“Shh.” Fiona frowns and nods at the closed door, beyond which Emily could presumably be eavesdropping, though she sincerely doubts it.

  That would take initiative and, as far as she can tell, her assistant doesn’t possess a blessed ounce of it.

  Nor, apparently, does Brynn. She said she would call the others.

  Figures. Well, you learned long ago that if you want something done right…You do it yourself.

  “I’m just making sure you weren’t tempted to tell Garth,” Fiona says in a low voice. “I mean, he had Rachel in class, and he was in that faculty search party, so I thought maybe you figured—”

  “Well, I didn’t say anything.You didn’t tell anyone, did you?” Brynn whispers.

  “No.” Fiona ignores the slightest twinge in the vicinity of her conscience. “Who am I going to tell?”

  “Jeremy, no!” Brynn unpries her son’s fingers from the fringed lampshade beside the chair.

  He protests loudly as she removes several strands of maroon thread that are plastered to his sticky hands.

  “Sorry, Fee.”

  She nods, not about to say that it’s okay. Because it isn’t.

  Brynn should know better than to come barging into her office first thing in the morning—or anytime, for that matter—particularly with a toddler in tow.

  Anyway, this isn’t the time or place to discuss what happened in the past…ten years ago, or yesterday.

  Then her friend looks up at her with those big puppy dog eyes of hers and says, “I’m scared, Fee.”

  Fiona’s irritation dribbles away.

  So am I,she wants to admit.

  “The more I think about it, the more I’m sure it’s just Tildy or Cassie playing a stupid and totally unfunny joke,” she assures Brynn instead.

  “Really?”

  No.

  “I mean, who else can it possibly be?” she asks Brynn, but her attention is focused on Jeremy, reaching for the tall Lladro figurine on her desk.

  It depicts a mother and child; Deirdre sent it from Spain as a gift for Fee’s first Mother’s Day.

  Fiona was stuck at home with a newborn at the time. For her, the beautiful porcelain figure was less a testament to new motherhood than it was a symbol of her lost freedom.

  She had never been to Europe then. Saddled with a baby and a husband whose salary barely covered the rent, she probably never would get there…or so she believed at the time.

  She pulls the Lladro slightly closer to herself, out of Jeremy’s grasp.

  Brynn doesn’t seem to notice.

  “I can think of someone else it can be,” she says, and Fiona’s heart skips a beat.

  “Who?”

  “Think about it, Fee.”

  “Iam thinking about it. Who are you talking about, Brynn?”

  “Rachel,” comes the unanticipated reply, just as Jeremy grasps the figurine and drops it onto the hardwood floor, where it shatters deafeningly.

  The Dave Matthews Band was on the portable CD player, drowning out the night sounds.

  “Go for it, Fee!” Tildy commanded and Fiona, standing on the crest of The Prom, facing the lights of

  Cedar Crest in dazzling array below, popped the champagne bottle with two thumbs. The cork shot out into oblivion; then they heard the faint rustle of its landing in the thicket far below.

  “Woo-hoo!” Tildy reached to take the bottle from her.

  “Um, shouldn’t Rachel have the first sip?” Brynn spoke up. “Since she’s the birthday girl?”

  “Oh, that’s okay.” Rachel reached into her sweater. “I’ve got something better.”

  She produced a pint-sized mason jar.

  “What’s that?”

  “Grain alcohol.” Unscrewing the lid, Rachel took a swig, made a face, and offered the jar to the others. “Who wants some?”

  “Are you kidding?” Tildy wrinkled her cosmetically perfected nose. “Where’d you get that? Somebody’s disgusting bathtub?”

  “No, from my stepbrother, over the summer.”

  “Which stepbrother?” Fiona asked. Rachel’s family was a blend of full-, half-, and step-siblings as well as former and present stepfathers and stepmothers.

  “Which one do you think? I’ve only got two steps, and Joshua is only in fourth grade.”

  That would leave the older stepbrother, whose father had married her mother briefly a few years ago. Their parents had long since gone their separate ways, but Rachel was still close to him. He had graduated last May from Morgantown University in West Virginia; now he was living and working in New York. The sorority sisters were planning a road trip to Manhattan later in the fall, and Rachel said they could stay with him.

  “So where did your brother get grain alcohol?” Cassie asked, after a delicate sip from the champagne bottle.

  “Where else? This came straight from the mountains of West Virginny.”

  “Hey, Rach, that hillbilly twang is about as believable as your fake English accent,” Fiona told her.

  “Yeah, but at least it’s a lot better than her fake Southern drawl,” Brynn put in teasingly.

  “Hey, my drawl was pretty good,” Rachel protested. “That guy I met in the Rat the other night believed me when I said I was from Mississippi.”

  “Yeah, up until you told him your name was Scarlett,” Tildy said with a snort.

  “You guys were in the Rat the other night?” Fiona asked.

  They exchanged guilty glances.

  “Sorry, Fee,” Brynn said. “You were working that night anyway.”

  “Whatever. Just because I can’t set foot in there until I’m twenty-one doesn’t mean you all have to stay away.”

  But she didn’t sound as though she meant it.

  And she added a bit sharply, “Just don’t go in there when Pat’s tending bar. He knows you’re underage. He can get busted if he lets you stay.”

  Somebody changed the subject to the upcoming Rush Week before anyone could point out that Pat had seen them there and looked the other way, plenty of times.

  Fiona had some funny hang-ups about being the lone townie among them. It wasn’t easy for her to watch the rest of them hit the popular local bars with their fake IDs.

  “Sure you guys don’t want any? It’s homemade.” Rachel brandished the jar of grain alcohol as though she was proudly referring to a tray of decadent brownies.

  Still no takers.

  Rachel shrugged and swigged, going about it almost grimly when she thought nobody was paying much attention.

  But they were—each of the four, in her own way.

  They all noticed there was something off about Rachel that night. As the night wore on, her voice vacillated between somber and shrill, but she didn’t really say much of anything.

  Nothing that would strike any of them, later, as having shed light on her strange mood.

  “You’d better go easy on that stuff,” advised Cassie, who took her pre-med studies seriously. “You’re so petite, Rach—you can’t handle that much. It can make you sick.”

  “It’s my party, and I’ll barf if I want to,” Rachel sang to the tune of the old Leslie Gore song.

  They all laughed…at first.

  But their amusement faded as the four of them passed around the bottle of champagne while Rachel guzzled the contents of the mason jar, clearly hell-bent on getting trashed.

  There was no joy in it; it was clear to them even then that this was no celebration.

  Something was troubling their friend.

  Brynn even pulled her aside and asked her, at one point, what was wrong.

  “If I could tell you, I would, Brynnie. But I can’t.”

  And sweet, pretty Rachel Lorent carried her secret to her death that night…or so they all believed.

  Cassie’s cell phone rings a few minutes after she turns it on, just as she slips behind the wheel of her car in the hospital parking lot.

  It’s probably Alec. She left him a message earlier saying that he shouldn’t come over tonight; that she feels as though she’s coming down with something.

  He’ll probably insist on coming anyway, with chicken soup or ginger ale or flowers. That’s the kind of guy he is.

  A great guy.

  And I don’t deserve him,Cassie tells herself, not for the first time.

  Why is she consumed by a familiar urge to drive straight to the barn, climb on her horse, and gallop off as fast as she dares…?

  Where? Where would you go?

  Anyplace other than here, in my life.

  Because it doesn’tfeellike my life.

  She reluctantly presses theSEND button on her ringing phone.

  “Cassie?”

  It’s a female voice. Unfamiliar…

  But only in that first instant.

  “Hello? Are you there?” the caller asks, and Cassie realizes, with a quickening pulse, just who it is.

  “Brynn?”

  “Oh, youare there. I heard a click a second ago and I thought you’d hung up.”

  “No, I’m here.”

  “Can you talk? I mean…you know…Is anyone around?”

  At her furtive words and hushed tone, Cassie understands why she must be calling.

  “Yes,” she says reluctantly. “I can talk.”

  “Did you get one, too?”

  Cassie’s heart erupts in a wild pounding.

  “Yes,” she says simply.

  So it wasn’t just me.

  “So did Fiona.”

  Then what about Tildy?

  Maybe I have a voice mail from her,Cassie thinks—though there wasn’t one the last time she checked, on her lunch break.

  “Listen, we’re meeting at one tomorrow afternoon, near Springfield, to talk about it. Can you be there?”

  “Who’s meeting?”

  “Me, Fee, Tildy…and you.”

  “You talked to Tildy?”

  “Fiona did. She tracked her down at work.”

  “So she got one, too? Tildy?”

  And why didn’t she call me back last night?

  “All four of us did. Can you be there tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow? No, I can’t—”

  “You’re working?”

  At her hesitation, Brynn says firmly, “Cassie, you have to come.”

  “But—”

  “You have to.”

  Brynn is right.

  Cassie dutifully writes down the directions to the meeting place.

  “You haven’t told anyone about…” Brynn hesitates.

  “Come on, do you really have to ask that? We took an oath, remember?”

  “I remember. But that was ten years ago.”

  “An oath is an oath, Brynn.”

  There’s a pause.

  “I know. I’ll see you tomorrow at one.”

  Tomorrow.

  At one.

  That’s going to take some juggling to arrange, but it has to be done.

  There’s no way I’m going to miss this.

  Four so-called sisters, together again at last.

  The precious bond of trust, stretched thin across the span of years, is on the verge of snapping.

  They’re wondering, now, who among them might have violated the sacred vow.

  They’re wondering whether carefully sealed closet doors are about to be thrown open, brittle, decade-old bones tumbling out.

  Ah, ladies…if you only knew.

  One moment, Rachel was there, clutching the almost-empty mason jar.

  The next, she was precariously close to the brink of

  The Prom, laughing hysterically about something.

  Or maybe she was crying.

  It was hard to tell; she was incoherent.

  All four of them warned her to get away from the edge.

  And all four watched as she lost her footing and fell.

  Unlike the champagne cork, she didn’t sail out over the edge of the cliff. No, she rolled off, grasping helplessly, her terrified screams punctuated by a horrible thrashing descent, curtailed abruptly with a sickening thud far below.

  Fiona lives still in the house she and Pat bought during their marriage: a vintage 1920s Tudor tucked into a quiet, winding side street in Cedar Crest.

  “Don’t you want to sell it and start fresh in a place where there are no memories?” Brynn asked, after the divorce.

  “Trust me, there are no real memories here.”

  No meaningful ones, anyway—good, bad, or even trivial, day-to-day stuff. As far as she’s concerned, everything about her marriage was behind her the moment they signed the separation papers. The house itself was always just a roof over their heads and a façade behind which they could carry on the charade of marriage and family life.

  The mountain cabin is even less meaningful. They bought it just a few months before the split—Fiona more as an investment, and Pat because he wanted to actually use the place. As far as she knows, he rarely goes up there—and she never does. They keep the key under the doormat, and Fiona has more than once urged Brynn and Garth to use it as an escape. Mostly because she doesn’t want Pat to think he has sole dibs.

  “Leave the kids and take a second honeymoon,” she tells the Saddlers every so often. God knows they could stand a break.

  But they keep protesting that they don’t have anyplace where they can leave their kids, and Fiona isn’t about to offer to watch them for a weekend.

  “Why don’t you ever go up, Fee?” Brynn wanted to know once.

  “Because I like my creature comforts. I’m not the rough-it type.”

  Brynn laughed. “No, you’re definitely not.”

  Now, as Fiona stands in the master bedroom taking off the suit she wore to the office, she admires the Waverly floral wallpaper, coordinating draperies and area rug; the white iron bed she bought at an estate sale in Lenox, along with an antique dressing table, bureau, and wardrobe.

  The first thing she did after Pat left was strip off all the old striped wallpaper, rip up the carpeting, and get rid of the bedroom suite they had bought with their wedding money.