Page 44 of Luck of the Draw

“Is she talking about you?” I whispered in alarm, scared to tip her off to Dylan’s whereabouts.

He nodded.

“You’ll do no such thing!” Dottie protested. “I’m all for live and let live, but I’m afraid I can’t stand by and let you take Dylan’s agency from him.”

Dylan’s hand squeezed tighter around mine.

I stared up into his face as my own panic set in. “Run!”

And so we did. Only this time, we ran together.

Epilogue

Dylan

“I was right,”Ollie said softly, with something like awe.

Liam was too doubled over in laughter to tell him that he was only sort of right. They were both looking at my portrait, which now hung on the wall of the Buchanan Brewery tasting room. Dottie’s final act as tasting room manager had been to buy it and hang it up, and she’d done it so proudly, at the beginning of this party she was holding in my honor, that I could hardly tell her I’d rather not display a portrait of me as a centaur. Even if her granddaughter Adalia had painted a fig leaf over the centaur’s dick.

“I like it,” Deeandra said. “I almost wish Dottie hadn’t bought it so we could hang it up at home.”

“Yeah, I’d rather not look at Dylan’s…fig leaf over my cereal,” Liam said through gales of laughter.

Some people thought we were moving too fast, namely Deeandra’s ex, but we’d moved in together as soon as her divorce was made final in September. With our combined salaries, we were able to make the mortgage payments, and it was a lot better than trying to find another place, where we might be stuck with another Tony or worse. But it was the house Deeandra and her ex had lived in together, and there were plenty of memories attached to that, so we’d decided to do a major,Property Brothers-inspired renovation. A couple of Deeandra’s friends from the Bad Luck Club—Cal and his father, Bear—were house flippers, and they’d agreed to help free of charge. Given that I had the club to thank for her decision to crash Georgie and River’s wedding, I was doubly grateful to them. Liam, who’d been wary of me the first few months of our relationship, had offered to help, and already things had changed between us. Both kids had taken to playing the occasional pickup basketball game with me and Tyrell, from my old building.

We hadn’t gotten far with the renovation yet—we’d just framed out the new sunroom—but it already felt different. It already felt like ours. Dottie would probably have something to say about the energy shifting, and maybe she had a point.

I glanced over and, sure enough, she was still in deep conversation with my nonna. I wasn’t sure if I should be worried or amused. Maybe both.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Deeandra asked in a hushed voice.

“Nonna’s probably saying something about all of our souls being damned. I wonder what we did this time?” Tina said, walking over to us. “Nah,” she said, her face transforming with the force of her laughter, “it’s definitely Dylan who’s the focus of her praying this time. He’ll be first in her nightly rosaries for months because of this painting. I mean, he has cloven hooves. That beats my high heels any day. And then there’s the fact that he’s living in sin.”

She clapped Deeandra on the back. “No offense, Dee. Boys.Ilive in the twenty-first century.”

“What’s living in sin?” Ollie asked, his nose scrunched up. “Dad mentioned something about it the other day.”

Liam ushered him off, although not without an eye roll. “Come on, let’s get you one of Dottie’s ‘joyful’ cupcakes.”

“Tina,” I said with a groan, “behave yourself, or you’ll be the first in my nightly rosaries.”

Deeandra laughed. Which was good, because I’d seen the glint in her eyes when Ollie revealed Randy had been flapping his mouth about us living in sin, when he still hadn’t made good on his marriage offer to Sheree. I privately thought she’d be better off if they broke up, baby and all, but the less I had to do with Randy the better. I might want to give him a beating for the things he’d said to Deeandra, for the way he’d made her feel, but he was the boys’ father, and I needed to treat him as such.

“As if,” Tina said. “I’m sure you don’t even have one.”

“We all have one. Nonna gives them out like Dottie gives out crystals.”

“And crucifixes,” Dee added. “Don’t forget the crucifix.”

We’d hung it up prior to their visit, but Ollie had been so afraid of it, he’d started coming up with ways to avoid the hallway where it was hung, so it had come down as soon as Nonna left.

My whole family had come down for the official changing of the guard, something that had been months in the making. There’d been a lot for Dottie to teach me. My dad had reacted with bafflement to that statement.

“I don’t get it. It’s gonna take her months to teach you to pour a beer? You’ve known how to do that since you were a teenager.”

My mom had shoved him, said something mildly delusional about when she thought I’d started drinking, and ended with, “I’m sure there’s more to it.”

And she was right. Dottie had taught me a lot about how she read people—what they wanted versus what they said they wanted, who was going to make trouble (something I was already pretty good at spotting), and how to stop it before it reached the point of violence or ugliness. A lot of my training had also involved making food, which was pretty funny, since we didn’t sell any in the tasting room. But she’d always brought in gifts and small items for regular customers, and she’d suggested it was a tradition I should maintain. I agreed. There was something to be said for mixing tradition with progress, the old with the new. It was a balance I’d found in my own life, and one that seemed to be at the core of Buchanan Brewery.

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