Chiara scrolled through her social media feeds while her makeup artist added jewels along her temple to match her sequined dress. She was looking for mentions of Elena Rollins, the woman Astrid had texted her about, asking Chiara if she’d meet her. Chiara recognized the woman’s face; if she remembered correctly, she was a beauty influencer who’d let her profile go quiet during a brief marriage to a well-known cooking show host. A mistake Chiara didn’t plan to make; she would never give up her job for the sake of supporting someone else’s. She’d come a long way from her hopes of a career as a mixed-media artist, leaving behind her dream of large-scale collage installations and working with found objects to create beauty. But at least she had discovered another way to use her creative skills, honing an online presence.

“Can you tilt your chin up?” the makeup artist asked, changing his brush for a wedge-shaped sponge. “I’m going to highlight the cheekbones a little more.”

Chiara tapped off her phone screen and obediently moved her head right and left. She was already planning her time in Tahoe. She would bill it as a girls’ retreat weekend and maybe invite a couple of others to fill out the photos she would post. She’d bring lots of outdoor gear and do some things outside. Work-wise, she’d be fine.

But Astrid had mentioned that Gage Striker would be there with Elena, putting two of the Mesa Falls Ranch owners in her path again. And while Chiara adored Astrid, she had a long-standing grievance with the men of Mesa Falls. They’d all been friends with Zach Eldridge, a boy she’d loved and lost when she was fifteen and he was sixteen. She thought she might be one of the few people in the world who knew that Zach had been on a horseback riding trip with those friends when he died. Gage Striker’s powerful father had taken pains to cover up his son’s connection to the death but Chiara had still managed to find out the truth.

Chiara would never forget how she’d snuck onto the Dowdon campus to find out what had really happened to Zach, a friend who’d loved art as passionately as she did. She’d confronted Gage and Miles separately, asking them for the truth, and they’d both given her canned responses that sounded rehearsed. She’d cried. Begged. Completely embarrassed herself for love of Zach, desperate to understand what had really gone wrong that terrible week.

She knew Zach had been upset about something. He hadn’t been himself at the last school art show, a coed event between her all-girls institution and Dowdon.