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Chapter One

There were four of us in a jeep that smelled of weed and coconut surf wax, and not one of us had thought to ask the driver his last name, which tells you everything about the kind of women we were that summer: the kind who could end up almost anywhere if there was something beautiful involved and someone else was steering.

In this case the beautiful thing was Kai, our driver. Skin bronzed to warm chestnut over honey, a body built to make smart women do stupid things, and a mop of sun-bleached hair that was maple sugar at the roots and baby-blonde at the disheveled ends.

Looking away from him took discipline, and apparently none of us had brought any. He had forearms someone somewhere had probably written a sonnet about, wrapped in leather bracelets that marked every place he’d almost drowned. He’d already explained that part, one eye on the road as we passed the mud flats of Humboldt Bay.

I had no intention of acting on that lust, though, and for the record, I never did. I didn’t know then that when the real thing found me, it would come with strings attached, and those strings would lead me right into the dark.

Kai had picked us up in Eureka a few hours back, all sunshine and a smile like he already knew us. The bay was now behind us, and we’d traded the standing herons for deep green pasture, then for redwoods that closed over the road like a clawed hand, and somewhere inside them the asphalt gave way to dirt. The jeep rattled and groaned. It gave a rhythmic bang every time Kai took a rut at a speed that made my spine jiggle. My phone had one bar, then the ghost of one, then nothing. The world let go of us little by little and I remember thinking how peaceful.

The conversation had been thin, probably because of the entire boho fever dream piloting the jeep, until Priya, who I’d known for exactly thirty minutes, piped up from the passenger seat.

“Okay, I have to say it or I’ll die,” she said, leaning into the gap between the seats and lowering her voice to a volume that carried perfectly. “Are we all aware that none of us has cell service, and not one of us asked this man for ID?”

“He told us his name,” said Jess, who had only said a handful of sentences since she climbed into the jeep. She hadn’t taken off her sunglasses once.

“He told us a name,” Priya said.

“It’s Kai,” Kai offered from the driver’s seat, not remotely offended. In fact, Kai was constitutionally incapable of being offended. “It’s actually Kai. I can’t prove it right here, but it’s deeply Kai.”

“That’s such a Kai thing to say. You seem like a quintessential Kai,” said the fourth woman, Callie. She arrived in your life at full volume. Sunburnt across the nose, hair in a big, tousled bun, and now grinning. Holding her phone up, she said, “I’m documenting. Everyone be charming.”

“There’s no signal, it won’t even—”

“It’ll send when we’re back in civilization,” Callie said over Priya, “and if we’re not back in civilization, it’ll be evidence.” She snapped a photo of Priya, then turned the camera around on the three of us in the backseat, pressed together and faintly drunk on a bottle of natural wine opened two cattle guards ago. “Say proof of life.”

We did. We were laughing in it.

“Good,” Callie said, checking the picture. “Now we have a before photo for when we all find our twin flames and become completely insufferable.”

I’ve looked at that photo more times than I’ve looked at anything.

Here’s what I knew about the three of them by then, which was very little:

Priya had signed up for the Sacred Flame retreat because her love life dried up the year she made VP; now every man she met seemed afraid of her. Jess made silver jewelry that she sold online and at craft fairs, between romantic catastrophes, wearing half her inventory. Callie was a graphic designer with a brand identity she declared was objectively too twee to survive a recession. She was there to stop thinking about the ex who’d slept with her sister.

As for me, I wasn’t there because of heartbreak. That would have required someone getting close enough to break it. I was a PA for a woman named [REDACTED] who you’ve probably heard of if you’ve ever bought a rose quartz yoni egg or a candle that cost more than ninety dollars, and the only thing I will say about her at this point in the story is that she had given me this trip as a thank-you for three years of service—service that had cost me a little of my soul.

This is what I had instead of friends, mostly: a job.

“Wait,” Priya said, when I gave the name of the candle woman. “You work for her?”

“For my sins.”

“I interviewed her once about her wellness app. She made me wait forty minutes and then asked me if I’d ever considered cutting my hair. How are you not dead?”

“I take a lot of magnesium.”

Callie laughed a real, full-bodied laugh that bounced off the windows of the jeep. Being laughed at by Callie, I would learn, was like being chosen.

“Okay, magnesium girl,” she said. “First question. Are we friends now or are we still being polite?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are we?”

I looked out the window so I wouldn’t have to watch her decide.

“I think so,” she said. “I’m making the executive call.” She held up her phone, which was searching for a signal that wasn’t there. “I’m making a group chat. Names.”