Page 74 of Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies

A victimless crime, he said.

Only that wasn’t true. There was a victim. Someone had lost his life.

He brushed that away, too. Gianni Giuseppe was a violent member of a criminal family. His life expectancy wasn’t anything to write home about. He’d been the author of his own demise.

Does it even matter what Connor said?

It only matters what I did.

I didn’t turn him in.

And then, despite everything, despite all of it, I’d written When in Rome.

It started as a way for me to try to make sense of what happened. To get my story straight. Not just with myself, but if the police ever came knocking. I didn’t need Connor to tell me that I was now an accessory after the fact to those crimes. Maybe I’d even helped facilitate them.

So I wrote and wrote and wrote. I shaped the narrative in a way that made it possible to live with. I left out the real solution, the Connor of it all, and made him the hero. I did such a good job of convincing myself of our innocence that I forgot our guilt.

Which Connor made clear to me in New York when he learned about the book.

He stayed up all night reading the manuscript, and then he came to me with a proposal. I’d give him the cut he wanted. And if I didn’t? Well, then he’d let the carabinieri know that I was an accessory. That I’d hidden material evidence.

“And don’t think you can turn me in and get away scot-free,” he’d said. “I’ve planned for that.” I couldn’t take him down without taking myself down, too.

Mutually assured destruction, he’d called it.

Or maybe only I’d be destroyed because Connor wasn’t stupid. He’d manipulate the evidence, he assured me, to make it seem like I was the one who had planned the heists, not him. So, I was going to comply, wasn’t I? I was going to do what he asked. Because if I didn’t, there’d be consequences.

And how did I know that he wasn’t the one who’d killed Gianni?

That was the part I couldn’t forget. The coldness in his eyes when he suggested that he might’ve taken Gianni’s life.

I believed him.

I agreed to his terms.

I was scared and foolish and vain and stupid. I paid and I wrote and I smiled for the cameras. I kept my nose to the grindstone for ten years because I was afraid of what I’d find if I looked up.

But then I did. And here’s the thing Connor hasn’t figured out yet.

There’s a statute of limitations for robbery and obstruction of justice in Italy.91 I discovered it when I was doing research for Amalfi Made Me Do It.92 What that means is, even if Connor tells the carabinieri what I did, they can’t prosecute me.

So I’m free to get rid of him.

There’s nothing he can do about it.93

CHAPTER 14It’s Murder on the Med

Sorrento

We finish the tour of Pompeii without any further incident, and then we say goodbye to the BookFace Ladies. They climb back into the bus to be taken to their resort while we’re sent to our hotel in private cars.

Cathy—who’s been keeping her distance all day—gives Isabella a hard stare when she climbs into a car with Connor. Whether it’s because she thinks she deserves a luxury ride or because she wants to cozy up to Connor, I’m not sure. Like most of the book’s fans, she thinks the sun shines out of Connor’s butt, although she’s always been more fixated on me than him. If that’s about to change, I’m not going to stop it.

I get into a car with Harper, hoping that the ice has thawed between us, but it hasn’t. It’s as cold as the air-conditioning, and I don’t know what to do.

“Harper, will you please talk to me?”

She glances at me. “What were you talking to Allison about?”