Chapter One: Harper

ONE HARPER FIVE WEEKS EARLIER

Oliver’s pre-K was a short six-block walk from Harper and Benjamin’s Park Slope apartment, a minor miracle in the Brooklyn public school rat race. By the time mother and son scaled the brownstone’s front steps and walked in the door, Oliver’s face coated in a fine layer of animal cracker dust and Harper’s misty with sweat from the brutal blast of May heat, Benjamin had closed his laptop, pulled lamb burgers from the freezer, filled Oliver’s Daniel Tiger cup with two-thirds water and one-third apple juice, and brought up the mail.

Harper gratefully accepted a glass of iced tea and leaned in for a kiss, a familiar thought humming—How did I get so lucky?

Most days, she could barely keep it together—full-time copywriter for an ad agency, mom to a spirited four-year-old—but Benjamin made working and parenting look like a breeze. He swept their son onto the footstool by the sink and mopped one cheek with a damp cloth while showering the other with kisses until Oliver squealed with glee.

Harper leaned against the counter and allowed herself a moment to breathe, to appreciate everything she had. Ben was tall, wiry, and knee-bucklingly handsome if you were into that bashful scholar type, which she was. Her eyes shifted to their son. Oliver’s genetic draw included her dark brown hair, out-turned feet, and wide-set eyes, features that never failed to make her heart skip a beat when mirrored back to her in her son.

“Something fun arrived for you.” With his chin, Benjamin gestured toward the round wicker tray on their tiny kitchen table where he’d deposited a stack of mail. Harper had bought the tray at Brooklyn Flea, envisioning a charming touch that would keep the apartment less cluttered, yet on days when she grabbed the mail, she invariably left it scattered on the coffee table or piled beside the toaster. She used to be more organized.

On top of the day’s neat stack sat a large, hand-addressed cream envelope. “Looks fun, in any case,” Ben said. “Wedding invitation?”

Placing her iced tea on the counter, Harper walked to the table. Ms. Harper Gates and family. It did look like a wedding invitation, and at twenty-seven, they’d entered that phase—their peers were getting married in droves. They had been the exception, tying the knot two weeks after graduation. Harper had been in her second trimester then, evidence of Oliver’s pending arrival just starting to show, and they hadn’t wanted to wait. But with Clare’s death still fresh, Harper hadn’t been able to imagine throwing any kind of party, and so the timing three months into lockdown had been a relief. They’d had a private ceremony in the living room of their new apartment—the only room not still stuffed with moving boxes—and on their second anniversary, they’d invited twenty friends and family, mostly on Benjamin’s side, to a dinner reception in the garden at Frankies Spuntino.

Harper plucked the envelope from the table. Who knew her well enough to invite her to their wedding, yet not so well as to include Ben and Oliver by name? When she flipped over the envelope, the return address was stamped in pretty blue ink on the back. Her breath caught, a fist taking hold of her insides. The Monroes.

Clare’s family.

Hurriedly, she ran the tip of her finger beneath the seal, breaking it open and slicing her skin in the process. A bead of bright red blood appeared above her nail bed, then splashed down onto the card. She stuck her finger in her mouth.

The paper, so thick it felt like cloth in her hand, drank up the droplet before she could reach for a napkin. A pea-sized stain formed above the salutation.

Dear Ms. Harper Gates and family:

Your presence is requested the week of Monday, June 2–Sunday, June 8, at Palazzo Mella to join in a celebration of the life of Clare Annabelle Monroe. Travel and accommodations at our family vacation home on Lake Como will be provided. Ms. Janet Clowe will be in touch with you directly to arrange your trip.

We hope you and yours can join us to honor Clare’s memory.

Most sincerely, The Monroe Family

June 8. It would have been Clare’s twenty-seventh birthday. The invitation dropped from Harper’s fingers and glided to the table.

“What is it, Mommy?”

Finger still in her mouth, she turned to her son, who was settling into his seat with his Daniel Tiger cup.

“Who’s getting hitched?” Ben asked. From the junk drawer by the sink, he produced a Band-Aid.

Harper smiled gratefully, then shook her head. “No one. It’s not that. It’s…” She was not in the habit of lying to her husband, but in that moment, it wasn’t devotion to the altar of the truth keeping her honest. She was simply not clever enough. If she could have concocted a convincing story on the spot, torn up the card, and flushed the pieces, she’d have done it in a heartbeat.

“Harper?” Benjamin touched his wife’s shoulder. “You’re doing that thing again. Where did you go?”

“What? Nowhere.”

He dropped his hand and pressed both palms to the table. His shoulders tensed. Benjamin was frustrated, but he wasn’t going to let it show in front of Oliver. “You know you can tell me anything,” he said gently. “No secrets, remember?”

“Of course not.” It wasn’t the first time Ben had accused her of keeping secrets. If they were alone, he’d be a lot more direct about it. They’d argue, Ben keeping his cool but clearly hurt. Then Harper would feel awful because she was keeping something hidden. Only one secret, but it was something she never wanted to take out and examine—and anyway, the window for laying it all bare had closed a long time ago.

Harper’s mind traveled then to the Monroes’ vacation home on Lake Como, to a real window offering a grand view of the lake from the room where she’d stayed. Through it, night falling on the dark, deep water below, the fireworks just starting. She could still feel the hot shame in her belly, how she’d been freezing. In shock.

In her mind’s eye, Harper extended a trembling hand toward the curtain rod and grabbed hold, blotting out the view.

“Harper?”

She sighed and thrust the invitation toward her husband. “The Monroes want us to come to Italy. It’s a bit morbid, don’t you think?”

He scanned the card. “Because she died there?”

“Who died?” Oliver asked, eyes wide.

“Mommy’s friend Clare.” Benjamin dropped to his knees, meeting Oliver at eye level. “It was a long time ago, before you were born. And now, Clare’s family is throwing a party to remember her.”

Oliver’s lips curled into an exaggerated frown. “I don’t think I’d want to go to a dead girl’s party.” He placed his half-empty cup on the table. “Can I go play in the green pavilion now?”

Harper nodded. The “green pavilion” referred to an electric green tablecloth from which Benjamin had constructed a semi-permanent blanket fort in a corner of Oliver’s bedroom. Marjorie Platypus lived there, as did Rupert Squirrel and Oliver’s entire collection of Lego.

“I don’t think I want to go to a dead girl’s party either,” Harper said when their son was out of earshot. Although that wasn’t entirely true. She missed Clare every single day. Her best friend, her North Star. Clare was not the thing keeping her from going to Italy.

The truth was this: if Harper had received an invitation to Clare’s memorial, so had Sirina, David, and Luca. The only three people in the world who knew everything that happened the night Clare died. The only three living keepers of Harper’s secret. Seeing them again—in Italy, with Benjamin in tow—could be very, very dangerous.

Further, there would be someone else at the memorial Harper was loath to see. She sank into a chair and picked up the invitation once again, flipping it over, but the back held no further details.

The Monroe family. Who all would that entail? Clare’s parents, surely, Samuel and Helena. And her two siblings. Tanner would be nearly thirty now, and Emma, the youngest, must be twenty-two, around the age they’d all been back then. That week at the lake—the week Clare died—there had also been an aunt, a cousin, a couple of family friends. The memory of all those faces hit Harper like a slap, and she sucked in her breath.

Benjamin fetched her sweating glass from the counter, deposited it on the table in front of her with a swift kiss to her forehead, then began pulling burger buns, asparagus, and salad greens from the fridge. With Oliver happily occupied in his room, Harper knew she should be helping with dinner, but all she could do was sit at the table and take small, grateful sips of iced tea. Why did they invite her? It almost felt cruel. She couldn’t see them again. She couldn’t possibly face it.

“Just thinking out loud,” Ben said. “A week in Italy, all expenses paid? We haven’t traveled since college.”

“But—” Harper started to say.

“Horizon Capital owes me scads of PTO,” Ben continued. “And it’s the week before our anniversary. Mom would come stay with Oliver. She’d be in heaven.”

In an instant, he had it all figured out.

And he was right. Neither of them had traveled since college, save for a small handful of weekend trips to the shore. Between the pandemic and Oliver’s arrival so early in their relationship, they hadn’t taken a real vacation in five years of marriage. Her last trip out of the country had been to Lake Como, with Clare, the week she died. She hated the way things had been left that night, unfinished. In her mind, she traveled to that room again, the vast poster of an Italian film still above the bed. She’d stood in the center of the carpet, her body wrapped in a plush white bathrobe, the thick terry cloth unable to stop her shivers.

“I have to admit,” Ben said, “a week among the Monroes is pretty tempting. See how the one percent lives?” He pulled a colander of rinsed asparagus from the sink and began trimming the ends.

The Monroes’ primary residence in Malibu was a world apart from Harper and Benjamin’s comfortable but unfussy existence in Brooklyn, even further from Harper’s quiet upbringing in suburban Massachusetts. Harper had been Clare’s constant companion on school breaks, had had her fill of Clare’s family—flashy new money on her father’s side and well-heeled New England stock on her mother’s—while her best friend was still alive. But Ben hadn’t been close to Clare—hadn’t experienced the Monroes in all their opulent glory.

Spending time with Clare and her two siblings had undeniably been a trip. Hollywood premieres, VIP rooms at trendy nightspots, summers on the Vineyard, and of course that infamous New Year’s on Como. Harper had drunk it all in as Clare’s father, Samuel, furnished the entertainment industry with a steady stream of venture capital. While his wife, Helena, drifted along in a perpetual haze of white wine and Oxy. While Helena’s older sister, Catherine, kept the family machine running, keeping their reputation squeaky-clean in the press. The Monroes were intoxicating. But without Clare, they were not a drug Harper wished to sample again.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. But she did know—they could not go. Benjamin had been home in Saratoga Springs over winter break that December. Not on Lake Como with the rest of them, at the Monroes’ palazzo. They’d just started hanging out that fall—that’s what Harper had insisted they term it at the time, something more than friendship but short of a committed relationship. She’d never had a boyfriend before, not in high school, and not through the first three years of college. By senior year, she was beginning to wonder if she was too shy, too insecure, too terrified of revealing her feelings to another person to ever be in a relationship. She could picture herself with a boyfriend, but not making it through the awkward series of interactions and emotional unveilings required to get there.

Benjamin had sensed her nerves and been incredibly gentle, allowing things to progress as slowly as she’d needed until they’d finally begun sleeping together in December, just before break. Even then, Harper held him at arm’s length, scared that calling it a relationship would invite heartbreak. So when Clare had issued invitations to join her family on Lake Como for New Year’s, Ben was not yet officially her boyfriend, and Clare only wanted the four of them anyway: Sirina, David, Luca, and Harper.

Ben hadn’t been there that night, hadn’t borne witness to the spectacular downturn the trip had taken on New Year’s Eve, or to its terrible conclusion: fireworks bursting in blues and purples and golds over Lake Como, and Clare’s body in the water below, her skin translucent with cold.

“I’m being insensitive,” he said, catching Harper’s pained expression. “Of course it would be hard for you to go back.” He placed the chef’s knife on the counter and transferred the asparagus to a roasting pan. “But would it also be healing? You haven’t seen anyone since graduation. I assume they’re invited too.”

She nodded. “Assume so.”

Once, their group of friends had been inseparable. But now they knew too much about each other. It had been easier to leave it all—leave each other—behind.

Had Clare’s death been a tragic accident, or had it been suicide? For the past five and a half years, Harper had sat with the uncertainty—and the reality that she would never truly know. Perhaps it didn’t matter. They all betrayed Clare that night, and then she died. Harper, Sirina, David, and Luca—Clare’s four closest friends. What Harper knew for sure was this: Clare had invited them to Italy, and they’d driven her into the darkness.