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asleep from last night’s club action, she didn’t have any unwelcome escorts. “You’re late!” Sasha said as Georgie got out. “Too busy smooching it up with Bramwell Shepard?”
    “Yeah, that’s what I was doing, all right.” Georgie slammed the car door.
    Sasha laughed. She looked incredible as always, tall and willowy in a white L.A.M.B. hoodie and gray pants. She’d pulled her straight brunette hair into a ponytail and shaded her face with a pink visor.
    “Ignore Sasha.” April, the oldest and only truly sane member of her inner friendship circle, wore a black T-shirt from her husband’s last tour. “She just drove up thirty seconds ago.”
    “I overslept,” Sasha said. “ Young people do that.”
    April was in her early fifties, with beautiful bold features, a dramatic square-jawed face, and a glow that spoke of well-earned contentment. She’d been Georgie’s stylist for years, but even more important, she was a dear friend. April tossed her streaky blond hair and gave Sasha a sweet smile. “I slept like a dream. But then I had hot sex last night.”
    Sasha frowned. “Yeah, well, I’d have had hot sex, too, if I was married to Jack Patriot.”
    “But you’re not, now are you?” April said smugly.
    Three decades earlier, April had been a famous rock-and-roll groupie, but her notorious days were long behind her. She was now the wife of legendary rocker Jack Patriot as well as the mother of a famous NFL quarterback and a recent grandmother. She no longer worked as a stylist, except as a favor to Georgie.
    Georgie tucked her hair behind her ears and slipped on a ball cap. She pulled a backpack heavy with water bottles from her car. She was the only one of them who didn’t mind wearing a pack, so she carried all the water, a calorie-burner they’d been trying to talk her out of since she’d gotten so thin, but she refused to cave.
    Sometimes she wondered how women who didn’t have girlfriends coped with life. In her own life, these were the friends who never let her down, even though they were so frequently separated by geography, making these Saturday-morning hikes a rarity. Sasha lived in Chicago. April lived in L.A. but spent as much time as she could at the family farm in Tennessee. Meg Koranda, the baby of the group, was off on another of her journeys. None of them were exactly sure where.
    Sasha led them toward the trailhead. She held back from her normal killer pace so Georgie, who used to be their leader, could keep up. “Tell us exactly what happened with Bram,” she said.
    “Honestly, Georgie, what were you thinking?” April frowned.
    “It was an accident.” Georgie yanked on her backpack. “On my part anyway. Totally premeditated on his.” She told them about her plan to start serial dating, then explained what had happened at The Ivy. She avoided mentioning her marriage proposal to Trevor, not because she didn’t trust them—unlike Lance, these women would never betray her—but because she didn’t want her closest friends to know she was even more pathetic than they realized. By the time they reached the open ridge above the canyon, she was gasping for breath.
    The last of the morning chill had burned off, and they could seethe coastline from Santa Monica Bay to Malibu. They stopped for a moment to take off their jackets and tie the sleeves around their waists. Sasha pulled out two candy bars and offered one to Georgie, trying to be casual about it, but Georgie declined. “I ate this morning. Honest.”
    “A spoonful of yogurt,” April said.
    “A whole carton. It’s getting better. Really.”
    They didn’t believe her.
    “Well, I’m starved,” Sasha said.
    As she bit into her candy bar, neither Georgie nor April pointed out that Sasha Holiday, the founder of Holiday Healthy Eating, might want to munch on a piece of fruit or a Holiday Power Bar instead of a Milky Way. Sasha was a secret junk-food junkie, something only they knew. Not that it showed on her