The Unwedding

by Ally Condie

Genres: Women's Fiction; Amateur Sleuth; Suspense

Synopsis

Agatha Christie meets The White Lotus in The Unwedding, the adult fiction debut from #1 New York Times bestselling YA author Ally Condie, about a recent divorcee whose vacation at an exclusive Big Sur resort unravels when she discovers a dead body on the day a wedding was set to occur.

Ellery Wainwright is alone at the edge of the world.
 
She and her husband, Luke, were supposed to spend their twentieth wedding anniversary together at the luxurious Resort at Broken Point in Big Sur, California. Where better to celebrate a marriage, a family, and a life together than at one of the most stunning places on earth?
 
But now she’s traveling solo.
 
To add insult to injury, there’s a wedding at Broken Point scheduled during her stay. Ellery remembers how it felt to be on the cusp of everything new and wonderful, with a loved and certain future glimmering just ahead. Now, she isn’t certain of anything except for her love for her kids and her growing realization that this place, though beautiful, is unsettling.
 
When Ellery discovers the body of the groom floating in the pool in the rain, she realizes that she is not the only one whose future is no longer guaranteed. Before the police can reach Broken Point, a mudslide takes out the road to the resort, leaving the guests trapped. When another guest dies, it’s clear something horrible is brewing.

Everyone at Broken Point has a secret. And everyone has a shadow. Including Ellery.

Release date: June 4, 2024

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

No one could believe it when Luke and Ellery Wainwright got divorced the summer before their oldest child’s senior year. Everyone was astonished by the speed with which it happened—they were still together, everything just fine at the neighborhood last-day-of-school party, their children running through the sprinklers or lounging bored on the grass along with all the other neighborhood kids. Ellery brought the strawberry rhubarb crumble she always did, warm and smelling of fruit and brown sugar. Luke hung out with the dads over by the barbecue and returned wayward basketballs to the teenagers playing in the Humphreys’ driveway. They ate together on a blanket with their children. Later, Kat Coburn said she was sure she saw Luke put his hand on the small of Ellery’s back when they were leaving.

No one had known they were putting on a good front. That Luke had already called the game, that Ellery was electric with grief and still hoping he would change his mind.

But by the Fourth of July, Luke had moved out. By the middle of September everything had been finalized, and in October Ellery was vacationing by herself on the trip they had planned for their twentieth anniversary.

“We’ll seat you out on the patio,” the hostess told her. “Please, follow me.”

Ellery did.

She felt like she had been besieged by beauty since she had touched down at the airport in Monterey a few hours earlier. The drive to Broken Point was breathtaking, astonishing, Big Sur vistas around every turn, and the resort itself was also stunning. When she’d checked in at reception at the Main House, she’d been greeted by a staff member at a low midcentury desk flanked by a gorgeous gilded screen. Small fires snapped and flickered in stone pits throughout the property, a sculpture made of glass, steel, and granite looming near the largest one. Globe lights hung above on strings, swaying slightly in the breeze.

The restaurant, called Wildrye, was located adjacent to the Main House, and an enormous blown-glass chandelier graced its lobby. The tables on the patio were dressed with white linen cloths, ivory candles, and fresh flowers in tiny ceramic vases. A tree-scented breeze from the sea came up through the forest and the open windows. The full moon hung over the ocean in the distance, glimmering the waves. A glassed-in building clung to the edge of the cliff a few hundred yards up to Ellery’s left, shimmering with light and shadowed with the shapes of people moving around.

“That’s the art gallery,” the host said. She was a doe-eyed young woman with a name tag that read Brook. “It’s booked for a cocktail event for a wedding party tonight but will be open to all guests tomorrow.”

Ellery knew all about the gallery and the other features at the resort. She was the one who had done the research, found the place, booked the trip.

She’d stumbled onto the website by accident the previous winter, via a “50 Places to Visit Before You Die” article. (Since she’d turned forty, two years prior to that, she’d been reading a lot of those kinds of articles online: “100 Novels You Need to Read,” “The Best 100 Songs of All Time,” etc.)

The Resort at Broken Point, the website read, in a font that managed to be both subdued and emphatic. The automatic photo gallery scrolled unbidden through pictures showing ocean vistas, sleek, low-slung modern buildings tucked discreetly among redwood trees, a woman enjoying a spa treatment with a row of smooth gray stones marching down her perfectly tanned back, delicious-looking meals arranged on creamy stoneware plates and decorated with flowers grown on-site in the organic kitchen garden. Guest rooms were arranged in groups of three per building, and there were five cottages. (Ellery’s jaw had literally dropped at the price of booking one of those.) There was a sauna and a spa, Pendleton blankets thrown over lounge chairs on the terrace, heated pools, piles of fluffy white towels, mist threading through greenery. There was an art gallery, quiet trails winding through a cathedral-esque grove, a collection of fine art and sculptures scattered throughout the property, a full-sized Airstream trailer converted into a bar and nestled in the trees.

When Ellery had shown the website to Luke, he’d said “Let’s go for it.” He was standing behind her and kneading her shoulders precisely where they tended to tighten. She loved it when he did that. “Really?” she’d asked, because it was very, very expensive. “Of course,” he’d said. “You only celebrate your twentieth anniversary once.”

“You should still take the trip,” Luke said later in mediation when they were dividing things up. His tone was gentle, as if he were committing an act of profound generosity. “The deposit’s nonrefundable. And you really wanted to go there.”

Didn’t you? she’d wanted to ask. Or were you pretending when we booked it? Had you already decided you were done?

“Here we are.” Brook pulled out Ellery’s chair. “Your waiter will be with you shortly. Enjoy.” She gave Ellery a menu—cream-colored paper, letterpress print. Moments later, a waiter in a cuffed white shirt stood at her table, listing the evening’s specials.

Ellery couldn’t concentrate. She felt an acute, sudden pain scything through her body. For a moment, she knew exactly where her heart was in her chest within a precise millimeter or two, thudding as it was against the muscle and bone that kept it contained.

But, as her therapist kept telling her, the human body can’t live at that high a level of pain for long. Whatever systems made it so that you kept on going—even as your life was a shatter of sharp-edged glass around you—kicked in eventually to make it so you didn’t actually die. And then you’d be back to the basic, chronic, ubiquitous pain, the one that never left, the one you were beginning to realize you might live with for the rest of your life.

Ellery glanced up. At the table to her left, what seemed to be a father and daughter were seated. There was something similar in their careful, heads-inclined attentiveness to what the restaurant host was saying. The father wore a button-up shirt with khaki pants. His daughter’s long curly hair was twisted in a bun on top of her head, and she had a fresh-facedness about her, a cleanness to the line of her profile.

It seemed like everywhere Ellery looked, every life she saw, cut her to the quick. Everyone had a person. Everyone else’s lives were going so well.

It wasn’t that she wanted their lives.

She wanted her own life back.

She had known, of course, that there were problems in her marriage. Luke had definitely been in the throes of a midlife crisis for the past few years, but she was so sure it would pass. She thought they’d weather it together, the way they had everything else. Grad school, babies, toddlers, job changes, moves, illness, teenagers.

Sometimes, he was wonderful.

Other times, he said things that broke her heart.

I shouldn’t have gotten married so young.

I was so busy doing what everyone expected of me that I didn’t think about whether it was what I wanted to do.

I shouldn’t have gone straight to grad school.

I should have tried to be a musician instead.

I never had time to find myself.

I didn’t get to see what was out there.

They were laughable, the things he said. They were the things the crappy ex-husband says in the movie before the heroine goes home to her small town to heal and remeets her super-hot high school boyfriend, who is now a veterinarian raising his deceased sister’s precocious daughter.

But she’d always thought that she and Luke would make it. They were both good people. They had had great times, so many of them, small and big. They had raised each other up, cheered one another on, held each other when they cried. They knew what the other looked like when they were sleeping, kissing, sobbing, brushing their teeth, seeing their children for the first time.

The kids.

Ellery stood. Her napkin fell from her lap to the ground and she didn’t bother to retrieve it. She turned, almost blindly, and began walking back the way she’d come. A waiter moved to the side to let her pass. Her sandaled heels made snick-snack, clip-clop sounds on the stone of the patio as she made her way between the tables. Did the others glancing up at her know it, too? How nothing and no one was ever as it seemed? Not even this beautiful place, not even their beautiful lives.

Luke had told her he was done in May, two weeks before school ended. They were sitting at the kitchen table after the kids were in bed. Kate, their oldest, had a cello recital coming up. Ethan, their son, was just finishing his freshman year in high school. Maddie, the youngest, had a new best friend who they both found hilarious. Those were the things she’d thought they would talk about.

“I’m not happy,” Luke said instead. “I don’t like anything about my life.”

He was holding her hand. He had said things like this before. At first, it didn’t register that this time he was serious. That he wasn’t blowing off steam.

She’d looked back at the counter where she’d packed the kids’ lunches for the next day, still scattered with paper bags and jammy knives and apple cores; at the shoes on the floor, the dollops of socks they hadn’t picked up when they’d peeled them off after school; the dishes in the sink. Earlier that evening she’d thought, How is it possible to work literally every minute of this day and have nothing to show for it?

Ha. How little she had known.

She’d had everything to show for it.

And now it was all being taken away.

In the restaurant’s bathroom, she pulled out her phone and dialed her best friend, Abby.

“How are you?” Abby asked without preamble.

“It’s going great,” Ellery told her. “I’m having a grief attack in the bathroom.”

“Perfect,” Abby said. “Get it out of the way. Do you need to cry into the phone?”

“Probably.” Ellery took a shuddery breath. The bathroom had a small alcove with a sofa. Maybe she could just lie down on it. Maybe that wouldn’t be weird. “There’s a wedding here this weekend.”

“We knew this might happen,” Abby said. “It’s going to be okay.”

“Remind me again why we thought that?”

“You’ve never actually been to Big Sur or Broken Point with Luke,” Abby said, reciting the reasons. “So it’s new geography. You didn’t want to waste the money because the deposit was nonrefundable. And—”

“I didn’t want him to bring Imogen on the trip instead of me,” Ellery finished.

Imogen was Luke’s new girlfriend, whom he had obtained within a month of the divorce. She was tiny (Ellery was tall), had beautiful red hair (Ellery had basic brown), was five years younger than Ellery and Luke, and was Irish—like actually from Ireland. Which meant she had an accent.

There was no competing with an accent.

These were thoughts Ellery had expressed to Abby before, so she held off on expressing them again now. Instead she said, “I wish you were here, Ab.” She had invited Abby to come with her since the trip was over fall break, but Abby had already made plans with her family.

According to their freshly signed divorce decree, this was Luke’s year to have the kids for fall break. He was taking them camping. Ellery had never loved camping and now they were probably going to do lots of it without her. Ellery was great at hiking. And she used to be great at rock climbing. She could run, she could ski, she could kayak and paddleboard. But she had sucked at camping ever since she was a kid. She could never seem to sleep when she was out in the wild.

She would camp with Luke now, if he’d give her the chance. Do all the things she hadn’t done. He was also doing the things that she’d hoped he would do. Now he listened to Brené Brown and talked about emotional vulnerability, and he had started exercising again. It was all very exciting for Imogen, Ellery was sure.

“I wish I were there, too.” Abby’s voice had softened. “This is hard,” she said. “It was hard enough for me when I’d been married for seven years. You guys were married for twenty. You can do this.”

“I don’t think I can,” Ellery said. Not dramatically. Truthfully. Even checking in to the room she’d been supposed to share with Luke had felt impossible. Honey-colored wooden walls, crisp and cozy white bed linens, a gray-and-red Pendleton throw draped across the foot of the king-sized bed. Simple leather chairs, black-and-white art prints, a plate with two chocolate covered strawberries and a handwritten note on a thick card letterpressed with the resort’s logo (a spare line drawing of three trees clinging to a cliff’s edge). Enjoy your stay, it said. When Ellery walked into the bathroom and she saw the vast, sleek glass shower with two showerheads and two fluffy white robes hanging on Eames-inspired hooks, she’d slid down to the cool tile floor and put her head in her hands.

Was she going to spend this whole trip crying in various bathrooms?

“You can live through anything for three days,” Abby said.

“I don’t think that’s right,” Ellery said. “Like, you think you could live through labor for three days? Could you grade ninth-grade research papers for three days?”

“Okay.” Abby laughed. “You’ve made your point.”

Ellery and Abby both taught social studies at Dutch Fields High School. Ellery had been a teacher her entire marriage, first to put Luke through grad school, then to help pay off his student debts, and now to help save for the kids’ college. Plus, when she wasn’t mired in grief, she loved her job and was good at it. Six years ago, Abby had started teaching across the hall right after her divorce, and they coached the girls’ track team together. Abby was feisty and smart and gorgeous and funny and loyal. She made Ellery laugh harder than anyone else. She threw parties every time she felt like there was something worth celebrating—a new album by her favorite artist, friends’ promotions, her kids’ half birthdays. She had a habit of patting people’s backs when she hugged them that Ellery teased her about, telling Abby that it was like she thought the world was made up of her babies and she was going to burp them all. Ellery had always felt lucky to know Abby, but over the past few years, they had been each other’s lifeline.

“I know this is ridiculous,” Ellery said.

“It’s not ridiculous,” Abby said. “You’re grieving. The life you thought you had exploded in your face.”

Ellery stood up and walked over to the long marble countertop with the sunken-in copper sinks. She squirted some of the fancy lotion in its amber bottle into her hands, rubbing it into her skin. Her face in the mirror looked dim and half-formed. “It really did.”

“And now everything feels super shitty. Luke let you put him through the hard part of life. Now he’s walking away in the middle of his midlife crisis. Some other woman you don’t even know is hanging out with your kids. He’s started putting gel in his hair and shaving his arms and wearing V-necks and posting wrongly attributed inspirational quotes on social media. Do you need me to keep going on about why it’s okay for you to feel bad?”

“Please don’t,” Ellery said, trying not to cry-laugh. She sat back down on the sofa. The lotion smelled like an upscale, herbal version of the Creamsicles she used to eat in the summer during her childhood.

“It’s going to get better,” Abby said. “I swear to you. It is.”

Abby’s ex had cheated on her with their next-door neighbor. Abby had two little boys who hadn’t even been old enough to be in school yet when her husband had left for good. She was now happily remarried and had made it through, as she said, to the next part of her life.

Ellery felt tears well over. “Everything feels wrong, Abby. On a cellular level.”

“I know,” Abby said gently. “I really do.”

“Maybe I should leave,” Ellery said. “This place, I mean. It’s supposed to rain later this weekend anyway.”

“You’re not going to waste the money,” Abby said firmly. “Tonight, dinner. Tomorrow, you’re going to go on a hike because you loved hiking before Luke and you will love it again. You’ll sit by that heated infinity pool in your bikini and breathe in the air of a place you have never, ever been with him. You will feel horrible some of the time but you’ll try to put together a few minutes or hours or whatever when you feel a little better. Distract yourself. Pretend to be someone else if you have to give yourself a break. Fix your eyeliner before you go back out there. Call me anytime. You’re going to be okay.”

“Okay.”

“I need to hear you say the whole thing.”

Ellery drew a deep breath. “I’m going to be okay.”

“We’ve been through worse,” Abby said, gently.

Abby didn’t say the words two years ago or mention the accident but Ellery knew what she meant. And, even in the depths of her agony, even feeling that losing her marriage and her family was the worst possible thing, she knew empirically that it wasn’t.

Because she had been there when the worst thing had happened.

And she would never be able to leave it behind.

Ellery was almost back to her table when someone stopped her.

“Excuse me.” An extremely handsome man stood in front of her. He wore a chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his warm brown eyes were kind. “Are you dining alone?”

“I am.”

“Would you like to join us?”

The man, whose name was Ravi, handled everything with perfect grace. He signaled to the waiter and swooped a chair over to where he and his dining companion were sitting a few feet away. “This is Nina,” he said, indicating the woman across the table from where he placed Ellery’s seat.

“Ellery,” Ellery said, slipping into her chair. “It’s kind of you to let me sit with you.”

“It’s no problem at all.” Nina’s voice was warm and pleasant. She wore a fantastic pantsuit and her dark hair was in the kind of messy, perfect chignon that Ellery could never quite get right. Nina’s eyes were shrewd, intelligent, and evaluating. But not unkind. Just… clear. Unhoodwinkable.

The waiter arrived with another menu. Ellery had planned on ordering the farfalle pasta, because it was the cheapest item on the menu, but she found herself eyeing Nina’s filet mignon and ordering that instead. Why not?

“Nina and I are friends,” Ravi said in an explanatory tone after the waiter left. “We’ve been traveling together for years.”

“That’s fantastic,” Ellery said. “Plus, it’s so much cheaper when you can split a room.”

“Um, no,” Ravi said. “We never share a room.”

“We’d kill each other,” Nina agreed.

“Oh.” Ellery could feel herself flush slightly with embarrassment. Of course. Most of the people who came here wouldn’t be worried about the price of the rooms. She had a stab of misgiving about the filet mignon.

“We’ve been on enough trips together to make a few ground rules,” Ravi said. “Never share a room is one of them. Eat dessert every night is another. Also, we steal something on every trip.”

“Ravi,” Nina said. “Don’t give away all our secrets.” She rolled her eyes in mock-exasperation. “We just met her.”

Do they really steal something? Ellery wondered with a thrill of misgiving. Neither of them seemed the type. Nina caught Ellery’s eye and gave a wry shake of her head, as if to contradict Ravi’s statement.

“And we always invite someone else to eat with us the first night,” Ravi said. “The only criteria is that they have to look interesting.”

“I’m not interesting,” Ellery said automatically, and she immediately heard Abby in her ear. Why do you always deflect? Stop selling yourself short!

“Yes, you are.” Ravi leaned back, studying her, smiling. He was so friendly, so disarming, that she grinned in return. “A beautiful woman, sitting alone, a certain sadness in her eyes…”

Ellery’s smile faltered. Was she that transparent? Could strangers see how sad she was? How nothing felt right, ever? She straightened her spine. She was not going to give these elegant people her sob story. For one thing, that wasn’t the point of this trip, and for another, they’d have to earn it. She had some pride.

“Actually, I think you’re being taken in by the eyeliner,” she told Ravi. To her delight, this made him laugh. “I’m a high school teacher.” Because she was curious and because this conversation was centering entirely too much around her, she asked, “What do you both do?”

“I’m a landscape architect,” Nina said.

“World class,” Ravi confirmed. “Look up Nina Ruiz online and you’ll see her work everywhere.”

“Wow,” Ellery said. “What a cool job.”

“I love it,” Nina said simply.

“She does sustainable landscape design for extremely rich people and companies,” Ravi said. “It’s a whole thing.”

Ellery was intrigued. But before she could ask Ravi what he did for a living, he’d moved on. “So, what do you think of the resort?”

“It’s beautiful,” Ellery said. No need to mention how she found the place daunting. Or how it was becoming clear to her—despite the resort’s supposed eco-friendliness and its attempts to blend in with its environment—that a place like this did not belong here. This was a land of cliff edges and living beaches and wild waves. Not heated pools and retaining walls and expensive buildings. She wondered why she’d been so taken with Broken Point when she’d stumbled across it online. She wondered if the other guests felt the strangeness, or if she’d brought it with her.

“It’s exactly what I need,” Ravi said.

“Ravi just broke up with his boyfriend,” Nina said.

“I’m sorry,” Ellery said.

“It’s all right,” Ravi said. “Or, if not, it will be. Eventually.” He lifted his glass in a toast and Ellery and Nina raised theirs to clink with him.

“We got here this morning,” Nina said. “Flew in from New York. What about you?” Her sleeve slid up as she took another roll from the basket, revealing a small tattoo on the inside of her wrist. Ellery wished she could see what it was.

“This afternoon. From Colorado.”

“Apparently there’s a wedding on the property this weekend.” Ravi gestured with his wineglass to the gallery on the hillside above. “I’m hoping for scandal.”

“Ravi’s always hoping for scandal,” Nina told Ellery.

“I do better when I have a problem to solve,” Ravi said. “Even on vacation.”

The breeze shifted, fluttering along Ellery’s neck, the backs of her hands. “I get that.” She would love her brain to have a problem to work on that might actually be solvable, instead of the ones it kept pacing around, circling.

“Hey.” Ravi had lowered his voice. “Speaking of problems to solve. Mysteries to unravel. Did you know there’s a shadow celebrity staying here? We’ve got to figure out who it is.”

Ellery wasn’t sure what he was talking about. “A what?” She darted a glance at Nina.

“Someone who’s sneaky famous,” Ravi said. “Who can go unrecognized among the masses, but who wields tremendous power. Like the head of a movie studio who prefers not to be known. Or the founder of LikeMe. Or the person who invented a cryptocurrency that funds an entire nation.”

“Oh,” Ellery said, a small thrill running through her. “How can you tell that someone like that is here?”

“Don’t listen to him,” Nina said. “He’s always making things up. And the worst part is, he believes them.”

“People are not always what they seem.” Ravi’s eyes searched Ellery’s. “Don’t you agree?”

“I do,” she said. “Everyone has a shadow.” Even the waiters with their bright eyes and cheerful voices, even the people across from her, even her best friend, her own husband, herself.

Before Ravi could respond, the waiter arrived with Ellery’s entrée. A few twists of black pepper, a murmured Can I get you anything else? No? Please enjoy and it was only the three of them again.

Ellery took a bite of the filet mignon. It melted in her mouth. This was nice. Eating with other people was helpful.

“I like the way you said that.” Ravi held his knife loosely in his hand, his eyes thoughtful and direct as he looked at her. “There’s that saying that everyone has a secret. But I think that everyone has a shadow is much more accurate.”

Ellery glanced away, accidentally catching the eye of a very cute guy standing at the bar. He wore a flannel shirt and khakis, his brown hair curling around his ears. He appeared to be in his twenties. How could someone so young afford to be here? Probably a trust fund baby. Although he didn’t look like a trust fund baby. In fact, he looked… uncomfortable. (But didn’t good-looking people fit in everywhere?) His shirt wasn’t. . .