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“I don’t think we can do this, Rhiannon,” she says quietly.
Rhiannon blinks. “Sorry?”
“I figured I should tell you in person. But I just…I don’t think we’re good for each other. As friends. I don’t like the decisions I make around you. This isn’t easy for me to say, but…”
Rhiannon shakes her head. “Lenna. I feel so terrible about dragging you to Halcyon. Youknowthat.”
“Yes, but even before you knew there was some master plan involving Sarah and me, you were still bringing me there under false pretenses. There were reasons you hadn’t entirely shared with me.” Lenna is so nervous, she’s gripping her kneecaps hard.Push through.“And that thing you told me about your mom—”
“I told you, I’m so sorry about that. I feel awful.”
“I know, and I understand it. But I mean, that you’d tellthatkind of lie, and not just the first day of our friendship, but after we’d developed a rapport…” She feels tears on her cheeks. For some reason, this lie hurts the most. That Rhiannon manipulated her feelings so brutally—almost indifferently. “I feel like I know nothing about who you really are.”
“But you do,” Rhiannon begs. “I swear.”
Lenna worried about this happening. Rhiannon pushing back. Rhiannon trying to get Lenna to change her mind. People talk about the art of breaking up with a significant other; there are plenty of articles to refer to, tactful scripts of how to do it. But breaking up with a friend? Those scripts don’t readily exist.
Lenna certainly knows that firsthand. If there had been a script, maybe she would have done a better job ending her friendship with Gillian before that moment on the cliff. Maybe Sarah would have, too, instead of both of them resorting to panic andfrustration and threats and death. And Lenna sees the other side of things, too—from Rhiannon’s perspective, and from Gillian’s. To them, these are friendships desperately worth fighting for.
She closes her eyes.Gillian.In the aftermath of things, Sarah showed her Gillian’s private Instagram posts, which she’d combed through during the investigation. Finally Lenna could read through Gillian’s Instagram posts herself. It was fascinating to see howjustifiedGillian thought she was in her behavior, how she only saw herself as a true and caring friend—and also how much her readers were on her side. But maybe she had reason to have such a skewed view of the world, now that they knew about Coral.
Or, well, what theypresumedthey knew about Coral. Sure, Gillian had told Lenna, in so many words, that being pregnant with Coral had been a terrible ordeal. But it wasn’t as if Lenna knew what exactly happened. She’d tried to inquire into Gillian’s family, who she was finally able to track down. They lived in central California, and they declined to answer her emails. But then a cousin, Heather, reached out randomly, saying she’d heard Lenna had been a friend. Heather was the chatty type, one of those people endlessly interested in family history and 23andMe connections, and her cousin Gillian’s saga was the biggest story of her uninteresting life.
“All of us used to hang out when we were kids,” Heather said on a phone call. “But even then, Gillian was kind of…dorky, I guess? Laughed too late at stuff, and her jokes weren’t funny, didn’t quite catch references about things, all around a little bit of a doofus. And there were some days she just didn’t want to hang out at all. And if we were going to meet people she didn’t know—forget about it. She went home.”
“Social anxiety,” Lenna said sadly. “Did her parents acknowledge she was going through that?”
Heather paused. “Her parents…they weren’t the type whobelieved in any sort of mental troubles, you know? They’d just try and pray it out.”
“Ah,” Lenna said, thinking about what Coral said.She was from this real churchy part of the state.
Heather continued. “This one summer, she bragged about having this serious boyfriend. She showed us a picture, but we didn’t really believe her. I mean, she kind of lied about a lot of stuff, you know. Embellished the truth, made things seem better than they were. Like, maybe he was just a good friend? Or she got a mixed message? Anyway, I only saw her once that summer—she got this awful flu. Or, well, her parentssaidshe had a flu—it was only later that I wondered if it was something else. I only found out much, much later what actually happened, and that was only from a girl whose mother worked as an OB/GYN and…heard things.”
“That’s when she was pregnant,” Lenna guessed.
“Obviously her parents didn’t want anyone to know. They must have told her not to tell anyone, either, because I talked to her that following year—even saw her!—and she didn’t say a thing about it. Acted like everything was fine—sort of. She was a lot quieter.”
“Did she say what happened to the boyfriend?”
“I don’t think she ever mentioned him again. And then I lost touch with her after she moved to LA. She never spoke to her parents after that, though.”
“Because of how they covered up what happened?”
“Well, no—actually, I think they were the ones to cut her off, not the other way around.”
It was heartbreaking. If only Gillian had told her. Had she been able to talk to anyone about her pregnancy? Had anyonecared? But it was a huge missing piece to the puzzle. Maybe Gillian wasn’t interested in relationships because someone had scarred her in her teens. And maybe Gillian was so clingy with friendships becauseshe had little practice with them—since she’d been awkward even when she was young. There was also the trauma of teenage pregnancy, the childbirth, the way she’d had to lie…it seemed she’d grown up to believe that lying was easier. Things could be swept under the rug. And so she kept lying.
It was no excuse for Gillian faking texts from Lenna’s phone. It was no excuse for Gillian teasing about tampering with Sarah’s meds—or maybe doing it. But could they really despise Gillian, if she’d had no guidance? She was doing what she thought she needed to do to hold on to precious relationships. They were so hard to come by, in her world.
It was what Rhiannon was doing now. But it all felt too tangled, too messy.
“I loved being friends with you,” Lenna says to Rhiannon now. “And I’m so happy for you and Teddy, and I really think it’ll all work out. But…I need to go my own way.” She shoots her an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry.”
Rhiannon’s gaze falls to the table. “I guess part of me saw this coming.”
“Maybe you can go back to Halcyon, after the adoption comes through?”
The community is still going. Naomi and Melissa stayed on the property. So did Amy, though not Matilda—she left to live with an aunt. Ann was awaiting trial on drug charges. And Gia—it turned out she never actually rejected her fortune, just needed a break from that life. She joked about buying an island, maybe starting a community there. But Lenna had a sneaking suspicion no Halcyon guest would be invited.
