“Despite everything, I am sorry about Christopher,” Whitney said, turning around unexpectedly, far too close to the shoebox, and because Gwen had thought she was safe, she flinched, making a movement toward the box on instinct as if to grab it out of Whitney’s reach. She stopped herself, but it was too late. Whitney had seen it.

Chapter 39

Oh,” Whitney said, and so Amara turned around right in time to see Whitney lunge forward, scooping a shoebox off the ground a moment quicker than Gwen could get to it. What the hell did Whitney want with Gwen’s shoes? This wasn’t exactly the time to be raiding her closet. But Whitney reached in and pulled out a clear Tupperware container—large enough to hold half a chicken and filled to the very top with loose TrueMommy caplets. She handed the container to Amara and then grabbed a leather journal and began flipping through. “The notes in here don’t seem like someone who was just supposed to keep an eye on things,” Whitney said. “There are schedules. Accounting.”

“What?” Amara asked as Claire held out her hand for the planner.

Gwen let out a strange, disbelieving laugh. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You’re going to listen to Whitney?” Amara bent her head over the journal while Claire turned the pages slowly, both of them looking at Gwen’s cryptic abbreviations in her neat cursive. This wasn’t the work of some minion. This was the work of a mastermind. Amara felt the world growing fuzzy around her, Gwen’s voice like a mosquito in her ear as she buzzed relentlessly on. “Whitney, who lied to you all for months about sleeping with my husband, who might just as easily have slept with any of yours?”

Amara realized she was hugging the box of TrueMommy and wrenched off the top, spilling a conical mound of the amber pills into her palm. The smooth hill of capsules gleamed and beckoned. All this time, Gwen had been pretending she felt their pain when really she was the source of it.

“Gwen. You are a sociopath,” Amara said.

“No,” Gwen said. “No. I wanted to help you. The pills made your lives easier—”

“Our lives,” Amara said, dazed, as rage began to gather and swirl behind her eyes. “You never took them at all, did you?”

Gwen hesitated for just a moment too long. “I did!”

Amara rocketed toward Gwen, a short-fused firecracker set ablaze, shaking her handful of pills in Gwen’s face. “I should shove these down your fucking throat, you psycho,” she yelled. “You’ve infected our entire lives!” She hurled the pills at Gwen, who flinched as the capsules bounced off her and scattered on the floor, far too light to hurt the way Amara wanted them to. “Do you understand what you’ve done to us?” she yelled, ready to slap Gwen, to tear out her heartless heart. Claire stepped forward and put her hand on Amara’s shoulder, and suddenly, Amara saw herself as if from above, saw what her own wrathful body had become, and hated it. She stepped back. “Of course you don’t understand,” Amara said, her voice cracking with exhaustion. “You never even took them.”

Gwen looked Amara straight in the eye. Then she gathered up a handful of the pills and, as if in an offering, swallowed them.

Chapter 40

The capsules scraped Gwen’s throat as they went down, leaving her raw. She would have to humble herself before the women, do what they wanted her to do, distract them. But Amara simply stepped back, her whole body slumping, and turned into Claire’s embrace, beginning to cry. “I don’t want to be like her. I don’t want to live some double life anymore,” Amara said between her racking sobs as Claire stroked her hair. “I don’t want to keep this secret from Daniel. I don’t want to keep lying.”

“But what about everything we said before?” Ellie asked. “About Child Protective Services, and everyone finding out?”

“Gwen was the one who brought up Child Protective Services, wasn’t she?” Claire asked, and Meredith furrowed her brow as if trying to remember, then let out a gasp as she confirmed it in her mind.

“Oh, Gwen,” she said.

“Please,” Gwen said, desperate. “Please. Just let me wind it down in secret. I’ll stop it all. No one will get hurt. I’ll find some way to prove it to you. You can look at the records. I can give you the names of all the women so you can check up on them. I’ll give you a cut if you want! Just let me take care of it.” Her body started to tingle as it absorbed the drug, her levelheadedness disappearing in a million synaptic bursts. She fought to maintain control. She could wind down the operation and still have her smaller group of women who didn’t need the wellness excuse. She could still get the Connecticut house.

“I don’t know if we can do that anymore,” Amara said.

“If I go down,” Gwen said, narrowing her eyes, “you all go down too. Everything comes out.” She shot a look at Ellie, who shifted uncomfortably. “Every fault or secret you ever told me in confidence.” She lasered in on Whitney, spitting the words at her. “Every sordid detail of the affair. Grant will divorce you so fast your head will spin, and then you’ll have nothing.” She turned to Amara now. “How will Daniel ever love you in the same way again? And, Claire, you wanted to be one of us so badly, following us around and trying our pills? Well, I’m sure there are magazines out there that would love to do an article on your whole story.” Even if she had to say goodbye to the Connecticut house, there were other options. One of the shoeboxes she’d taken down earlier, which was on the floor farther back in the dark of the closet, had thousands of dollars in cash from this month’s latest deliveries. She had plenty in an offshore account too. She could take the girls and get away, hide out with Teddy for a little while, then go to Mexico. She’d studied Spanish all throughout college, even spent a semester in Barcelona, and it would be good for the girls to be bilingual from an early age. “Maybe your ex-boyfriend with the cancer scare will have some choice quotes.”

“I think I’ll just have to deal with that,” Claire said.

Gwen stuck her finger down her throat and forced herself to vomit all over the carpet.

Chapter 41

Amara understood logically that her former friend–turned–drug kingpin (queenpin?) was coughing up waves of vomit on the floor of a walk-in closet. But her heart kept insisting that it wasn’t real, that she’d actually stepped through a portal to an alternate universe in which anything could happen. She half expected a parade of talking flamingos to come pedaling by on unicycles. A long string of amber-colored phlegm dangled out of Gwen’s mouth, and Amara thought that talking flamingos would be a welcome bit of sanity.

The other women had stepped back as Gwen, still in that ridiculous fur coat, heaved and shuddered and then grew still, multicolored chunks on the rug around her, the particular wretched smell of vomit rising up in the close closet air. Ellie and Meredith put their hands over their mouths and looked away.