Movement in her peripheral vision caught her eye, and Piper looked up, surprised to see she’d already made it to Lady Judy’s house while her mind was wandering—and further surprised to see Anders standing a few rungs from the top of a ladder at the side of her house, muttering under his breath as he clearly struggled to scrape the paint off the hundred-year-old window frames.
She stood staring up at him, as if his physical body might somehow offer clues to who he was and what he was doing here. A few wiry muscles she’d never noticed before flexed in his upper arms as he wielded the scrape, beneath skin that wasn’t quite as pale as when he’d arrived, the contrast with his freckles less apparent. It seemed work on the island was agreeing with him, too. It wouldn’t be long before he was as bronzed and sinewy as Tom.
As Piper appraised him, Anders paused in midscrape and leaned forward on the ladder, peering in the upper window of Lady Judy’s house, eyes widening with each passing second. Piper froze—what was he, some kind of creeper? And then she realized exactly which room he was looking in, and a grin replaced her frown as she understood why he was so captivated.
“Whatcha doing?” she said loudly, and Anders startled, dropping the putty knife in his hand.
“Jesus. You scared me.” He glanced back at her.
“Sorry.” She bent over to pick up the knife and he carefully climbed down the ladder rung by rung until he was close enough to retrieve it from her grasp.
“Thanks,” he said, and made to retrace his steps.
“Wait.”
Anders paused.
“I ran into Bobby. That was real nice, giving him that camera.”
Anders shrugged. “I didn’t use it much.”
She couldn’t put her finger on it, but he seemed different today. There was a hard edge about him.
“You OK?”
He hesitated, as if weighing how to answer, and then jerked his head once. “No. I had a bad week.”
Piper waited, wondering if a beloved pet had died, or he had a fight with a friend, or maybe even a breakup—
“My podcast isn’t . . . going well.”
“Your podcast,” she repeated, blinking.
“I’m doing all of these things you’re telling me to do, but I still feel like an outsider. Like everyone’s keeping me at arm’s length. No one will talk to me. Not about anything important, anyway.”
“You are an outsider.”
“I know I am, but . . .” He sighed again. “Never mind.”
He climbed back up the steps as Piper chewed her lip. She had about a hundred questions but settled on one. “Hey. This podcast means that much to you?”
“Yeah,” he said, his eyes as plaintive as his voice. “It does.”
And she heard it then. The wanting. Up until that point, she may not have understood anything about Anders. Why he was really on this island. Or so hung up on a podcast, of all things. But wanting. Well, that was something she was familiar with—something she knew down to her bones. And in that instant she made a decision. She knew Tom would tell her she was being too nice, but she didn’t care.
She nodded. “When you’re done here, meet me at my house.”
—
Forty-five minutes later, Anders stood on the top landing of Piper’s carriage house, wiping a sheen of sweat off his brow and inhaling through his nostrils in an attempt to slow his galloping heart. After Piper’s unexpected invitation, Anders had scrubbed that window at lightning speed, nearly forgetting his curiosity about Lady Judy’s strange room stuffed floor to ceiling with unopened boxes and packages on one side and a full wall of liquor and wine bottles on the other. Alcohol! On a dry island. He couldn’t think about it now, because Piper was finally going to let him interview her. He could feel it. He could also feel a slight pinch of conscience for allowing her to continue laboring under the belief that he was solely focused on climate change. But as quickly as that cropped up, he swallowed it down, burying it as deep as it would go. This could be it—the big break his podcast needed. The thing that would reengage his listeners. And if not, well—he promised himself this would be it. He would quit. Leave Frick Island and Piper and their collective strangeness behind.
“Oh! I didn’t expect you so soon,” Piper said when she opened the door. “Come in.”
Anders stepped across the threshold, as if he’d just been invited into the Sistine Chapel. His eyes quickly adjusted to the dim light, and he darted his gaze around, committing to memory every detail in the dollhouse-like room—the tiny table with two ladder-back chairs, the round-edged minifridge and mustard-yellow half-size oven in the galley kitchen, the pewter crab wall clock—so he could properly paint the picture of Piper’s house for his listeners. When his head panned to the wall on his right, he yelped, nearly jumping out of his skin.
Piper flicked her gaze to the literally hundreds of insects splayed and pinned under glass and hung on the wall, and then her eyes widened as if seeing them for the first time. “Oh. Guess I should have warned you about that. Forgot you don’t like bugs.”
Anders clutched his shirt, trying to slow his breath. When the initial shock finally passed, he cleared his throat. “No, it’s not that. I was just alarmed to find that we have the exact same interior designer.” He gestured to the bug displays, trying not to flinch. “She assured me my wall of dead insects was original and now I have to call and get my money back.”
He grinned, so utterly pleased with himself that he had finally—finally—come up with a witty retort on the fly in front of Piper, but when he glanced at her, she was just staring at him, solemn. His face fell for a beat, until Piper opened her mouth in
