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Marlowe: I’ll tell you more later. I’m just wrecked

And I was wrecked. But I wasn’t ready to curl up into a ball just yet. I made coffee, munched through half a slice of pizza from the fridge, and opened Instagram.

I clicked on Sacred Flame’s account and found the reel advertising the retreat. In the comments, I typed: Did anyone else have a bad experience? Very concerned.

Then I Googled Aurora and Sacred Flame, but it only yielded exactly what she wanted people to find: retreat itineraries with beautiful people hugging each other in white. Women laughing by a campfire holding innocent-looking mugs of cocoa. Glowing testimonials. Aurora changed my life. I owe her everything. I found my twin flame the very next week. Influencers cooed about her with thousands of likes. Aurora had held hundreds of retreats, all over the country, from Portland to Miami to Sedona. And she’d developed quite a business funnel. She wasn’t selling individual retreats but an entire program, with each four-thousand-dollar booking leading to the next and the promise of even bigger prizes. Meeting your twin flame was only the beginning. That was The Calling, the entry-level weekend, the one we’d just survived. After that came The Keeping, “for women in the tender window,” which as far as I could tell was a maintenance plan for a man who hadn’t arrived yet. Then The Deepening, invitation-only, at an undisclosed coastal location, “for couples in the flame, and for flames still finding their way home.” The copy promised “full integration of the bond” and the flame “sealed at the source,” whatever the hell that meant. And finally, for the true believers, The Union: a couple photographed from behind, two silhouettes at the tide line, no faces, no names, no date. I scrolled through five pages of web copy and couldn’t find a refund policy, or a single photograph of a man’s face.

I tried other searches: Aurora Sinclair bad experience. Aurora Sinclair deceptive. Sacred Flame retreat dangerous.

Again, I found nothing, until the rabbit hole led me to the third page of a Reddit thread. Three posts, three accounts, now all terminated:

Aurora Sinclair ruined my life. Don’t go.

My mother always said there’s no such thing as a free lunch. I should have listened to her.

Be careful what you wish for. It comes with debts.

I took screenshots of the posts. The hollow sensation spreading through me said those posts wouldn’t be up much longer.

Farther down, another post jumped at me:

I went and I came back changed. Not in the way they tell you. Don’t ask questions. Don’t go back. Don’t ever go back.

I struggled to swallow, and that feeling of dread took me right back to the moment I realized Bram was gone. And to the flat, careful way Damian had said, “don’t come back here.”

I had no idea what I was piecing together, but I knew a pattern was taking shape.

I returned to Aurora’s Instagram account and downloaded her followers and following data. Then, fighting the urge to sleep and slightly nauseous, I studied the accounts. It took me hours. My leg went numb and I had a sore shoulder that was weirdly cold by the end of it. But eventually I had a list of very powerful women who kept showing up in her comments.

They looked, at first, like a coincidence. Of course wealthy, successful, entrepreneurial women would support each other. Of course they mixed in the same circles. But the more I clicked, the less coincidental they got. They praised each other in rotation, like a watering schedule. They appeared at each other’s launches, retreats, panels, always described as dear friends, never as anything with a paper trail. And every single one of them ran an empire.

Seraphine Varley owned Véla, the skincare line whose serum sat on my boss’s bathroom counter in a queue of identical bottles, eight hundred dollars a fluid ounce, radiance restored. Marguerite Ollier ran Vitalis, the supplement empire. Cellular renewal complexes, a subscription model, a founder photo in which she looked somewhere between thirty-nine and sixty. Calliope Webb ran The Ascent, a twelve-week transformation intensive that, on closer inspection, was a glow-up bootcamp for young women. Verena Ardeme ran Sanctum. Retreats again, but with rest instead of romance, massage instead of firelight, and the same expensive light in every photograph. Imogen Blackthorne-Frost presided over Meridian House, a members-only longevity institute with actual doctors on the letterhead and a lobby like a Zen spa with ferns.

And then there was the sixth woman, who was harder to find. No launches. No panels. Her account was private, her tags were scrubbed, and she appeared in other people’s photos instead of her own, the small one, in the corner, explaining everything. It took me forty minutes to get a name, and I got it off a charity gala listing from four years ago.

Octavia Halcyon. Founder, Halcyon Wellness Group. Stillwater Clinics. Proprietary infusions, by referral only.

Halcyon.

The cold in my shoulder moved down my arm, and I told myself it was the hour of the day, and the screen light, and the numb leg that was now needling ferociously, and I opened a new tab with fingers that had gone slightly stupid. I typed Damian Halcyon carpenter Eureka.

The county contractor license registry loaded first. Public record. Boring as a phone book.

HALCYON, DAMIAN R.—General Building Contractor, Active.

I stared at it until the letters fuzzed. Damian Halcyon, man of infuriating mystery who fought with his shadow about whether he was allowed to touch me. Who hadn’t flinched when I’d pulled a large thorn from his skin. There was nothing else online about him. Not even a photo.

I wrote down every question I had about the night before and the sisterhood of wealthy women I’d just discovered, scribbling on sticky notes until there were none left, and stuck them above my old green-painted desk. I printed the screenshots and web copy and taped them to the wall, too, like it was 1998 and I was a private detective in a noir movie. In the middle of that board, I stuck one more note, this one reading:

To find a love so deep and true that I feel like I belong inside it.

All that truth and vulnerability, thrown into a fire. I needed to talk to the others. Maybe Priya’s analytic mind would help me make sense of it.

My phone lit from my coffee table. I’d missed a whole new conversation.

Callie: OMG Kai called me

Priya: what??