Page 140 of Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies

I stop and wait for her to catch up. She looks like she’s in shock, and I’m hit hard by the realization that she’s a mirror of me. I open my arms wide and she walks into them. Before hers have even closed around me, I feel the tears start to fall. She hugs me close and I hug her back, and we stand there like that, two sisters who don’t have anyone else in the world, holding on for dear life.

I don’t know how to make the tears stop, so I grasp for the only thing I can think of.

“Pineapple,” I say, and I can feel Harper’s smile against my hair, even as her tears stain my shoulder.

She pulls back. “I’ll say.”

I wipe my tears away with the back of my hand. “What’s happening?”

“I’m so scared,” she says.

“Me too.”

“You sure? Back there in the library you seemed, I don’t know, not that bothered.”

“I think I’m in shock.” I expel a slow breath. “Shek is dead.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck. That was horrible.”

“For Shek, too.”

“Yes, for Shek, too, obviously.”

“I don’t want you to go to jail, El.”

“Thanks, baby sis.”

She smiles thinly. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Food?”

“Yeah, fuck it, let’s eat.”

We walk to hotel’s dining room. Everyone has spread out at various tables already.

Connor, Isabella, and Guy are at one table near the bank of windows that look out on the Med. Allison and Emily are at another in the middle of the room, near a family with unruly children. That leaves Oliver’s table, which I don’t want to sit at, but I don’t not want to sit at if you catch my meaning.

The choice is taken out of my hands when Harper leads me right to him.

It feels like so much of this trip has been about that between us—one of us tugging the other into something she doesn’t want to do. That hasn’t worked out well for either of us so far, and given the whole humiliating reveal that I knew Connor had planned the robberies and did nothing about it, that I let myself be blackmailed by him, well, it doesn’t feel like anything good’s going to come of this meal either.

But maybe I’m wrong about that.

Why not? I’ve been wrong about everything else up to now.180

At least this table is near the door, which seems like a good idea.

This feels like an evening where I might need to make a quick exit.

“Take a seat,” Oliver says as he shakes out his white linen napkin and places it on his lap. “The menu looks delicious.”

“It can’t be better than lunch,” I say. “I wanted to marry that pizza.”

Harper laughs, and it eases some of the tension. I look at the menu that’s on top of my place setting, printed on a thick piece of cream paper in silver leaf. They have Caesar salad and something called lemon pasta, which sounds incredible. I decide to order that, and though I want a million lemon spritzes to go with it, I’m going to hold off.

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