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“What? I said I won’t.”

I catch sight of Oliver approaching and take a step away from Connor.

Which is a mistake.

You don’t allay fears by stepping away suddenly.

“Ready to go?” Oliver asks as he arrives next to me, but what he wants to know is—what’s going on?

“Connor’s been hired by Tyler to investigate Fred,” I blurt, my voice high-pitched and rapid, like it always is when I’m nervous.

“Eleanor! Ijustsaid not to tell anyone.”

“You didn’t mean Oliver.”

“I meant everyone.”

“I don’t have any secrets from Oli.”

Oliver shakes his head as the boat slides into the dock. “Are we done here?”

I link my arm through Oliver’s. “Definitely.”

After the ferry docks, we’re met by a flotilla of golf carts, there to take us to our accommodations. Not everyone fits into the wedding venue at the Descanso Beach Club, and I made sure Harper, Oliver, and I got one of the private villas nearby.

Part of me wanted to have a romantic weekend with Oliver, but I didn’t want Harper to feel left out. She grumbled about being our third wheel, but I knew she didn’t mean it.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have plans for her this weekend.

There are a couple of wedding guests I have my eye on for Harper.

Not that she can’t find her own dates. It’s just that she doesn’t. Or she did, but the last person she was involved with was Connor, and that was a terrible idea.

So that’s whatwason my agenda.

Only now it looks like I also have to figure out who sent that note to Emma.

Could it be Tyler?

But why send the note to Emma if he was mad at Fred?

“Someone is going to die at the wedding”—it’s so vague it feels hard to take it too seriously under this perfect sky.

But you can’t trust the weather these days.

Storms come whether they’re forecast or not.

And there’s a tempest on the way.

“Eleanor,” Oliver says, “what were you talking to Connor about?”

“I told you—he’s investigating Fred.”

“But why were you talking to him in the first place?”

“This is our golf cart,” Harper says, pointing to a white cart with the number 10 on its side. There’s a young man in a blue-and-white uniform sitting behind the wheel. He gets out to help us with our luggage, and then we settle in—Harper and I in the back, Oliver up front—while the driver, Tommy, gives us a tour.

“Santa Catalina Island is twenty-two miles long and eight miles wide, making it seventy-six square miles covering almost forty-eight thousand acres with a coastal perimeter of fifty-four miles. For a point of comparison, Manhattan is thirteen miles long and two miles across at its widest point. Of course, Manhattan’s population is 1.6 million people, where the permanent population of Catalina is only four thousand, mostly here in Avalon, with a smaller concentration in Two Harbors, which is located on the other side of the island.”