Page 1 of The Four Engagement Rings of Sybil Rain

Once I’m through security at LAX, I send a text to Nikki.

Good news: made it thru security in record time. Bad news: hot security guard nowhere to be seen.

Nikki hearts my text. Good news: made it home just now. Bad news: I somehow drove in a circle through long term parking—twice.

I laugh at her message. Thanks again for the ride! Love you!

Duh, happy to. Text me when you land!

I pop in my earbuds and weave my way through the crowded concourse toward my gate at the other end of the terminal with a smile on my face. It was actually at an airport that my best friends—the Core Four, as we call ourselves—all met each other for the first time.

The summer after freshman year of college, Nikki, Willow, Emma, and I went on an epic backpacking trip abroad.

I’ve known Willow since I was a baby, and Emma since elementary school, but Nikki, as my college roommate, hadn’t met the other two girls before.

We were a bit of an eclectic mix. There was Nikki, in her Lululemon matching legging set, honey-blond hair pulled into a tight ponytail.

Willow, with her handmade statement earrings and tousled brunette waves thrown into a heap on top of her head.

Emma nervously twisting her red hair around her finger and covertly swallowing a couple of anxiety pills—though whether to ward off her fear of flying or the potential awkwardness of that first meeting, I couldn’t be sure.

I was also a little nervous about how everyone would mesh.

I felt responsible as the group’s connector to make sure everyone got along.

But by the time we were cramming our overstuffed hiking backpacks into overhead bins, laughing about whether customs was going to have a problem with Willow’s travel lube, I could tell everything was going to be okay.

The trip was even more magical than I could have dreamed: we started in Paris and spent most of the summer at Willow’s family chateau in southern France, making trips to Milan, Salzburg, Budapest, and finally Istanbul.

And somewhere between the midnight trains, bottles of Chianti, and hot Swedish guys in sketchy hostels, we became the Core Four.

When my boarding group is called, I unplug my phone from the outlet where I’ve been charging it and join the queue.

Last year, I accidentally left my cell in a Vegas cab, prompting Emma and my other friend Finn to go on a multistate manhunt for me.

Ever since then, I’ve been mildly obsessive about not losing my phone.

Once I’m settled into my window seat, I make small talk with the couple sitting next to me (Diane and Andrew from Santa Barbara, on their way to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary), then close my eyes for takeoff.

The engines rumble beneath me, the cabin shaking back and forth as we pick up speed.

Instinctively, I reach for the fourth finger of my left hand, rubbing at a ring that’s not there.

We hurtle ahead, faster and faster, until finally, we lift off the ground, and the weightless feeling of being airborne settles my nerves. As we continue to climb to our cruising altitude, I let myself imagine I’m flying away from all my problems. From everything that happened last year.

Maybe my friends are right that this trip is going to be good for me. Maybe getting away from it all is exactly what I need.

T HE IDEA FOR THE trip originated just a couple weeks ago, when the Core Four found ourselves all gathered in my little bungalow in Mar Vista for a celebration.

Or rather, the Core Five .

There’s a new chick on the scene. I’ve known Nora for a little less than a year, and she’s definitely shifted our dynamic.

Her communication can get dicey, and she did throw up on me once, but I can already tell she’s going to be a phenomenal addition to the friend group.

(Besides, Nikki also threw up on me one night at a Phi Delt frat party, and I’ve never held that against her.) The birthday girl was currently cruising around my coffee table, a party hat with a number one on it cocked at a jaunty angle over her peach-fuzz head.

Nora’s actual first birthday was not until September, and it was only mid-June, but any excuse for a party, right?

Anyway, it was while we feasted on cupcakes and champagne—and a bottle of breast milk for Nora, which Willow dared me to try and Nikki begged me not to—that the idea for this trip came up. I wanted it to be all of us; in the end, though, it ended up just being me.

Willow had been talking about the nightmare of trying to find affordable day care for Nora, and Nikki told us about the producer who was hounding her to appear on the next season of LovedBy , the dating reality show she’d been the lead of a few years back.

Emma was filling us in on her latest high-maintenance design client, and I could see she was physically struggling to rein in her impulse to redecorate my entire one-bedroom.

(When we lived together in New York, she’d move pieces of furniture in and out of my room at whim.

One time, I came home from a weekend in the Hamptons, and my whole bed had been lofted.

So the fact that she didn’t immediately start styling my bookcases the second she walked into my place was evidence of real personal growth.)

And then it was my turn to update everyone.

It felt weird; we used to spend so much time together, with so few gaps, that updates weren’t really required, but as I looked around, I had this sudden fear that if we weren’t careful, getting older—getting busier with our careers, falling in love—could cause us to drift apart.

Or rather, could cause them to drift away from me .

Emma was engaged, Nikki was basically a celebrity influencer now…

I mean, Willow had an actual, real-life child to take care of.

Sometimes it felt like they had all achieved a level of adulthood that I was still grasping for.

“Honestly, there is nothing to catch you guys up on,” I told them. “You know everything, I promise.”

Willow picked Nora up and plopped onto my couch. “No good Meredith stories lately?”

Meredith is my boss at Flowies, LA’s hottest women-owned period underwear start-up. I’ve been running their socials for the past ten months. The founder is amazing but definitely has her… quirks.

“Actually, there was the Flowies-by-Buzzworthy collab launch party,” I told the girls.

“What’s Buzzworthy?” Emma asked.

“Vibrators,” Willow and I answered in unison.

“Right,” I continued, “and this was, like, a two-hundred-person event with all the board members, and long story short, we found out the hard way that Meredith was wearing the product at the party.”

Emma threw a hand over her mouth as Willow laughed and demanded to know, “What do you mean you ‘found out the hard way’?”

“I truly do not need to hear the answer to that,” Nikki declared, swigging her champagne.

But of course, I was going to tell them anyway.

I was in my element. “Okay, so the creative director at Buzzworthy is this girl Christina, right? So Christina takes the mic, and she’s about to start talking, and the room goes quiet, and that’s when all of a sudden, we all hear this, you know, buzzing sound.

I’m not joking, like, everyone in the vicinity turns around, and we all realize at the same time that the sound is coming from Meredith’s pants . ”

Nikki spat out her champagne, and Willow started laughing so hard I was briefly concerned she was going to drop Nora into a bowl of tortilla chips.

“Anyway,” I went on, “we have since been talking to them about an updated model that doesn’t make so much noise. So, you know, in the end, it was useful market research.”

Emma shook her head, red hair swishing like a shampoo commercial. “Sybil, for real, you have to get the LovedBy producers to do a show about your office. It’s such a good idea.”

I sip my drink. “Ha. I would definitely watch that, if it wasn’t, like, my life .”

“But it sounds like things are going… okay? Generally, I mean,” Emma said.

“Yeah, everything’s great!” I assured her. But from the way she was looking at me, it seemed like she didn’t quite believe me. I turned to the other girls, and they, too, had quieted.

“You should tell her,” Nikki said to Emma. She then exchanged a glance with Willow, who in turn raised an eyebrow at Emma. None of them said a word.

“Tell me what?” I asked. “You guys, what is this, some kind of intervention?” I gave an awkward laugh.

“No!” Nikki exclaimed at the same time Emma said, “Not at all!” and Willow, more quietly, said, “Well, sort of.”

Finally, Emma came out with it. “Sybil, tomorrow, it will have been exactly one year.”

The words hung in the air like she’d uttered a curse.

I knew what she was talking about, of course. I’d had the date mentally circled on my calendar for weeks now. On June 18, it would be exactly one year since my wedding.

Well—my almost wedding.

My friends would be the first to tell you that my life is full of epic, sometimes charming and sometimes horrifically mortifying catastrophes, but that one really took the (three-tiered, strawberry bagatelle with Bavarian cream) cake.