“Girl, why did you even take me to your dead-ass house?” Sierra demanded after we got drinks inside as if I’d done her a grievous injustice. “You were hiding all these sexy AF bikers from me all along?”

Before I could answer that, she shimmied onto the dance floor with her clear plastic cup of beer raised in the air and her long braid pony extension swinging in time with the music.

It was like watching a party animal who’d been raised exclusively in city zoos get released into a nature preserve filled with her own kind. Sierra acted just as rowdy and flirted just as aggressively as the heavily tattooed women who usually hung out at the clubhouse. And I soon realized why I felt so comfortable from the start with the old ladies even though we didn't have much in common. Sierra was the kind of friend I naturally gravitated to, and she fit right in here.

As worried as Sierra had claimed to be about me before coming out to Angel Pond for her “investigation,” that was pretty much the last we saw of her that week.

She had so much fun, she swore up and down she would visit again in the spring. But the pandemic really hit the States in mid-March, and she'd been so busy at the hospital that she barely had time to text, much less pay us a visit.

At least she hadn’t for the first year after the virus upturned our lives.

One day when Antonia was about three months old, the doorbell rang, and we found Sierra on our front porch. Sobbing and stuttering so much, I immediately diagnosed a mental breakdown.

It took a few days and several crying fits for her to actually talk about what happened in Wilmington. But in the end, it wasn't an uncommon story. She was one of the many medical professionals who had hit a wall at her big-city hospital.

And suddenly, she’d gotten it—the appeal of living somewhere so small and nestled away from the rest of the world. Feeling crazy, she’d simply walked out of work mid-shift, driven herself to the airport, and plopped down her credit card for the soonest set of flights to Cedar Rapids she could find.

For the first three weeks of her unexpected visit, she walked around the house like a shell of the best friend I used to know. She volunteered to watch Antonia but refused to go anywhere near the clinic.

Then she did what she promised to do that December before the pandemic hit, she went right back to the compound and started partying like it was—well, 2019.

Ever since then, she’d been going through Reapers like they were a game she’d been sent from Wilmington to play and conquer.