What I want to say: Yes, however will I peel back the layers of such compli cated minds? Can a simpleton ever truly understand the genius of the noble frat star? For now they crush empties against their foreheads, but someday they will command boardrooms. My team warned me about this guy, a dinosaur of corporate America who still believes business belongs on the golf course. I glance out the conference room window, squint at the Charles River in the distance, and count to three. “With all due respect, what makes you think you”-he spits the word like it’s a shit sandwich-“can get inside the mind of our man?” He looks me up and down, sneers a little. As sales have slipped, my new agency has found itself on thinner and thinner ice with this client. He oversees a household-name beer that’s been losing market share to craft breweries for years. The CEO leans forward, mouth slightly ajar as if a cigar is usually perched there. “Using this new strategy,” I say, “we’re confident we will make your brand the number one beer with men twenty-one to thirty-four years old.” He is past his prime, trying to disguise the fact with hair plugs and a bottled tan. I direct the close of my pitch to the CEO, who has spent fifty minutes of my sixty-minute presentation playing with his phone and the other ten frowning at me. The chairs around me are filled with men: short, tall, fat, bald, polite, skeptical. I STAND AT the head of the conference table. But she’s about to learn that Wisewood won’t let either of them go without a fight. Panicked, Natalie hurries north to come clean to her sister and bring her home.

Six months later, Natalie receives a menacing email from a Wisewood account threatening to reveal the secret she’s been keeping from Kit. Natalie thinks it’s a bad idea, but Kit has had enough of her sister’s cynicism and voluntarily disappears off the grid. But the rules are for a good reason: to keep guests focused on achieving true fearlessness so they can become their Maximized Selves. During this time, they’re prohibited from contact with the rest of the world-no Internet, no phones, no exceptions. On a private island off the coast of Maine, Wisewood’s guests commit to six-month stays. She told Natalie she was sure there was something more out there. The last time they spoke, Kit was slogging from mundane workdays to obligatory happy hours to crying in the shower about their dead mother.

Natalie Collins hasn’t heard from her sister in more than half a year. We’ll keep your secrets if you keep ours. From the national and USA TODAY bestselling author of Darling Rose Gold comes a dark, thrilling novel about two sisters-one trapped in the clutches of a cult, the other in a web of her own lies.

This might hurt novel