“I want more too,” I said. “Soon.”

I agreed, but I didn’t appreciate her tone of urgency. I pushed her head down onto my shoulder and stroked her hair lovingly.

Big changes cannot be rushed. That’s how mistakes are made.

AIMEE

Freshly showered with Alo leggings and a lightweight cropped hoodie, I meet Farah outside Rini’s study after her reading.

“That’s not what we’re wearing for this,” I say when Farah emerges with Rini behind her.

Farah and I coordinated all our outfits while we packed for Stars Harbor. We agreed that an exercise called Sun Worship at an astrological retreat did not call for swimsuits but for athleisure wear.

“What’s wrong with this?” Farah asks, pulling at her Vuori joggers.

“Maybe change your top?”

“I’ll meet you ladies on the back deck in five,” Rini says.

“Were you listening in on my reading?” Farah asks.

“No, why, were you spilling your darkest secrets?”

Farah ignores me—about the outfit and the reading—and walks toward the back door.

“Oh my God, you were.” I scramble to catch up with her. “You have deep dark secrets?”

She stonewalls me, but I’m confused. I thought she was simple; brilliant but totally straightforward. What could she be hiding?

There is no way she’d have an affair; she would end her marriage before crossing a line of impropriety. She’s got an iron will. She’s definitely not a gambler, and I cannot imagine her hooked on prescription pills. What other secrets are there at our stage of life? What kind of counseling would she want from an astrologer? I get no answers on the short walk from Rini’s study to the back patio, where Margot and Eden wait.

“Rini said she would be right out,” Farah reports.

“Sun Worship, anyone know what this is?” Eden asks. “I doubt it’s about our favorite celebrity couples.”

“Ah! That’s why we say ship? As in worshipping,” I say.

But Margot pipes up instead. “Reviews specifically say to go into this part of the weekend with no preconceived notions. There were a few people who included ‘spoilers’ and other guests had them taken down. I’m so intrigued I can’t stand it.”

Rini appears at the edge of our table, as if out of nowhere. That was quicker than five minutes. It reminds me of when she surprised us at arrival. I don’t know if I’m not paying attention in this house or she’s the stealthiest walker around.

“Follow me,” she says.

I pull the sunglasses down from the top of my head over my eyes. Rini leads us along the edge of the property, which makes a sharp turn one hundred feet to the south. From our suites all we can see is the stunning, unobstructed view of the water. But here, over the beach grass, the steep drop to the beach below is evident.

Rini stops near the edge of a bluff and turns her back to the ocean. We form a semicircle around her.

“Bold. Blunt. Ambitious. Relentless,” Rini says. “If you take these qualities and bestow them upon a man, he is a leader. He’s a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the head of a hedge fund, or a politician. These same exact qualities in a woman make her a bitch, someone to shun and shame. A psycho. A mean girl. A bad mother. No one aspirational or admirable. As a result, most women have learned to repress their masculinity.”

Rini takes a step back, closer to the edge of the bluff. Beach grass wraps around her leg. I scratch my calf, imagining the tickle on my own leg.

“In the Western world, we confuse energetic qualities with gender. Men must be masculine, women must be feminine. We make them polarities and give them bodies to live in. But no man should be without femininity and no woman should be without masculinity. That’s what I’m here to guide you through today.”

Rini raises her hands to the sky—the sun. She then joins her palms together and takes a moment to look each of us in the eye. She begins with Margot, then Eden, Farah, and lastly, me. She doesn’t break eye contact, holding it longer than is comfortable, longer than she did with any of the other women. My body sweats, trying to warn me of something.

As I’m on the verge of understanding her silent communication, Rini disappears over the cliff edge. The other women scream, snapping me out of my trance.

“What did you do, Aimee?” Margot says.

“Me? You were closer to her than I was,” I say.

“But you two were staring at each other so intensely. Did you make her jump with your mind?”

“Margot, that’s ridiculous, even for you.”

Rini’s head pops up inches to the left of where she fell with a dazzling smile and a ta-da.

“That was on purpose? Part of the act?” Eden asks.

“It was intentional, but it’s not an act. I’m afraid of death, and trust me when I tell you it’s more complicated than the average person’s fear. I want you to do the same.”

Eden turns abruptly, clearly angry. “I’m going back to the house. This is not for me,” she says. I can’t say I blame her. What is Rini playing at?

Rini waves the rest of us closer and points to a small shelf in the bluff three feet down where she must have landed.

“It’s barely a jump,” Farah says.

“I’m not falling off a cliff,” Margot says. “She could have easily tumbled down way past that little ledge.”

Rini steps between us and we fall back into our semicircle.

“You are missing the point. That was defiance of my fear. You have to identify your own act.”

“I don’t like that idea.” Margot crosses her arms. “What if the universe interprets what you’re doing to mean that you actually want to die?”

Rini walks over to Margot and takes both her hands. It’s strangely intimate and I want to give them privacy, but I can’t look away. Finally I search for Farah, who is already one step ahead in giving them their moment by staring at me.

“Margot, I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, but I do need you to let go of your white-knuckle grip on life. It’s paralyzing you,” Rini says.

“I want that too. How can I do it?”

“Stand at the edge of that cliff. As close as you dare and shout out into the void.”

“Scream?”

“If you don’t want to defy your fears, then tell the Universe what you do want.”

Assuming I’m next after Margot, I consider what it is I want. I want my husband to be back to his normal self. I want our perfect life to be as real as it feels to me when I post about it.