aditilolc
Aru Shah and Aiden Acharya have not spoken properly since the night of Brynne's Diwali party. She's been fine. She's been absolutely fine. She has a curry plant and a job and two best friends who only ask about him every other week now, which is progress.
Then Mini and Rudy announce they're getting married in Hampi, ancient ruins, sacred river, the exact city where Aru and Aiden once stopped being enemies, and suddenly she is a bridesmaid and he is the wedding photographer and they are going to be in the same place for seven days and she has no plan whatsoever.
She never has a plan. That's always been his job.
Told in two timelines, the present, a wedding week unraveling every unresolved thing between them, and the past, five summers of trips across India that built a friendship that quietly became something neither of them had a clean word for: Every Place We've Ever Been is a story about how far two people can travel together while still managing to miss the point.
It is also, unexpectedly, a murder mystery. Because on the second night in Hampi, a body turns up in the temple ruins. A stolen divine artifact is missing. And the only two people with the knowledge and the clearance to do something about it are Aru Shah and Aiden Acharya, who can barely look at each other without two years of unsaid things rising to the surface, which makes the enforced proximity either the worst possible timing or, if Sheela's cryptic non-prophecies are to be believed, exactly the right kind.
Somewhere between solving a murder, recovering an artifact that could enslave half the mortal world, and watching their best friends get married in a city that remembers everything, they are going to have to decide whether they're brave enough to say the thing they've been almost-saying for five years.