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“What did she say?” Priya asked.

I made the choice. “She said if the circle breaks, it turns back on us. All of us, at once. So it can’t break. That’s the rule.”

It was true. It just wasn’t all of it.

Jess held my eyes one more second. Then she looked down. Priya nodded slowly. Callie’s eyes were closed, but she nodded, too. I looked back into the mirror, my pulse pounding hard against the locket.

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Clemency said in my head. “Do not call me again to ask what you already know. I am not a servant, and this is not a bell.”

She began to recede, scowl first, then the dark dress. She and her black dogs sank back into the depth of the glass, throwing our four stricken faces back at us in the candlelight. The cold eased. The flames swelled and began to flicker again.

I realized I was shaking.

“What did we just agree to?” Callie said, her voice climbing.

“Killing him, or else,” Jess said, flat and unreadable.

“Just so I’ve got this straight,” Priya said. “We go to the beach, summon the undead headmistress a second time, bleed into a bowl, and try very hard not to die.”

“At least you don’t have to recruit your own boss into it,” I said.

It wasn’t funny. We laughed anyway, standing in the room where Clemency Hart had refused to break, having just promised her we wouldn’t either.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

On Sunday I was summoning the dead in an abandoned Victorian home. On Monday I was on the phone to the pool float guy, explaining that the swans were too bridal. Vivienne had asked for shells instead, but only the matte white shells, as according to her, the pearl ones had second-wife yacht energy, which she considered a hate crime.

The day had only gotten more annoying from there. Right after lunch, the organic sommelier canceled. She’d twisted an ankle rappelling down a waterfall in Costa Rica and couldn’t be on her feet for more than ten minutes.

I had a to-do list that was still sixty lines long and just six days to get it all done. Sofia was threatening to quit because Vivienne had asked her to drive to the Healdsburg estate and deep-clean the pool tiles by hand. Sofia had also been informed she was to wear white linen for the event so that she’d be “visible but not service-coded,” and I now had to find her a white linen dress with quiet coastal authority.

Rolling the stiffness out of my neck, I climbed down from the stool at the breakfast bar and made myself another espresso from Vivienne’s gleaming Italian machine, which she’d never used herself, then checked my phone.

The group chat had gone quiet. For the last few weeks, it had buzzed at all hours. Priya’s spirals, Callie’s white-rose updates, the running tally of everything the men had said and done. Now there was nothing, as if we were all holding something too heavy to type. Callie hadn’t posted since yesterday. Neither had Jess. The only contact had been me texting Priya to tell her she’d left her wallet at my house.

I threw myself back into work, but the thing I really had to get done was still demanding my attention, and I couldn’t avoid it any longer. I had to figure out which women on the RSVP list I would target for recruitment.

I scanned my spreadsheet and, with guilt gnawing at me like little fangs, I highlighted the women most likely to be lured by the promise of a twin flame. I landed on five targets, in addition to Vivienne. We needed four in total, but nothing was ever that easy, and I’d decided we’d have to cast our net a little farther to succeed.

My fingers tensed around the double-wall bistro mug as I hatched a plan to carefully work the following women:

Blythe Withers, the sacred feminine embodiment coach. Newly single at forty-something, she had been reinventing herself at volume. Her blog talked about “reclaiming her wild” a lot, and “dancing her divorce out of her hips.” Under the hood, her marriage had been her entire identity. She was rattling around an enormous house in Sonoma, day-drinking gin and St-Germain from teacups.

Next on the list was Lark Sutherland, Vivienne’s hanger-on and protégée, who called herself a luxury wellness concierge and fawned over Vivienne with devotion bordering on obsession. Beneath her sparkling personal brand, Lark seemed profoundly empty and lived in terror of going unnoticed. Her Instagram suggested she was also profoundly single.

Then there was Sloane Pryor, an old-money breathwork facilitator who had recently been very publicly discarded by an Italian sculptor and was now rebuilding her worth selling courses on transformational breath. She was a good friend of Karen Mulvey, an exhausted lawyer who probably hadn’t unbuttoned a man’s shirt in five years, so her name had been highlighted, too.

Last was Davina Ashworth, the name that made me feel as if I’d crossed some final, ugly line.

Davina had lost her mother four months ago. Her Facebook page was still full of memorial posts, old photographs, comments from women saying things like sending light and she would be so proud of you, which meant I was now the kind of person who could identify fresh grief and highlight it as an opportunity.

Just as I was about to order a linen dress from COS for Sofia, Vivienne walked through the front door, fresh from a hair appointment. She came in smelling like rosemary hair serum, asked me a dozen questions about the pool party, poured herself some sparkling elderflower, then wandered into her office.

I gave her ten minutes to decompress from the stress of being pampered by an elite hair stylist, then approached her. I found her staring out the window.

“I have some updates on the pool p—” I cleared my throat. “On the poolside connection event.”