Dalliance

Before we start,

This is a funny book about very unfunny things.

Some of us arrive planned and cherished, and some of us grow up apologizing for arriving. This is a book for the second kind.

If you’re someone who does that too, I think you’ll understand Lily. If you’re not, I hope you’ll be gentle with her anyway. She’s doing her best.

Lily is Lily, and she’s unapologetically herself. And this book is about her.

There’s heat in here, and there’s heartbreak, and a woman who is learning about boundaries.

There’s a happy ending, too, one that only works for her. She’s earned it.

Also, there are chocolate penis with mocha ganache. I’m not going to explain them.

Happy reading,

— Dana

The late-November snowstorm was picking up fast. The cold crawled under my skin and made me question why I wasn’t sipping mojitos on a Mediterranean beach instead of slowly freezing to death in Quebec.

Money.

The answer was always money. Specifically, the complete lack of it.

I was broke. And broke people don’t get Mediterranean winters. We got eight months of Mother Nature trying to murder us and called it “character building.”

I tightened my hand-knitted scarf, a lumpy, uneven creation I’d made during a brief, misguided DIY phase, around my neck, trudging through the slush like some depressed penguin who’d lost her colony. The walk home had become a death march through frozen hell in silence that forced you to actually think about your life.

My breath puffed out in little fuck-you clouds, and my eyes were stinging, not just from the bite of the wind, but from the tears I’d been ugly-crying for most of the day. I sniffled, trying to suck it back in before my nose froze solid. The last thing I needed was some innocent strangers witnessing my public meltdown.

Which, to be fair, was already in full swing. Population: me and my life.

My day had started in the toilet and promptly flushed itself. The dental clinic where I’d worked for the past five years, my safe place, my only source of income, my actual reason to get up and put on pants every morning, was closing for good.

Dr. Moreau, the senior dentist and owner, had finally decided to retire while he was still healthy enough to enjoy it. Objectively, the right call. Subjectively, it gutted me. He wasn’t just my boss. He was my mentor, and, for whatever it says about my nuclear disaster of a family situation, closer to a father than my own had ever been.

A few months ago, he’d suffered a cardiac arrest that very nearly killed him. He survived, thank God, but surviving death has a funny way of clarifying priorities. After thirty years of fixing other people’s smiles, he’d decided it was time to start living his own.

Must be nice, having a life-changing epiphany that ends in Tuscany instead of, say, my apartment.

I couldn’t even be mad about it. I was grateful he survived. Grateful he and his wife, Geraldine, were finally taking the trip they’d been postponing for decades. If anyone deserved to spend months wandering vineyards and arguing over Italian wine lists, it was those two.

Geraldine had run the clinic’s longer than I’d been alive. She managed the place with an iron fist wrapped in freshly baked banana bread. She could scare aggressive insurance companies into submission before lunch and still remember everyone’s birthday, dog’s name, and favorite shade of lip balm. I’d started as a terrified intern before taking a full-time gig at the clinic, and somewhere along the way, the clinic had quietly stopped being just a job. It had become my second home.

Losing Dr. Moreau felt awful. Losing Geraldine somehow felt worse.

This morning, Dr. Moreau gathered the six of us in the staff room. The air was thick with the smell of stale dark roast and cheap grocery store Danish pastry. He handed everyone two weeks’ notice, a modest severance package, and a reference letter printed on fancy gold-embossed stationery that was apparently supposed to make impending poverty feel classy.

He gave us a speech about how precious life is, how short our time on this earth is, and how we should embrace every second.

Then he asked us to keep the goodbyes “quick and painless.”

Quick and painless for him, maybe.

The rest of us were left to stand in a circle holding our fancy golden death sentences, dealing with the emotional shrapnel... and the sudden realization that my work family had just been dismantled before noon.

Before I left, Dr. Moreau and Geraldine called me into his private office, the only room in the building that felt less like a dental clinic and more like someone’s slightly cluttered living room. Framed diplomas shared wall space with grandkid art and thirty years’ worth of patient photos. My favourite was the wall covered in pictures of kids proudly holding up the first baby teeth they’d lost in his chair.

Funny how adorable kids looked with missing teeth. On a woman my age, and me specifically, would just look like I’d lost my tooth and whatever remaining grip I had on adulthood.

They knew I’d already booked three weeks off to attend my sister’s wedding, Noémi, in Morocco, the trip that was supposed to help repair our relationship. Not fix it, exactly. Nobody was promising miracles. Just… patch it. Enough to stop the open bleeding.

Geraldine had hugged me so tight my ribs popped, pressing a wrapped loaf of banana bread into my hands like a contraband package. She knew. “You should enjoy yourself, Lily,” she’d told me, her eyes misting over behind her cat-eye glasses. “Take the opportunity to breathe. Maybe even splurge a little with your severance package.”

Sweet woman. The severance package had been spent before I’d finished reading the letter.

I needed something, anything, to focus on besides the giant, gaping hole where my future used to be. So I focused on Morocco.

Here’s the deal with the wedding. Noémi was covering my flights and the ‘family introduction week’, the seven days where everyone pretends we’ve always been close and nobody asks why the maid of honour and the bride haven’t been in the same room since God knows how many Christmases ago. The week before that, the one where I fly in early to make sure her vendors exist, and her venue isn’t a pile of sand, is mine. My riad. My street food. My camel. I volunteered. Nobody made me.

I’d also bought her a wedding gift that cost two full months of my salary, double shifts and overtime included. Was it financially irresponsible? Absolutely. I probably went over budget with this whole wedding thing, but a wedding is for life, so I wanted it to be perfect for her.

See, I wasn’t bad with money. I’m exceptional at spending it. Those are entirely different skills, and I refuse to apologize for mastering the second one.

The plan had been to come home broke. Broke I could handle.

Not broke, unemployed, and Googling “how much does a cardboard-box apartment cost in Old Quebec” at 2 a.m.

As a dental hygienist, I earned a decent income. Scraping tartar off teeth isn’t glamorous, but it paid well. Unfortunately, I had indecent spending habits. Just like everyone else my age, I assumed.

I really, really needed to build three months’ worth of rent and living expenses and stop checking last-minute trip deals on Expedia. I’d been telling myself that exact same lie since the day I landed a full-time job at the clinic. Just one more trip, Lily. Just one little reward for working forty hours a week scraping tartar off people’s molars.

And now? Now the clinic was closed, my savings account was a sad, single-digit joke, and I was about to blow my last reserve of cash flying to Marrakech for a sister who hadn’t spoken to me in years.

This was probably what Dave Ramsey meant when he warned people against “high-risk, zero-return investments.”

My brain, sensing an incoming complete mental breakdown, did what it always did when cornered: it served up a ridiculous, unearned, top-tier delusional hope.

Because what if this was it? What if two weeks of sipping mint tea, checking out artisan tile patterns, and smoothing over vendor drama was the exact, magical bonding experience Noémi and I needed? What if we ended up giggling on a riad rooftop at 3 a.m., eating smuggled pastries and promising never to let life pull us apart again?

Sure, Lily. And maybe tomorrow a flock of majestic pink flamingos will land on your fire pole and hand you a winning lottery ticket.

Still, I couldn’t help it. An idiotically optimistic grin crept onto my face. I wasn’t just burning my life savings on a trip, I was investing in a sisterly miracle! A hot, sunny, sand-filled reconciliation!

And hey, if the emotional reunion fell completely flat, at least I’d get a tan before going entirely bankrupt. That had to count for something.

I rounded the corner of my street, the wind howling through the alleyways like a dying cat. By the time I saw the front of my apartment building, my toes had lost all sensation, and my face felt like a sheet of dried drywall.

All I wanted was to strip naked, crawl into my rattiest pajamas, and eat my weight in chocolate while listening to people get murdered on a true-crime podcast. You know, healthy, functional coping mechanisms for a twenty-six-year-old adult.