She nods. “This is going to let my nerd show more than I’m usually willing to this early in a relationship, but…” She slides a book out of her faux-leather purse. The spine is bumpy, cracked in a well-read kind of way. It’s one of those old-school travel guides people used before we carried the internet in our pockets. I count dozens of tabs curling out of the pages. Taormina, the title says.

My upper lip curls up. “That is grossly nerdy. Please tell me you didn’t annotate it.”

“Oh.” She blinks, taken aback. Her face slips into a confused hurt, then masks up again. “Um, no. Just wrote a handful of comments.”

“Good. Because that would be very…” I pull something out of my backpack. “Cringe.”

It’s the same guidebook. Same publisher, same title. A little worse for wear, given that I prefer dog-earing to tabbing, but yellow Post-its full of comments—Botanical garden, Rue would love; Hike if possible; Check if open—stick out in every direction. Avery studies it, then looks up with a grin just as the car comes to a stop in front of a villa. I spy two men outside, and my stomach lurches.

“Did we just become best friends?” she asks, grinning.

That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.

Chapter 3

My brother is waiting for us at a table on a stone patio, sitting in the shadow cast by a wooden trellis covered in bright pink bougainvillea; one hand over his eyes, head thrown back in laughter. Across from him is Conor Harkness, still in the middle of narrating whatever is giving Eli all this merriment.

It’s a good thing. That I’m getting this over with now, on minute one of the vacation. Once I’m past the first interaction with Conor, the tone will have been set, and the rest will be smooth sailing. I’m sure it’s what he wants, too: A mutual and tacit agreement to polite indifference. The pretense that our entire relationship is linchpinned by Eli.

“Unbelievable,” Avery says, still in the back of the car.

“What?”

“Hark, wearing something that is not business casual. The apocalypse is being harbinged.” She opens the door and exits. Tiny follows her, trampling over me to run into the arms of the one human for whom he’d bury us all in a ditch. I slip out just in time to watch him tackle my brother with all the unbridled violence of his love.

“It’s been less than forty-eight hours since you last saw him,” I mutter to myself, not quite able to bite back a smile. “Show some dignity, Tiny.”

Then, over the hypnotic buzz of the cicadas, I hear an unfamiliar voice. “—don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that if my office sends in a CIM, the principal will have their team run processes and put together a deck. Am I wrong, Hark?” The words rise from a phone set on speaker, face up in the middle of the table.