I did as I was instructed, and so did Lily. This time, Hope was the one who came around to gather the cards. “Some secrets,” she said wickedly, “are explosive. Sometimes, all a White Glove needs is to bide her time, and then . . .”

The two White Gloves who’d lit the torches earlier dipped them toward the ground now. I realized, belatedly, that while we’d been writing, they’d been assembling brush and debris.

Flammable was an understatement, enough so that I wondered if there had been gasoline or another accelerant involved. Flames flickered through the air, the sound and smell and heat reaching me in waves. I’d spent a few weeks in childhood fascinated with flint and trying to bang various stones together to make fire.

I hadn’t realized, until now, how many more colors there were in a flame than orange and red.

One by one, the White Gloves took turns tossing secrets into the bonfire. They never opened them. They didn’t read them.

They burned them.

And then they invited us to sit. Even without the heat of the bonfire, the summer air would have been sticky and warm. With it, I felt like we were all under some kind of blanket—or inside a pressure cooker, vents closed.

“One to bury,” Victoria said. “One to burn. One for all.” I waited for her to tell us to pass our cards in, or instruct us, one by one, to read them out loud. But what she did was produce a card of her own. “Three years from now, those of you who become White Gloves will come back to this island and do some digging. That’s the thing about buried secrets—they don’t stay buried forever.” She looked down at the card she was holding. “Three years from now, it will be your turn to choose a new location for this ceremony. You’ll gather your Candidates to bury and burn their secrets. And before you ask them to share the third with everyone present, each of you will share the one you buried years before.”

I was used to them putting us through our paces. But this? The current White Gloves giving us something in return for what was being asked?

That was new.

“I’ll go first,” Victoria said. She paused, for a second, if that. “I’m not in my father’s will.” She looked down at her card after she said the words, as if to check that she’d said them correctly. “That’s all I wrote. Next?”

Hope held her card in both hands. “The cancer came back.” She didn’t say whose cancer.

No one asked.

Nessa stared at Hope for a moment, shaken, and then read her own secret aloud. “I’m a replacement.”

For what? Or who? Again, there was no explanation, no clarification.

A fourth girl whose name I couldn’t remember offered only three words: “I said no.”