I knocked on Cam’s third-floor apartment door, then tapped my foot impatiently for the fifteen seconds it took for the door to open. “Okay, why do you have Kori’s number?” I asked, before he could even invite me inside.

His brows rose in amusement, and he visibly fought a grin. “I wondered how long that would take.”

“You don’t have to look so smug.” I stomped past him when he stepped back to let me in.

“Are you kidding? I’m surprised you resisted this long.”

“So?” I set the convenience-store bag on his counter and my satchel on a bar stool. “Why do you have her number?”

Cam closed the door and crossed both arms over his chest. “I think the real question is why don’t you? Most people don’t leave their friends just because they leave town.”

Ouch.

“I didn’t mean to lose touch with everyone. I just… I needed some time to myself.” To process the fact that I was suddenly without Cam, under threat of death. “And by the time I felt like getting back in touch, Elle had disappeared. I tracked Anne and Kori just to make sure they were alive, but by then…so much had changed I was afraid I wouldn’t even know them anymore.” And they wouldn’t know me.

“Well, now you’re getting a second chance. You ready?”

“Yeah.” Though being ready didn’t really matter. Anne and Hadley would arrive in half an hour, and we needed to be ready for them. “What’s her number?”

Cam recited and I dialed. Then the phone rang. And rang. And rang. Then my call went to a voice-mail system answered by a computer-generated voice.

I hung up.

“She hasn’t recorded a voice-mail message,” I said, scowling at my new phone as if it had personally betrayed me. I hadn’t expected Kori’s message to provide her real name, but hearing her actual voice would have been nice. “How do I even know I have the right number?”

“It’s the right number. She doesn’t usually pick up if she doesn’t recognize the incoming number. You’ll either have to bug her until she answers or call her on my phone.”

I hit Redial. I hadn’t spoken to her in six years—I didn’t want to know she’d only taken my call because she thought it was Cam. I got her voice mail again, but when I called back a third time, she answered on the first ring.

“Who the fuck is this?”

I smiled. It was good to hear her voice, and from the sound of her greeting, Kori hadn’t changed a bit.

“Five seconds, then I’m hangin’ up and blockin’ your number,” she snapped.

“Kori, it’s Liv—willyouhelpme?” I ran the words together in my rush to be heard before she could hang up.

Silence. Then a deep intake of breath, and I flinched, knowing what was coming—I’d been pissed, too, when Anne asked for my help. “You bitch…” Kori muttered, and I smiled again, surprisingly nostalgic over Korinne’s all-purpose greeting/curse/compliment. “How did you get this number?”

“Hey, Kor,” Cam called, by way of explanation.

“You soft-skulled, marble-balled motherfucker. I’m going to kick your ass next time I see it.”

Cam laughed. “You know, my grandmother always said no woman with a decent vocabulary would resort to profanity.”

Kori huffed. “My grandmother said, ‘Get the hell out of my house, bitch, before I throw you out on your ass.’”

“Well, you did set the kitchen on fire. Twice. With her in it.” Kori had slept on my couch for two weeks before her grandmother finally took her back the second time.

Another impatient huff from over the line. “I fail to see how the facts are relevant here.”

“Don’t you want to know why I called?” I asked, leaning back to prop my boots on Cam’s coffee table, over scarred marks in the wood, proving he’d obviously done the same thing.

“I figure you’ll get to it eventually.”

I grinned at Cam—if I were speaking to anyone else, I’d have felt guilty for how much I planned to enjoy tugging on Kori’s binding. “I need help. Will you please come to Cam’s so we can talk?”

“Hell no—oww, fuck!” she cried, and I could practically see Kori clutching her head from the unexpected pain—proof that our original oath was still intact. “What the hell, Liv?”

“I’ll explain when you get here. Will you come, please?”

“Like I have any choice.”

A second later, the bathroom door squealed open and I turned to find Kori stomping toward me from the darkened hall, still holding her cell. She flipped the phone closed and shoved it into the pocket of her ripped, artfully ratty jeans—like us, she was fully dressed and obviously wide-awake at one in the morning—and propped both hands on her hips in the living-room doorway.

“You better tell me what the hell is going on, or I swear I’ll kill you justn taon’t have to listen to you.”

I laughed. “Good to see you, too.”

She shoved wavy, white-blond hair back from pixieish features twisted into her usual angry scowl. “I’m not fucking kidding.”

“Me, neither.” I’d actually missed her crass, sarcastic affection. Kori only yelled at people she liked. She didn’t bother with anyone else. “It’s been too long.”

“No, it hasn’t been long enough. What the hell happened to the second oath?”