Page 8 of Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies

“Can we get gelato now?” I ask Harper, clinging to the shadow cast by the church as I cover my eyes with a pair of oversized sunglasses.

“Don’t you want to find out what’s going on with Connor?”

I glance over my shoulder as he exits the church. He’s put his fedora back on, but his shoulders are still slumped like he has a slow leak.

“Do you?”

Harper shakes her head. “I vote for ice cream.”

“This is why I love you.”

“Also genetics.”

“True.”

She links her arm through mine and we march away from Connor. I don’t care if he follows us. I need to shake off the cognitive dissonance of the last five minutes.

Because what if someone did kill Connor?

That would be amazingly convenient.

Which is why it can’t be happening. Or maybe I’m magic. I’ve sometimes suspected as much. I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes I think something and then it happens. Okay, well, once.14 But still… 15

Sigh. This is all just magical thinking—the idea that I can make what I know needs to happen come true with my thoughts. It’s going to take more than that. A whole book, in fact. Can I do it? Incur the wrath of my “public” and my agent and my publisher and let him die in the next book?

If I did do it, I could kill him off in the first third, and then use the rest of the novel to introduce my new hero. No, heroine.

Yes. Good. My new main character will be a competent, trained woman. A police officer, maybe. The police officer brought in to solve Connor’s murder—

“El?” Harper says, tugging on my arm.

“Yeah?”

“You okay?”

“Hot, but why do you ask?”

“Because you were talking to yourself. It sounded like you said, ‘One quick blow to the head.’”

“Oh, sorry. Plotting.”

“I’ll never understand how you do that.”

“What?”

“Figure out plots when you can’t even pay your electric bill on time.”

I pull her closer. “Don’t be silly. You could do it if you wanted to.”

She stiffens. Shit. That wasn’t the right thing to say.

Harper was supposed to be the writer in the family, something she’d been planning since she was eight. Instead, I got a book deal, and she agreed to be my assistant for a six-month stint that never ended. Now her life is too much about me and she barely writes anymore.

I don’t know what to do about it. But the unspoken agreement between us is that we don’t speak about her writing, or her not writing.

We struck that bargain when I’d pushed her finally finished manuscript on my editor a couple of years ago and she’d politely declined to publish it. When I asked her why, she’d asked me if I’d read it. The truth was, I hadn’t. I was so certain Harper’s novel would be as brilliant as Harper, I hadn’t stopped to check.16

“I’m sorry, Harper, I didn’t—”

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