Page 9 of No One Was Supposed to Die at This Wedding

“I heard that,” Oliver says, taking my hand in his. I’m still at the stage when I feel giddy around him, and his touch feels like an invitation to do something we can’t in front of Harper.

“You were meant to,” I say, and give him a wink.

He winks back. “Ladies, you both look lovely.”

“This old thing?” I say, nodding to my very new dress. It has a high neck and a low back. Harper’s wearing something similar in ballet pink, and we’ve both got our hair in a high ponytail.

We look like, well,sisters.

“Thanks, Oliver,” Harper says. “You look nice, too.”

Oliver’s phone beeps in his pocket.

“Do you need to check that?” I ask. “It might be a publishing emergency.”

Oliver smiles. He’s an author, too, and it’s a joke between us that there are no emergencies in publishing, only predictable disappointments.

“It’s just a weather alert.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I set a special chime for those.”

I start to laugh. “That’s...adorable. And a bit odd.”

“Why odd?”

“Because the weather’s always the same. Warm and sunny. It’s why people live here.”

“Tell that to the hurricane.”

“Hurricane?”

Oliver gives me a rueful smile. “Hurricane Isabella. Scheduled to make landfall in Southern California in the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours.”

“HurricaneIsabella?”

Isabella is one of the people who tried to kill me. She’s in jail pending her trial, but you don’t just stop being afraid of someone because of a little thing like prison bars.

“It’ll probably be a tropical storm by the time it makes landfall,” Harper says. “It’s been all over the news.”

“You know I don’t read or watch the news when I’m writing.”

“Haveyou been writing?”

I look away. There’s a surfer in a black wetsuit trying to mount a wave. He almost makes it up, then tumbles off his board.

I wrote Book Ten of the Vacation Mysteries series15in a fever dream after we got back from Italy. But I’ve got another book to write, and so far, I haven’t been able to produce anything. My agent, Stephanie, checks in weekly, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to focus now that filming is over.

“I will be next week. But in the meantime, is there really a hurricane named after my attempted murderer heading toward us?”

“It’s not named after her,” Harper says. “It was just the next name in line from a preassigned list.”

“Uh-huh.”

“First sign of a narcissist...thinking everything’s about you...”

“That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?” Oliver says.

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