“Hey, El, wait up,” Harper calls after me as I drift toward the dining room.
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.
I mean, the last time someone had a drink near me, he ended up dead.
Oh! Harper told me not to drink on the boat. Does that mean … No. No.
My sister is not a murderer.181, 182
Right?
I watch her while she peruses the menu, and nothing seems amiss. Not more than it is with all of us. Shek’s death is weighing on us, but maybe not as much as it should.
Does that make us terrible or just human?
The waiter comes to take our orders, and then it’s just the three of us. There’s a nervous pit in the bottom of my stomach that I can’t shake. Is this my last night of freedom? It can’t be. But that’s how everyone must feel in this kind of situation. Like they’re in a movie where someone will run in at the last minute and put a stop to all of this.
That can happen anytime, universe.
“This won’t be your last supper,” Oliver says, tipping his glass of red wine at me.
“How did you read my mind?”
He lifts the corner of his mouth. “Practice.”
I smile at him, but his being nice to me doesn’t help.
I guess we can be pen pals or something while I’m in jail.
Assuming Italian jails let you have pen pals?
“You told me before that Inspector Tucci was a bit of a bozo,” Harper says. “The magistrate must know that.”
“I don’t … Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure.” Harper smiles at me sympathetically. “Can I ask you something, though?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about Connor?”
Oliver nods. “I have the same question.”
I glance toward the door, but there’s no escaping this.
“I was embarrassed.”
“Why?” Harper says.
“Isn’t it obvious? I was an idiot. I knew what Connor was and I wrote about him anyway. I kept him in my life.”
“You were twenty-five.”
“Is that an excuse?”
“It might be,” Oliver says. “We’ve all done stupid things, especially when we were younger.”
But I wasn’t that young when I did the stupidest thing.
“How did you figure it out?” Harper says. “Did Connor tell you?”
“No, I put the clues together … and he played it all down when I confronted him. So a bunch of criminals went to jail, so what? So a bad man got killed by one of his associates … It all sounds so stupid now. But then, I don’t know, I wanted to believe him.”
“You were in love,” Oliver says.
I try not to flinch. “I was in something. But I’m not even sure that was it … I … That’s why I wrote the book, I think. To justify it to myself.”
“And then he read it?”
“Before it came out. And he had all these demands, and the publishing house wanted me to cave and … I should’ve just shelved the book. If I’d done that, everything would be different.”
“We wouldn’t be here now,” Oliver says.
Is that regret I hear in his voice or relief?
“I know. But Shek would be alive.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“Why not? Inspector Tucci thinks I’m responsible.”
Harper shakes her head. “But you’re not, I know you’re not.”
“Thank you for saying that.”
“I don’t think you did it either, for the record,” Oliver says.
“For the record, I appreciate it.”
Our eyes lock across the table, the way they always seem to, and I can hear that rising music in my head. Maybe it’s that Taylor Swift line about being saved by a perfect kiss, maybe not, but something, and it’s just the two of us at the table, Harper receding outside of our bubble.
Then he looks away, and just as quickly the moment is gone.
And I’m back in a room with someone who wants to kill me, and it occurs to me that all of the evidence that Inspector Tucci referred to—the key, the device that killed Shek—means more than my guilt.
It means someone is trying to frame me for his murder.183
But who?
After dinner, which is delicious and filling in the best way, we go to our rooms.
There’s no awkward silence in the elevator, just me, Harper, and Oliver playing over the day in our minds. We separate without discussion, and mindful of the fact that I’m not the killer, that Guy has a gun, and Shek is definitely dead, I double-lock my door and put a chair under the handle for good measure. I also stole a knife from the table, slipping it into my pocket, and while it’s dull, it’s better than nothing. I put it under my pillow, and since the police still have our phones, I take out my iPad and put on something I’ve watched before to try to lull myself to sleep.184
After thirty minutes of tossing and turning, I wish I’d asked Harper for a sleeping pill, but on second thought, being drugged seems like a bad idea in the circumstances.
If someone comes to kill me tonight, I want to have my wits about me.
But what I want most is sleep, which feels like it’s going to be a permanent stranger, particularly given the noises coming from above.
Coming from Connor’s room.185 But mostly I hear Isabella.
They’re going at it hot and heavy, and this is the last thing I need to be listening to. I stuff a pillow over my head, but that doesn’t erase the squeaking bed and the grunts and moans that are all too familiar.
And okay, I confess. It still has an effect on me. Connor was a good lover. He had skills, ones I’ve tried hard to forget. But you can’t tell your body what to react to.
It doesn’t help that this might be my last night of freedom.
Do I want to spend it listening to someone else’s raucous love life?
No, I do not.
I get up quickly and slip on my robe. I don’t stop to check my hair or what I look like, because if I do, I’m going to stop myself altogether, and I don’t want to do that. Instead, I pull the chair away from my door, unlock it, and walk into the hall. I close my door behind me carefully; I don’t want to wake Harper, who’s a light sleeper.
I pass her door silently and stop in front of Oliver’s.
This is a terrible idea. I’m going to get rejected. He might not even hear my knock because he’s a deep sleeper and rarely wakes to a noise. And isn’t this the exact scenario I envisioned the other night?
And now I’m making it happen.
I am a glutton for punishment.
I knock sharply once, then wait a second and knock again.
It’s an old signal that we had for each other—I don’t even remember why we invented it. Something about when we were kids and you’d call a friend twice to get past parent screening? Or did I read that in a book once? I—
The door opens. Oliver’s standing there in boxers and a T-shirt, his hair rumpled, his eyes tired, but he wasn’t asleep. I know because when he wakes up, his eyes are half closed for at least ten min—
“El?”
“Yeah.”
“Everything okay?”
“No,” I say, then stop myself from saying anything more.
There have been too many words today.
Instead, I launch myself at Oliver like I’m Kate in the church after Anthony and Edwina’s failed wedding,186 and it happens just like that as my lips crash into Oliver’s. There’s a minute of hesitation on his part where I think he’s going to push me away, and then his arms are around me pulling me closer, closer, closer, and he tugs me into his room and the door snaps shuts behind us, and any memories of Connor are erased in an instant because that’s what Oliver does to me.
When we’re together, there’s nothing but us.
And it’s scary. It’s terrifying.
But I’m not going to let go this time.
I’m going to hold on with everything I’ve got.187
Hours later (ahem), we’re tangled up together in Oliver’s bed. My head is on his chest and I can feel his heart beating in time with mine. He’s stroking my hair slowly, and we still haven’t said anything.188
It’s perfect, this moment, but everything perfect comes to an end.
I should know.
Sometimes it’s easier to be the one to end it.
“Hi,” I say, looking up at him.
“Hi,” he says back, then kisses me. “That was … unexpected.”
“Unexpectedly good?”
“What do you think?”
I smile at him, then expel a long breath. “I’m getting arrested in a couple of hours.”
“No, you’re not,” Oliver says, sitting up a little. “I made a call after I got back to my room.”
“A call?”
“To our publisher.”
“Oh God.”
“You should’ve done it.”
“It didn’t even occur to me.”
He brushes his nose against mine. “I figured. Anyway, after she calmed down, Vicki said she was going to get you a lawyer. She sent me an email confirmation an hour later. They’ll be here at eight A.M. And Tucci was lying to us.”
“About what?”
“All of it. Police procedure, whether he needed a warrant. Nothing any of us said to him will be useful. The case will get thrown out.”
“How can you be sure?”
“They’re going to hire the best. They don’t want their golden goose in jail for a crime she didn’t commit. And Shek dying on their tour. None of this is good, and they want to clean it up quickly and quietly.”
“I didn’t even think of that. What if this gets into the press?”
“Shek’s death definitely will, but no one’s picked it up yet, thankfully. They’re going to put out a statement tomorrow after we get the lay of the land from the lawyer.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“But what about … I mean, doesn’t my contract have a morality clause? They could cancel me for all of this.”
“They can’t cancel you for being falsely accused of murder.”
I’m not so sure about that, but I’m touched and relieved that he’s made the effort. If I have to sacrifice a book deal to avoid time in an Italian jail, I’ll make that bargain.
“Thank you, Oli.”
“Of course.”
“It doesn’t solve the problem, though.”
“Us?”
“For once, that’s not what I meant.”
“What, then?”
“Who killed Shek?”
He frowns. “I don’t know.”
“We have to figure it out before something else happens.”
He pulls me closer. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
“I don’t want anything to happen to anyone else either,” I say as a shiver goes through me.
Shit, shit, shit.
Remember how I told you I was magic earlier? Not actual magic, but how sometimes I have these premonitions about things that are about to happen or words people are about to say?
I’m having one of those right now, only it’s visual this time.
A flash of someone creeping along the hall with a gun in their hand.
And then, bang!
Bang!
It goes from premonition to reality before I have time to prepare myself.