. No more money. No more contact. I would never be welcome under his roof again. All I could think was ‘Thank God.’ Because it was over.”

A splash from nearby suggested a fish breaking the water somewhere out in the dark. And then something moved through the fog—a dark vee that resolved itself, a moment later, into the silhouette of a bird skimming over the waves.

“I didn’t know any of that.”

“I didn’t want you to.” My mom sighed. “And now he’s dying, and all I can think is that I did everything wrong. Everything. I tried so hard not to do what he did, and I still did it all wrong.”

“You didn’t do everything wrong. Dottie and I have great lives. We’re happy and healthy. You’ve got your first grandbaby. We’re even reasonably well-adjusted adults.”

For some reason, that made my mom laugh and wipe her cheeks. But then she shook her head. Her shoulders turned in, and she looked washed out, thin. Exhausted, I thought. And then, more clearly: grieving.

Maybe that was enough. She’d always been so private about her feelings, and the rawness of this grief seemed too intimate to intrude on. Maybe she wanted privacy. Maybe she wanted time to compose herself.

But maybe not.

I scooted over and slipped an arm around her. Her body felt stiff at first, and then she relaxed, and her head came to rest against my shoulder. We sat in silence, listening to the waves. Far off, a bell was ringing, and I thought someone had won one of the games on the pier again.

“You were right to be upset,” she said. “I’m sorry for overstepping. I’d like to think that I really was trying to help, Dashiell. That I wanted what was best for you. But I don’t trust my judgment right now, and I suspect that, like most people, what I did, I did because I wanted to do it. Because I do want you to be successful. I want you to be happy. I want you to have whatever you want in life. That was one of the things I promised myself: I’d never stand in the way of my children’s dreams. But I suppose I should have tried to figure out what those dreams were, first.”

“If I’m being totally honest,” I said slowly, “there’s this part of me that doesn’t want to share my writing with you and Dad because—because for so long, I wanted you to pay more attention to me. And now, when you want something from me, I can say no. And that is so petty and pathological and…” I groped for a word and settled on, “Cuckoo.”

It made both of us laugh.

When the laughter faded, my mom said, “I’m sorry we weren’t there for you.” And then, her voice thin and catching, she continued, “I didn’t know. Didn’t want to know, I suppose. It was convenient to believe that you were fine because I wanted you to be fine. Convenient to believe that I wouldn’t have to make any sacrifices. Or at least, no big ones. But that is a lie we all tell ourselves: that we can have everything, no matter the price.” She took my hand, and her fingers were cold. “What do you want, Dashiell?”

“This,” I said. I didn’t even have to think about it. “I want this life. What I’ve got right now, with Bobby and my friends. It’s not what I thought I wanted, but I’m happy here. Of course, I need to get a job and figure out how to, you know, pay the bills, but one thing at a time.”

“Your father and I—”

“No,” I said. “Thank you, but no. I think—I think it was good, you know? A wake-up call. If this is the life I want, then I need to start doing my part. Like you said, it’s all about making sacrifices.”

“But your writing.”

“I’m going to keep writing. For the first time in a long time, I’m excited about this manuscript. It’s not going to be perfect, but I’m going to finish it, and I’m going to be proud of it. And then I’ll see if anybody wants to publish it. If they don’t—or even if they do—I’m going to write the next book. And the next. Maybe nobody will ever want to publish my stuff. I don’t know. Maybe what I write is too weird or too niche or not to market. That’s okay, though. Because if someone does buy it, it’ll be because I worked for it. And it’ll be mine.”

My mom’s fingers tightened around mine. I waited for the argument, for the protests, for one last-ditch effort to convince me to work with Phil to land this book deal. But what she said was “Writing has so much more to offer than publishing, Dashiell. I wish I’d said that to you a long time ago. Publishing is about many things. It’s about turning a story into a product. And yes, it’s about the opportunity to share your work with the world, to have other people see your writing, know your characters—”

“To make money,” I murmured.

“That too.” She fell silent, and when she spoke again, there was a thrill to her voice I wasn’t sure I’d heard before. “Writing is so much more than that, Dashiell. Writing is an opportunity to know our own minds better. To learn about ourselves in ways that we wouldn’t have, if we hadn’t tried to put one word after another after another. It’s an opportunity to create something beautiful, even though it will always fall short of what we want it to be. It asks us to do one of the most complicated things the human mind is capable of, to order our thoughts in symbols, to chain everything together with meaning. You know the rush you get when you write something good—something really good, something you know is right or true, or whatever word you want to use?” She waited until I nodded. “There’s something to that. Something I’m not even sure how to put into words. Writing isn’t magic. It can’t fix everything. On its own, it does not make us whole. And, as you have reminded me tonight, art should never take the place of life, and of the people we love. But writing can do something. And whatever it is, it’s different for each of us, and that is magic.”

I knew what she meant. Or maybe I just understood it, because I loved writing, and she loved writing. And I thought maybe I loved it because she did, and that was a gift she had given me.

After clearing my throat, I tried for lighthearted. “I guess all my unfinished drafts were good for something after all.”

“Of course they were. No writing is ever wasted. The writing itself is what matters—to have made something, and in the making, to have known yourself, changed, become something more. A book, even an unpublished one, is tremendously valuable, even if it’s not valuable in the way you hoped it might be.”

I nodded—and, because I was working on being a mature, responsible adult, I refrained from pointing out that the electric company didn’t accept unpublished books as currency.

“I understand that I crossed a line,” my mom said. “And I’m ashamed that I’ve lost your trust. I hope one day you’ll believe that my efforts, misguided though they were, came from a place of love. Because I do love you, Dashiell. Even if I do a poor job of showing it. I am so proud of you. I could never be disappointed by you.”

I nodded again. I could let the conversation end there. I could tell her I loved her, and that would be the end of it.

But in the last year, I had grown—even if that growth sometimes seemed microscopic. And I wanted to be braver. I wanted to be honest. And I wanted to have a relationship with my parents—it would never be the one I’d hoped to have as a child, but it could be something now.

“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” I said. “I’m grateful for all the support you and Dad have given me. I believe you when you say you want what’s best for me. Right now, I think what’s best is that you let me work on this writing stuff on my own for a while. Let me fumble my way through it. Let me make mistakes. When I get tired of banging my head against a wall, I’ll ask you for help—I promise.”

Her voice was neutral to the point of stiffness. “Of course, Dashiell. Whatever you want.”

“But even though I don’t want to talk to you about my books,” I said, “I’d love to talk to you about my murders.”

At first, her face was blank. And then, for the first time in my life, I saw my mom grin.