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Jess said hers without looking up. Priya gave her first and her last name, in a tone that suggested she’d had to spell it for a lot of receptionists. Callie typed with her thumbs and pronounced everything aloud as she went.

“What’s the chat called?” Priya said.

“Working on it.” Callie chewed her lip. “Flame Dames is too on-the-nose.” She looked up, eyes bright. “What if we just admit what we’re afraid of and lean in?”

“Oh god,” said Jess.

Callie glanced out the window at the road that had narrowed to the width of the jeep.

“Proof of Life,” she said, with conviction. “Because I stopped knowing where we are an hour ago.”

Priya considered this for one long second, and said, “Me too. Name it that.”

Kai was too busy watching the road to say anything. I tracked his eyes in the rearview mirror anyway, because I’m the kind of person who does that, and I noticed that they flicked, exactly once, to Callie. Just for the length of a word, then back.

The road dropped. I don’t know how else to describe what happened then: the trees ran out, the world cracked open, and underneath us was a switchback so steep the jeep pitched nose-first toward the drop. We hit the first turn and suddenly the Pacific was below us, the color of a knife in shadow, and above the water, low and already coming up to meet us, the fog.

“Holy shit,” Callie said. It was the only time she had spoken softly.

Priya stopped talking. Jess took her sunglasses off for the first time in two hours and put them on her head, ambushed by the view.

Kai eased us through the next switchback delicately. “First-timers always do this part quiet,” he said. “You’re allowed to make noise. This isn’t church.”

The road kept dropping. At the bottom there was an iron gate older than the road and a small painted sign beside it. GATE OPEN BY TIDE, it said, and underneath in smaller letters, and by request, and I remember reading it and thinking what a charming touch.

“High tide’s at eight-twelve tomorrow,” Kai said. “So if you’re thinking about leaving before then, you’re thinking about it wrong.” He said this kindly. Everything Kai said was kind.

The gate swung open, without a signal I could see.

Beyond it the road went down through one last stretch of old-growth forest, and then the trees parted, revealing a cove of black sand, glittering wet under the fog like a mouth a child had drawn. There were six glamping tents along the tree line, white canvas going gold in the late light. A long table stood ready under a strung-up canopy, not far from an unlit firepit, ringed with stones the size of human heads.

And then I saw Aurora. She stood on the path between the gate and the tents, hands clasped in front of her, looking just like her Instagram: deep in the wilderness in a wildly impractical beaded silk maxi dress.

“My women,” she called when we were still ten yards out, her voice warm and unhurried. “You made it. You made it.”

Kai cut the ignition. Aurora came to meet us with both hands out, clasping Priya’s first, then Jess’s, then Callie’s, then mine. She looked at me for half a second longer than I liked and said, “Oh. Marlowe,” as if she’d been told things about me that she was not going to repeat.

“Come,” she said. “You’re early. We have time for the long version of the welcome before the light goes. I never give the long version. You’re lucky.”

She started up the path.

We followed, and behind us the gate swung quietly closed.

I wish I could tell you that I felt the click of it in my chest, or something like that. It would be a great sentence, but it wouldn’t be true. As I followed Aurora up the trail, I only felt a small, ordinary relief at being managed, after years of managing another woman’s life. It was lovely, for a few hours.

Chapter Two

Aurora led us to the campsite, the hem of her dress catching in the long blades of grass. None of us spoke, not even Callie. The fog climbed across the water, cloaking the bay and filling the air with a salty film.

We were halfway up the path when Callie stopped dead.

“Oh my god.”

There was a wood-shingled outbuilding at the edge of the clearing, which I would later learn was a kitchen, and beside it, in a low-fenced pen, was a small goat. He was white, with a brown patch over one eye that made him look like he was perpetually winking. He had a leather collar with a tiny brass bell on it that gave the smallest possible tink when he turned his head.

“Oh my god,” Callie said again, already moving toward the pen. “He is the most—Aurora. Aurora. Tell me his name.”

“His name is Bram.”