Read the opening chapters of Cayo Sereno.

Chapter One

Mine

The chime woke me. Two soft notes, the pretty kind, like an alarm saying good morning, you without making a thing of it.

I was on a lounger by the water, and there was already a drink sweating on the little table beside me: pink, salt on the rim, half-gone, the ice not even started melting.

I didn't remember ordering it. I took a sip anyway, because past-Bianca clearly had a plan, and I trust her about thirty percent of the time.

It was one of the best things I'd ever tasted. Like if a sunset were a beverage. I made a noise I would not have made in front of people.

But there weren't any people. That was the thing.

The sun was doing the low gold thing, the hour-before-it-sets thing, and everything it touched went honey-colored and soft at the edges.

The sand wasn't that hard-packed gray stuff from most beaches. It was pale and powdery and clean, raked into these neat little rows like somebody had recently combed it, and where the water slid up over it the wet part went the color of caramel.

The sea past the dock lay flat and bright and almost too blue, that postcard blue, going out and out until it just dissolved into a sky doing six different pinks at once.

Palms leaned in along the tree line, fronds barely moving. A string of bulbs ran between two of them, not lit yet, waiting for dark. The whole place looked less like a photo and more like a painting of a photo, like someone had taken a real beach and turned the saturation up a notch past believable.

I looked down at myself. Mint-green bikini, my color, with a gauzy sarong knotted at my hip that floated when the not-quite-breeze moved it. Flip-flops parked in the sand by the lounger.

“Cool,” I said, to no one, and slid the flip-flops on.

Then I stood up and waited to feel weird. Beautiful empty place, no idea how I got here, the polite move is probably to panic a little. I gave it a second. Nothing came.

What came instead, climbing up through me all warm and a little smug, was: the whole place is mine. Not towel-war mine. Not pretending-the-family-next-to-me-is-invisible mine.

Actually, completely, deliciously mine.

No bugs, either. I noticed that and got genuinely happy about it. A whole beach and not one thing trying to land on my drink. Heaven. Actual heaven.

“Okay,” I told the ocean. “Okay, I can work with this.”

The ocean, being a great listener, said nothing back. I laughed anyway, just to hear it bounce, and finished the pink miracle.

Then I did what any reasonable girl does when she wakes up alone in paradise. I went exploring.

The flip-flops clapped against my heels the whole way up the beach. Flap, flap, flap. The only sound in the entire world besides the water, and honestly kind of a banger of a sound. Very main-character-walking-into-her-movie.

The sand gave way to a path of smooth flat stones, warm under my feet, that wound up toward a low building of sun-bleached wood and open sides. There wasn't really a front door. The whole thing was a front door.

Climbing vines with these fat red flowers spilled down one wall. A sign hung over the entrance, hand-painted in soft blues, a little stylized sun sitting on a flat line of water.

And under it, Cayo Sereno.

The same little sun was stitched into the towel I'd left on the lounger, I realized, and printed on the napkin under my drink.

Love it. That little sun was working overtime.

Inside was a lobby, or what wanted to be a lobby: rattan chairs with cushions you could disappear into, a big slow ceiling fan, floors of pale wood polished to a glow, and a check-in desk of dark driftwood with nobody behind it.

Glass floats in fishing-net bundles hung from the rafters and threw little circles of colored light around when the fan stirred them.

A screen on the wall played a welcome video on a loop, drone shots gliding over the beach and the pool, a voice like warm honey saying how glad they were to have me, how everything I needed was already taken care of.

I waited for a front-desk person to pop up and ask for my last name. None did. The video started over.

“Hi,” I said to the empty desk. “Reservation for Monroe. Party of, apparently, me.”

The desk did not care.

Out the back of the lobby the path opened onto the infinity pool, and I actually stopped walking to look at it. The far edge dropped away into the horizon so the water seemed to pour straight into the sea beyond. It was so still and so clear and so blue that it didn't look like something you could swim in. It looked poured, set, like resin.

Loungers around it in a perfect row, towels folded into neat little fans on every one.

Amber would've fixed two of them that weren't quite square. She can't not. It's a sickness. She alphabetizes other people's bookshelves. The thought of Ambs out here clucking over the towel fans made me grin at an empty pool deck.

Off to the side, tucked under a thatched roof, was a tiki bar: every bottle you could want lined up and gleaming amber and green and gold, glasses hung upside down in their racks, a bowl of limes so bright they looked fake.

And a drink already waiting on the bar top. Pink. Salt rim. Like the one on the beach had teleported ahead to keep me company.

I picked it up. Of course I picked it up. I wasn't raised to ignore free cocktails.

And then, a little further on, the restaurant. This gorgeous open-sided pavilion with the tide-name spelled out in iron letters over the door, Marea, candles already flickering on every table even though it wasn't dark, white cloths, little vases of those same red flowers.

A buffet ran down the whole length of it under a row of warm copper lamps, and it went on forever, and not one plate of it had been touched. Steam still curled up off the trays like it had all been set down thirty seconds ago for a hundred guests who never came.

And the food. Okay. I need you to understand the food.

If I have a spiritual home it's a bowl of noodles, any noodle, all noodles, and here was a buffet that had clearly read my diary and then gone shopping.

There was spaghetti coiled glossy and red, and penne baked under a blistered cheese lid, and a whole station just for udon, the broth steaming, the noodles thick and pale and perfect, and next to it ramen with the egg already halved and the jammy yolk just sitting there being beautiful. There was pasta I didn't have names for, ribbons and shells and little twists, in white sauces and green ones and one that was almost black.

Bread torn warm. Fruit cut into shapes. A whole dessert end.

And then I spotted the strawberries down there, fat and red and glossy as nail polish, and thought, mean and instant, Chloe would hate that those are the prettiest thing on the table, because Chloe hates strawberries and Chloe has a shelf of baking trophies and Chloe would absolutely need to inform me, sweetly, that real pastry chefs don't lean on garnish.

I ate standing up like a raccoon. It was incredible. Every single thing was incredible. I'd take a bite and my whole face would do something embarrassing, and I'd turn to say holy heck you have to try this.

And there was nobody to turn to.

I could hear them, though. That's the thing about my friends. I carry them around in my head whether I want to or not.

Amber would've already been crying, one hand flat on her chest, going Bianca. Bianca, stop, I need the name of this place and I need it now.

Chloe would've taken one regal bite and said it's good, which from Chloe means give me a kitchen and twenty minutes.

Then there was Kimmy. Kimmy would've looked at this entire impossible spread, this whole gilded wonderland of a buffet, and said one word.

“Cute.”

And meant it as the highest praise a human being can offer, because that's Kim, and somehow her one flat little “cute” would've been the one I wanted most.

The first time it just kind of hung there in the air. My hand half-up, the sentence already started in my mouth, and nowhere for it to land.

I stood in that beautiful empty pavilion with the candles going and the best food of my life cooling in front of me, and felt the tiniest cold thing brush past me, fast, gone before I could even name it.

Then I shook it off, because come on. Paradise. Mine.

Don't be weird.

“You guys,” I announced to the empty restaurant, to the buffet, the candles, the slow drift of the fan, the little stitched sun on every folded napkin, “would have absolutely lost your minds over this.”

I went back for the udon. The sun outside hadn't moved at all.

Chapter Two

Golden Hour Forever

I gave myself the grand tour after that, and the grand tour confirmed it: I had won.

Some cosmic raffle I didn't remember entering. The prize was the nicest place I had ever stood in, with my name on the metaphorical door and no one to hog the bathroom.

So naturally I went looking for the best room, because if it's yours, you don't take the starter room. You take the room.

The suites were back behind the pool, a low two-story building half-swallowed in those fat red flowers, with outdoor staircases of the same pale driftwood as everything else and little brass numbers gone soft and green with salt air.

I clapped up the stairs. Flap, flap, flap. To the top corner, because the top corner is always the one, and the door there had a little hand-lettered plaque instead of a number.

La Perla. I didn't know what it meant and I didn't care. It sounded expensive. The door wasn't locked, and the second I stepped through it I said a word my mother would not have loved.

Whitewashed walls and a ceiling that went all the way up to the rafters, a fan turning slow up in the peak of it. A bed the size of a small country, white linen, a gauzy net gathered above it like something out of a movie about people more glamorous than me. Floors of that warm pale wood, cool under my bare feet when I kicked the flip-flops off by the door.

And the whole far wall was just open. Folding glass doors pushed all the way back onto a balcony, and past the balcony, the sea, doing its impossible blue thing, framed up like the resort had built the entire building around that one view and then handed it to me.

There were fresh flowers on the dresser. There was a fruit plate I hadn't asked for. There was a robe so soft I put it on over my bikini immediately and made another noise.

“Okay, this is insane,” I told the room. “This is genuinely insane. People save up their whole lives for this and I just — woke up in it.”

And my hand went to my hip, patting around for my phone.

Because this was a picture. This view was a crime not to send. Kimmy did photography. Kimmy would've shot this balcony like a magazine and posted it before I'd even found the light switch, and I wanted to fire off the most obnoxious bragging photo of my life to her specifically and watch the little cute come back.

Except there was no phone.

There hadn't been one all day, now that I reached for it.

Some small practical corner of me went that's strange. The rest of me, drunk on flowers and square footage, decided strange was a tomorrow problem.

I stood out on the balcony and gripped the railing and let the wind that wasn't quite wind move the sarong around my legs, and I started, without really deciding to, composing the story.

The way you do.

I was already home in my head, already on Kim's bad little couch with the throw blanket none of us are allowed to wash, already saying okay so I have to tell you about this place, and I could see it perfectly.

Amber's whole face crumpling with vicarious joy. Chloe doing her I'm so happy for you smile while secretly plotting a better vacation.

And Kimmy in the corner of the couch not even looking up from her game, going “cute,” which from Kim was a standing ovation.

I had the whole scene cast.

I just had to get home and perform it.

Then the sunset started, and the sunset demanded my full attention.

And it was a show. The whole sky went to work. Peach bleeding into rose bleeding into this deep bruised purple out at the edges. The sun fattening up and going orange and laying a long shaking road of light straight across the water to the bottom of my balcony, like it was for me specifically.

The little bulbs strung between the palms flickered on all at once down below, warm and gold. Somewhere a speaker I never found started playing something soft with steel drums in it.

I leaned on that railing and watched the most beautiful sunset of my life happen in total silence and felt, for one big swelling second, so happy I could have cried, and so alone that the happy had a strange hollow in the middle of it, like biting into something perfect and finding it warm where it should've been cold.

“You guys are gonna be so jealous,” I whispered, to the cast on the couch, to nobody.

Then the sun went down.

I mean it went down. Not the slow real way, the way you watch it sink for twenty minutes and then it's gone. One second it was sitting fat and orange on the water and the next the whole sky just dropped, like someone leaning on a dimmer.

Rose to purple to deep blue to dark in about the time it takes to breathe out, the long road of light snapping off the water, the shadows pouring across the beach all at once and pooling under the palms, and then the stars came on.

Not appeared. Came on, all together, a whole sky of them blinking into place like a switch had been thrown.

I blinked. I had two and a half pink drinks in me and a belly full of every noodle ever made and a brain absolutely marinating in contentment, and the part of me that should have said Bianca, that is not how the sun works never quite got to its feet.

It just felt like the day had been so good it got impatient to become night. That's honestly the thought I had. Wow, that was fast, and then, what a gorgeous night, and that was the end of my critical thinking for the evening.

Because it was a gorgeous night. Warm as bathwater, the bulbs glowing gold, the sea gone black and silver, more stars than I'd ever seen stacked up over the water.

I padded back inside, peeled off the robe, and sank into that ridiculous bed, and the linen was cool and smelled like sun and the net swayed over me in the fan-breeze.

I lay there making tomorrow's plans. Sleep in. Float in that infinity pool until I pruned. Find the dessert end of the buffet and do some real damage.

Maybe figure out where everybody was, eventually, when I felt like caring. There had to be a front desk person somewhere, a manager, a someone. And when I found them I was going to thank them so hard, because nobody had ever given me a day like this one.

“Best day ever,” I told the dark, the net, the little stitched sun I couldn't see anymore but knew was on the pillowcase under my cheek. “Genuinely. Best day ever.”

The dark didn't answer. I was getting used to that.

I fell asleep smiling, in La Perla, with the doors open to the sea, completely sure that tomorrow would be even better.

Chapter Three

Good Morning, Nobody

I woke up to the light coming back.

Not a sunrise. I'd half-turned over in the big bed, surfacing slow, and through the open doors the sky was running backward.

The deep blue lifted off all at once, dark draining upward, gold flooding back in from the edge of the water like someone filling a glass. The stars switched off together.

And then it was morning, that same low honey-colored hour-before-something light, the sea already its impossible blue, the bulbs between the palms gone dark and ordinary in the day.

I lay there a second with the net swaying over me and thought, fuzzily, huh. That was the second time the sky had done a magic trick and the second time I'd let it.

Some little splinter in the back of my head went that's not how mornings work, Bianca, and I rolled over on top of the splinter and squashed it, because the bed was perfect and the room was perfect and I had earned a slow start.

But the slow start didn't feel the way I wanted it to.

I stretched out across all that white linen, star-fished, taking up the whole ridiculous country-sized bed, and the thing about taking up a whole bed by yourself is that it only feels good if it's a choice.

The first morning it would've felt like a choice. This morning it just felt like a lot of empty bed.

I got up and went to get dressed, and that's how I found the closet. I hadn't opened it the day before. Why would I? I'd lived in the bikini and the robe.

But this morning I wanted to be in real clothes, the way you start dressing for the airport on the last morning of a trip without really deciding to, and I slid it open and there was a little suitcase sitting on the floor of it.

My size of suitcase.

And inside, folded neat, my clothes: a soft white hoodie I'd have reached for on any normal day, a plain black tank top, a pair of jean shorts, the comfortable nothing-outfit you throw on to travel in.

I pulled them on and they fit like I'd worn them a hundred times, because of course they did.

Everything here fit. And I stepped into the flip-flops and felt, just for a second, more like myself than I had since I woke up.

I did not remember packing the suitcase. I'd stopped expecting to remember things like that.

I zipped it shut, told myself past-Bianca had her reasons, and didn't think about it again.

I went out onto the balcony and the view was exactly as gorgeous as last night, and I stood there waiting for it to hit me the same way and it just didn't. Not quite.

Like a song you loved on the first play and now you're noticing the part where it loops.

“Okay,” I told the sea, the way I'd been telling the sea things. “Good morning.”

The sea did its sea thing. I was, I noticed, talking to a body of water with real expectation in my voice now, like it might finally say something back, and catching myself doing it gave me a small embarrassed feeling even though there was nobody to be embarrassed in front of.

Which was sort of the whole problem, wasn't it. You can't even be properly embarrassed alone.

It's like the joke I almost made coming down the stairs. Flap, flap, flap. Something dumb about the resort being all-inclusive of literally one guest, a real groaner, a Bianca special, and I actually started to say it out loud before I remembered there was no one to land it on.

A good dad joke needs a victim.

Kim would've made the face. Kim makes this face at my jokes, this dead-flat why-do-I-know-you face, and it's the whole reason I make them.

I let it die in my mouth on the staircase, and the flip-flops kept clapping, and the sound was the same sound as yesterday except yesterday it had been a soundtrack and today it was just the noise I made moving through a place where nothing else moved.

Low-grade. I want to be clear it was still low-grade. I wasn't scared. I wasn't sad-sad. I was a girl on the best vacation of her life having a slightly sour morning.

That's all it was.

I went to breakfast because breakfast fixes most things.

Marea was breakfast now. I didn't ask questions.

I just walked in and the dinner buffet was gone and a breakfast one had taken its place, fruit stacked in glistening pyramids, pastries under glass, a station with eggs steaming and another with these golden waffles in perfect grids, syrup in little glass pitchers that looked too pretty to pour. Candles still going on every empty table, white cloths, the red flowers. The strawberries were back, somehow even glossier.

The food was, again, the best food I'd ever had. The berries tasted the way berries look in commercials and never actually taste. The coffee was somehow exactly how I take it without my asking.

And I sat at a table set for two by a window full of ocean and I ate it alone.

That was the part.

Sitting down was the part.

Grazing like a raccoon yesterday had a manic fun energy to it, but sitting down at a laid table with a folded napkin across from an empty chair, eating perfect food in total silence with the candles flickering for no one, that felt like something else.

There was a second place setting across from me. A whole second chair, pulled out a little, like it was waiting.

And I had the strangest impulse to slide the coffee across to it, to fill it, like I'd sat down expecting the chair to have somebody in it and only now was noticing it didn't.

Like there was a Kim-shaped gap at my own breakfast table.

Kim should be here.

It arrived like that, plain and certain, not a wish exactly. More like a fact I'd misplaced.

Not I wish Kim were here, which is a normal thing to think on a trip.

Kim should be here.

Present tense, like she'd stepped to the bathroom and was taking too long.

I sat with it for a second, turning it over, and then did the sensible thing and explained it to myself: of course I wanted my best friend. I'd been alone for a day. You go to a beautiful place and the first thing you want is the person you'd be insufferable about it with.

That's all it was.

That's all it could be.

I looked out at the pool while I finished and the loungers got me a little. All of them squared up in their flawless row, towels folded into those neat fans, every single one waiting for a body that wasn't going to come.

Yesterday they'd read as all of this, just for you. Today they read as set up and abandoned. Same loungers. I'd just stopped being able to see them the first way.

“Where is everybody,” I said. Not even really a question.

I'd been talking to an imaginary couch and a real ocean for a whole day and some part of me had been carefully not asking the actual one, and now it just came out flat over the strawberries.

Where is everybody. A hundred-plate buffet, twice a day. A welcome video glad to have me.

Somebody folded these towels. Somebody lit these candles. Somebody made this coffee exactly how I like it.

So where were they.

And even then, even then, it didn't land as scary. It landed like the end of something. Like the vacation had quietly completed itself.

I'd had the perfect day and the perfect night and the perfect everything, and sitting there over a cooling waffle I felt the trip just sort of finish, in my chest.

I was full. I was rested. I'd done paradise.

And what I wanted now, suddenly and totally, the way you want it on the last morning when the magic's worn thin and your own people start sounding better than any infinity pool, was to go home.

To tell them.

The whole thing was useless rattling around just in me; it only became real, only became mine in the way I actually wanted, once I could hand it over.

Amber gasping. Chloe seething politely. Kimmy and her one flat cute.

I'd been writing the story for a day and a half and a story needs somewhere to go, and all of mine pointed at the same little couch with the unwashable blanket.

“Alright,” I said, and stood, and left the waffle, and the candles kept burning behind me for the empty room. “Let's find the front desk, settle up, and get me home.”

WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Bianca has paradise all to herself.

Now she just has to figure out why.