Page 169 of Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies

I can’t expect Connor to confess. That’s not his way. Even when I confronted him about his crimes ten years ago, he never quite confessed to anything. It was all innuendo, and “If I did it, then what?” like he was O. J. Simpson.

“Plausible deniability,” he’d called it, and even if it wasn’t, it felt like it was.

I was naive then, but I’m older and wiser than that now. I know I’m not going to be able to simply sit him down in the library with all the other suspects and lay it out like I’m Hercule Poirot and get some snarling confession out of him.

That’s not going to happen.203

I’m going to have to find some other way to get the evidence.

Some other way to convince more than myself that I’m right.

And I need to do it before he stops fucking up and kills me for real.

Remember how I said that sometimes I can see things before they happen? Like this morning with the gun?

Well, right now my vision’s foggy, but I know, whatever happens, that it’s going to be dangerous.

Are you ready?

I am. But I’m also hungry, so we have lunch with the BookFace Ladies in the Piazza del Duomo at a series of bistro tables set up on one side of the plaza. A massive church looms above us, blocking out the sun, and there’s a breeze in the air, the scent of lemons and the sea.

I think, despite everything, that I might retire here.

If I live, if I survive this, this is as good a place as any.

Thirty-five isn’t too young to retire, right? Not if you’re exhausted? Not if you’re worn down by life and everything that’s happened to you in the last ten years.

No one would judge me.

I can become an expat who speaks bad Italian and buys my food at the local shops, putting my purchases into a basket I sling over my arm. I can get a bicycle and sturdy walking shoes to go up and down these streets and climb down to the Gulf of Salerno and swim my morning laps in the sea.

“You want to retire here, don’t you?” Oliver says, sitting next to me. I left the seat open for him, but I wasn’t sure if he was going to take the invitation.

“Why can you always read my mind?”

“I don’t know.” The skin on the bridge of his nose is peeling, and his freckles are popping. His face is open and kind, and if I’m not getting ahead of myself, I can see love in his eyes.

How could I have thought that he had anything to do with this?

That’s what Connor’s done with his too many suspects and his pitting us all against one another. Like I put in my outline, but with a twist. It’s not just the thought of murder that kills you. It’s the thought that someone you love might be the one to do it.

“I wish I could read your thoughts as clearly,” I say.

He leans back and crosses one leg over the other. “I was thinking that retirement doesn’t seem so bad, right now.”

My heart kicks into another gear. “Retirement with me?”

“Potentially.”

“Where would we go?”

“We could go anywhere.”

“Not Florida, though,” I say.

“Florida is bullshit.”

“Florida is bullshit.”