13 Brooke “Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear Paulo, happy birthday to meeeeeeeeee.” The rest of us were singing too, but Paulo’s voice eclipsed all sixteen of ours. He was winning in the drinking stakes as well, and as he waved his glass around, half of his cocktail splashed onto the floor of the private dining room. Luckily, it was tiled. A waiter hovered in the background with napkins in his hand and a pained expression on his face. Unlike some of the town’s long-term residents, Paulo didn’t bear any grudges toward the Peninsula Resort, and that was where he’d decided to hold his birthday party, partly because the view across the beach was fantastic, but mostly, I suspected, because the cocktail list stretched to three pages. He’d started at the top, and