She knew plenty of people would cut off a limb to enjoy a week looking out over turquoise-blue water with the best man they’d ever known. But the very fact that Max had chosen a place she still wasn’t sure how to pronounce—Was it Saint or Sahn? Bart or Barts or Barth or Barths?—was another reminder of how different they were. Max made a government salary as an assistant district attorney, but had friends who were partners at major law firms, with second homes in East Hampton and the Berkshires. He’d been to Paris multiple times and seemed perfectly at ease ordering foie gras and escargot on this trip. As far as Ellie was concerned, a beach vacation should mean tacos, barbecue, and margaritas.

She kicked off the covers once again. How in the world could the most expensive hotel she’d ever stayed in not have better air-conditioning? Say what you will about Kansas, but at least the Midwest understood the importance of climate control.

And there it was. The reason she was tossing and turning in the middle of the night—Wichita, Kansas. It was a good enough place to grow up, the kind of little city where a cop dad and a bookkeeper mom could afford a three-bedroom ranch house, complete with a finished basement and a picket fence. The public schools were better than average and, at least back then, provided a haven where kids were all treated the same, regardless of zip codes. It had been a middle-school PE teacher who convinced a skeptical Ellie to enter a junior-miss beauty pageant to start squirreling away some college money, a few hundred dollars at a time. Kansas had turned her into the kind of person who could move to New York City at the age of twenty-one and sign up for criminal justice classes at John Jay.

But Kansas was also the state she never left—not once, not even to Kansas City, Missouri—until she was in the tenth grade for that impromptu trip to Mexico. It was the home that had never taught her about delicacies such as foie gras and escargot. And it was the place where her father died when she was only fourteen years old.

She shifted from her comfortable spot in the crook of Max’s arm and fumbled around on the nightstand until she found her phone. The glow of the screen lit the room in a yellowish haze, but Max seemed undisturbed.

She suddenly remembered she was in a foreign country and would have to pay data fees. Fuck it. A few texts would cost less than dessert at tonight’s overpriced restaurant.

Are you up?

Dots immediately appeared in a text box on the screen, suggesting that her brother was indeed awake.

I am now. You know I leave my phone on in case of last-minute cancellations.