50 pages • 1-hour read
Keep Your Friends Close
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Chapters 30-37Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, addiction, mental illness, illness, emotional abuse, child abuse, gender discrimination, and sexual content.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Now: Whitney”
Eight days after Kiersten’s death, Whitney meets Detective Perez, who tells her that Brooke is no longer the primary suspect due to a nanny cam alibi. The focus shifts to Whitney’s escort business, Supermodels LLC. Perez reveals that a former client who once stalked an escort, Jamar King, worked as a caterer at the party. Perez shows Whitney texts proving that Whitney lied to Kiersten about Colin’s gambling relapse and questions Whitney about her marriage.
Perez says that Brooke supplied information about Whitney’s marital problems. Whitney confirms that she and Kiersten had an arrangement to share husbands and that she hired an escort for Colin. Perez then discloses that Colin secretly reported a serious fight between Whitney and Kiersten over Jade. Whitney leaves feeling targeted by the investigation.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Now: Brooke”
Later, Brooke sits on her front steps, devastated after authorities label Julian’s removal by Abby a domestic dispute. Her attempts to force police action fail, leaving her frantic and isolated.
She drives to Whitney’s gated community and discovers that the gate code has been changed, locking her out. Feeling abandoned, she vows revenge. She notes that she already told Detective Perez all of her friends’ secrets.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Now: Whitney”
After her interview, Whitney searches Colin’s belongings and financial accounts but finds no sign of a gambling relapse. The lack of evidence unsettles her, and she wonders if the killer targeted her instead of Kiersten since they were often mistaken for twins.
Julian’s crying interrupts her, and she goes to care for him. The crisis has tightened the bonds among the other women, and Whitney reflects on how she, Jade, Natasha, and Taylor have all been donating breast milk for the baby. Abby is looking for an apartment and refuses to return home, where Brooke might film them.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Now: Whitney”
The next day, Whitney has a spy app installed on Colin’s phone. Within hours, she finds intimate texts between him and Jade, confirming a physical and emotional affair. She takes screenshots and realizes that Colin’s new fitness obsession has masked his meetings with Jade.
Whitney drives to the gym and watches Jade arrive minutes later. Hiding between two cars, she watches their rendezvous. Rather than confront them, she decides to continue collecting proof.
Chapter 34 Summary: “Then: Jade”
At a child’s backyard birthday party, Jade, resentful after a fight with her unemployed husband, drifts to the food station. There, she meets Colin Gilmore. They trade jokes about parenting and feel an immediate, powerful attraction. Their banter turns flirtatious, creating an intense chemistry that contrasts sharply with Jade’s unhappy marriage.
Chapter 35 Summary: “Now: Brooke”
At the emergency custody hearing for Julian, Abby’s lawyer, Jeff, argues that Brooke is a suspect in a homicide investigation and poses a risk. Brooke’s lawyer, Gill, counters that Abby is staying with Whitney, whom police now view as a more significant person of interest.
The judge focuses on Brooke’s frantic social media videos and questions her mental health. He orders Brooke to complete a psychological evaluation, granting temporary custody to Abby and allowing Brooke one supervised visit per day until it is finished. Brooke reacts with rage, and Gill nudges her to calm down.
Chapter 36 Summary: “Now: Whitney”
On the day she confirms the affair, Whitney keeps a neutral expression when Jade drops off Iris, knowing that Jade plans to meet Colin. Whitney is more upset over Jade lying to her than about anything physical happening between her and Colin. After Jade leaves, Whitney follows her to a children’s cancer center.
When Jade and her daughter Lily leave in under an hour, Whitney grows suspicious and goes inside. She tells the receptionist that she found Jade’s wallet and asks to confirm their appointment. The receptionist finds no record for Jade or Lily Porter. Whitney realizes that Jade likely fabricated Lily’s cancer diagnosis.
Chapter 37 Summary: “Then: Jade”
Weeks of escalating flirtatious texts lead Jade to agree to lunch with Colin. At the restaurant, the chemistry feels overwhelming, and Jade realizes that they are about to cross a line. A vivid sexual fantasy flashes through her mind, followed by panic. She tells Colin that she cannot go through with it and rushes out, leaving him at the table.
Chapters 30-37 Analysis
This section develops the idea that secrets function primarily as assets, developing the central theme of The Corrosive Power of Secrets in Female Friendships. Whitney’s interview with Detective Perez marks a turning point, where the secrets she once held about her escort business and her unconventional marriage are exposed and turned against her. The information that once defined her intimacy with Kiersten now renders her a suspect. Furthermore, Colin’s affair with Jade and collaboration with the police reveal that even the secrets within her marriage have made her vulnerable. His lies, which Whitney had compartmentalized, are no longer confined to one area of their life, leading to her outraged remark, “He couldn’t lie to me about other things. That’s not how this worked” (181). This breach demonstrates that once deception is permitted in one area of a relationship, it inevitably spreads.
As secrets come to light, these chapters dismantle the fragile social contracts governing the women’s friendships, altering the characters’ relationship to truth and agency. Whitney initially chooses to live in denial, ignoring her husband’s gambling addiction to maintain a facade of domestic stability. However, Detective Perez’s revelation that Colin has secretly met with the police shatters this willful ignorance. This disloyalty propels Whitney from passivity into active investigation, culminating in her using a spy app, stalking the gym, and following Jade to the cancer treatment center. The subsequent discoveries of Colin’s affair with Jade and Jade’s fabricated cancer diagnosis for Lily complete this transformation: Colin’s betrayal forces Whitney to confront the fraudulence of all her closest relationships.
By contrast, betrayal pushes Brooke further down a destructive (and self-destructive) path. Having already endured Abby’s infidelity, Brooke is pushed past her breaking point by two further acts of exclusion: the official dismissal of her custody plea and the symbolic rejection by her friends, who change their community gate code. This total social exile eradicates any remaining hope for support. Her vow that she “hope[s] their secrets destroy[] all their lives the same way they’d destroyed [Brooke’s]” (185) marks her transition to a disruptor. Unlike Whitney, who seeks to control the fallout of betrayal, Brooke seeks to weaponize the group’s secrets to ensure mutual ruin.
The novel’s critique of The Performance of Motherhood and Social Status crystallizes in the stark contrast between Brooke’s public castigation and Jade’s private manipulations. Brooke’s emergency custody hearing serves as a public trial of her maternal fitness, where her emotional distress is interpreted as a sign of mental illness and potential abusiveness. The judge’s assessment of her social media videos as an “immediate red flag” demonstrates how a woman’s public display of pain can be weaponized against her by systems that prize composure (208). Conversely, Jade’s fabrication of her daughter’s cancer illustrates how the performance of motherhood can twist actual maternal feeling. She crafts a narrative of selfless suffering to elicit sympathy, manipulate her friends, and provide cover for an affair. This calculated deceit is, for a time, socially rewarded, even as she exploits and abuses her child. The juxtaposition of these two mothers—one penalized for her authentic crisis, the other rewarded for her fraudulent one—comments on a society that values the appearance of perfect motherhood over its messy reality.
The narrative structure in this section reinforces The Unreliability of Perception in a World of Deceit through the sequencing of “Now” and “Then” chapters. By presenting the origins of Jade and Colin’s affair in flashbacks alongside Whitney’s discovery of it in the present, the author asks the reader to constantly re-evaluate characters—for instance, to see Jade not just as a deceitful friend in the present, but also as a woman wrestling with temptation in the past. This dual perspective complicates simplistic judgments and underscores the fragmented nature of objective truth.
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