Page 73 of Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies

What if he was the one who’d planned the robberies, and that’s how he knew where the next one would be?

But no. That couldn’t be. It was late and I was making things up. I was asking questions when I didn’t have to. The mystery had been solved, the bad guys were going to jail, and that was that. This would all seem ridiculous in the morning.

I was sure of it.

I was about to crawl back into bed when a notification flashed on Connor’s phone.

I don’t know what it was that made me look. I wasn’t someone who read my boyfriend’s messages—not until then, anyway. But that night I did. Because it wasn’t a text; it was a Signal message.

I’d always felt weird about Signal. Connor had suggested we use it when we met, and I didn’t question it at first, but eventually, it started to make me uneasy, like a hangnail I couldn’t get rid of. Why were we using a communication method favored by cheaters and politicians who didn’t want their official communications to show up on government servers?

What did we have to hide?

He’d smoothed that concern away like he’d ironed out so many things since we met.

—How he became a detective and what he’d done before that.

—Where he’d grown up.

—Where he lived when he wasn’t being put up in a hotel.

—What he saw in me.

I’d believed all his vague answers and had tried to live in the moment like he’d suggested. But that night, with too many questions swirling in my head, the doubts came rushing back.

Most of all, I wanted to know: Who was Signaling him in the middle of the night?

I checked the bedroom. He was still sleeping. I knew the code to his phone because he’d been casual about using it in front of me. Trusting. He never thought I’d look through his phone. Why would he?

But I did. And there it was, all laid out in his Signal messages. The man who was writing him—someone named Gianelli, a minor figure in the Giuseppe family—wanted his cut of the finder’s fee. He was insisting they meet in the morning. And the more I read, the more I saw that I was right. Connor had planned the whole thing. It was his idea to rob the banks, and he’d decided which banks to hit, and how. He’d worked it all out for them. And as far as I could tell, the surveillance we’d done was to make sure they were following his plan.

I sat there in shock for an hour, my robe cinched tight.

What I couldn’t figure out was why he’d turned on them. Why he’d involved me. Or what I was going to do about it.

But that shouldn’t have been a mystery to me, or to you either at this point.

I sat there afraid in the hotel room for hours, waiting for dawn to come, trying to decide if I should confront him or just leave without looking back, but I couldn’t make myself go to the door. Connor found me asleep in a chair, his phone clutched in my hand, and knew that I’d discovered his plan.

He had an explanation for everything. He’d turned on them after a member of the team had murdered Gianni because they thought his loyalty was in question. That had never been part of the plan. They were bad people and had to be stopped, and if he got the police off his own back, built up some goodwill, and got a finder’s fee out of it, well, then that was just his good fortune, wasn’t it?

Our good fortune.

Robbing a bank was a “victimless crime,” he said. The insurance companies came in and made it all better, and no real person lost their money.

It all sounds like bullshit now, but then?

It made sense to me.

I mean, had he done anything that wrong?

Okay, yes, he had, but he wasn’t a murderer. He hadn’t robbed the banks, exactly, just given the robbers a good idea of how to do it. Was that so different from someone who wrote a heist movie for Hollywood that inspired a real robbery?

This is an actual example he used as he talked me out of going to the police.

He had others. I don’t remember them now.

I just remember the feeling of his lips against my ear, the way he made me feel inside.