Good night. Month two is going to be absolutely terrifying. You've been warned.
Nina:
Good night. Thank you. Both of you.
Claire stood in her dark kitchen with the phone in her hand, smiling at the screen full of messages.
She had loved these women for 30 years and realized that Greg had not texted her once tonight. He had never asked where she was, if she was safe, or when she would be home.
He had gone to bed, left the porch light off, and not wondered about her at all.
She put her phone on the counter and looked at the napkin once again.
She turned off the kitchen light and walked to the bedroom where her husband of twenty-six years was sleeping on his side of the bed, facing the wall, breathing deeply.
It was the unbothered breath of a man who had not even noticed his wife had just done the bravest thing she had done in a decade.
Claire stood in the doorway for a long time.
Then she went to the guest room, took out her sketchbook from the shelf where it had been sitting for twenty-seven years, and opened it to a blank page.
She didn’t draw anything. Not yet.
She just held the pencil and looked at the white space.
For the first time in longer than she could even remember, there was a small, terrifying thrill of not knowing what came next.
CHAPTER 5
Harper’s alarm clock went off at 4:45 a.m.
For the first few seconds, she thought about quitting this whole pact thing, moving to Switzerland, and changing her name before these women could find her.
But she got up because Harper Ellis never quit. She quit people occasionally. Sometimes she quit relationships and hobbies, even a pottery class she had signed up for in a moment of weakness, but she did not quit commitments she had signed her name to, even if the commitment was written in bleeding ink on a dusty rose napkin and the result was nothing more than disappointing two women she loved.
Now that she thought about it, that was really the worst consequence she could imagine.
She made coffee in her Charleston condo. The machine was a $1,200 Italian model that produced espresso so good it was practically criminal. She only knew how to use two of the ten functions, and her now fifty-year-old brain had no desire to learn more.
The condo was on the fifth floor of the building with a view of the harbor that she paid a small fortune for but rarely looked at.
It was beautiful. It was immaculate. It had exactly one houseplant, a fiddle leaf fig that her assistant James watered on Wednesdays because Harper kept forgetting to.
The plant’s survival was, in many ways, a testament to James rather than Harper. He was patient and wanted the plant to live a full life. She, on the other hand, didn’t care what happened to the plant.
She drank her espresso standing at the kitchen island because she didn’t have a kitchen table. She had meant to buy one. Actually, she had meant to buy one for over four years, since the day she moved in.
But every time she looked at tables online, she would think about who was going to sit at it, and the answer was always just her. So she would close the browser, eat standing up, and try to move on with her life.
Her phone buzzed. It was a text from Claire.
I’m picking up Nina at 5:30. We’ll meet you at Folly by 6:15. Please tell me you didn’t forget.
Harper:
I’ve been awake since 4:45. Trust me, I haven’t forgotten. I’m regretting this already, but I have not forgotten.
Claire:
