Page 23 of Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies

It’s not an expression I’m familiar with.

“Oh God. I think I was just quoting myself! That’s embarrassing.”

When she got back from Italy, she felt compelled to write about her experiences. She wrote the first draft in three months of “coffee-fueled insanity,” as she called it, and changed most of the names and enough of the details to make a unique mystery and to “protect the guilty,” she said. “Except for Connor. He was so larger-than-life, I had to leave him in. And the rest, as they say, is history.” She laughs, then shudders, her focus pulled to the window.

Outside, a homeless man is talking to the sky. Eleanor excuses herself and goes to talk to the man, who, it becomes immediately apparent, she knows. She gives him some money and he leaves. When she comes back inside, she’s bemused. “It looks like I arranged that on purpose.”

I ask her if she did. “No. But it would be a good cover, wouldn’t it?”

What would she want to be covering up?

“Oh, this and that. Nobody’s perfect. Me least of all.”

She sits back down, distracted. She gets up in her head, she explains, the downside of being a writer. Which she wasn’t ever supposed to be. “Harper’s the writer. I’m just a hack.”

A hack who got an agent and a large book deal in record time, who’s gone on to sell ten million books, I point out.

“Yes, well, that’s what I meant about luck. There are so many better writers than me. Take Oliver Forrest… His new book is a masterpiece. It’s called ‘One for the Show’ and it’s going to win all the awards.”

And all the book sales?

“Those things aren’t linked, unfortunately. But I hope so.”

This is where a journalist is supposed to ask if the rumors about her and Forrest are true. That they dated for several years and then broke up suddenly a few years ago.

But something in her eyes stops me.

Instead, I ask her what she’s got in store for us next.

“You’ll have to read to find out,” she says, then laughs and shows me out.

CHAPTER 5Death Among the Ruins

Oliver steps past me to make his threat against Connor a reality, and I can see Connor choosing what to do like there’s a thought bubble above his head with multiple-choice questions.

Throw up his fists, or smile casually and toss the whole thing off?

He chooses the second just as Harper moves between them, her arms forming a T, her palms pointing at each of them.

“Stop,” she says, with a force of command that surprises me and them, too.

The men make eye contact over her head. They’ve wanted to hit each other for years, and it’s a minor miracle that it hasn’t happened yet.

“Oli,” I say, my voice a warning, but softer than Harper’s.

“What?”

“He’s not worth it.”

He glances at me now, and it’s like a sucker punch.

It’s been three years since we broke up, but I don’t think being around him will ever get any easier. Certainly not when he’s standing five feet from me in an open-collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up enough to show off his tanned arms and the ropey muscles underneath. Not when his dark brown hair is curling in the heat and making him look boyish, though his fortieth birthday is just around the corner.

My hero.

Or he once was.

“Please?”

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