50 pages • 1-hour read
Keep Your Friends Close
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Chapters 9-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, graphic violence, substance use, addiction, mental illness, emotional abuse, death by suicide, gender discrimination, and sexual content.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Now: Brooke”
Fifty-two hours after the incident, Brooke learns from a news report that Kiersten was 10 weeks pregnant. She reflects on the insular West Hollywood Moms’ Club, which she joined through Abby, and notes that none of the women have contacted her.
Detective Perez texts Brooke, asking her to come to the station. Almost immediately, Natasha, a club member, creates a group text called “THE SIX”: The others, including the club’s co-leader, Whitney, report receiving the same request. The group decides to meet before speaking with the police.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Now: Jade”
On the morning of the meeting, Jade rushes to clean her house, stressed by mounting bills and her family’s dependence on her. She sends her husband, Ryan, and their older daughter, Lily, to the park. Her baby, Iris, stays home with a fever.
Jade resents Ryan’s unreliability but recalls her therapist’s advice to treat him like an adult. She sets out drinks and snacks and prepares to host.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Now: Brooke”
Brooke arrives at Jade’s house with a plant. Two club members, Colleen and Taylor, arrive together, crying over the news of Kiersten’s pregnancy. Whitney shows up last, disheveled and shocked to learn about the pregnancy. Natasha enters and sits apart.
The women discuss the upcoming police interviews. Taylor says that the police know they used edibles and mentions a rumor that Kiersten died by suicide. Whitney rejects the idea. When the other women ask what to tell detectives, Whitney insists that they tell the truth.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Then: Brooke”
Brooke returns home from a night out to find a note from Abby saying that she has left, leaving Julian with her mother. Earlier that evening, Brooke had confided in Kiersten about her marriage.
Brooke is frustrated but not surprised by the lack of information in the note. After Abby announced that she was ending the relationship, Brooke began stalking Abby and installed a keylogger on her phone. Brooke recalls Abby abruptly saying she wanted a divorce and remembers how the other mothers refused to get involved, leaving her isolated.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Now: Whitney”
Whitney arrives at the Beverly Hills Police Department with her husband, Colin, for her interview. Detective Perez informs her that Kiersten suffered blunt force trauma to the head before drowning and that the case is now a homicide investigation. She explains that security footage shows only the six women at the house when the death occurred.
Whitney claims that she knew about Kiersten’s pregnancy and states that Kiersten’s husband, Tommy, is the father. When Perez asks who might be capable of killing, Whitney immediately identifies Brooke.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Now: Brooke”
Brooke arrives at the station and is surprised to see Abby there, going in first for her interview. When Brooke sits down, Detective Perez says that the other women have voiced concern about her mental state. She asks about a party three weeks earlier, when Brooke, who had begun drinking again, attacked Abby’s new girlfriend, Liza.
Perez confirms that she is investigating a homicide and tells Brooke that all the other women named her as capable of hurting Kiersten. Brooke pushes back, telling her that Whitney and Kiersten had been fighting for weeks due to growing jealousy and tension.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Then: Whitney”
Whitney meets Kiersten at a café, debating whether to tell her that Colin has begun gambling again. She thinks about Colin’s long pattern of addiction and remembers how Kiersten and Tommy supported them during past interventions. However, when Kiersten asks what is wrong, Whitney lies and blames PMS. Withholding Colin’s relapse marks the first major secret she keeps from her best friend.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Now: Jade”
Jade meets Whitney at a coffee shop. They align their alibis for the time of death: Whitney was in a guest room pumping breast milk and may have dozed off, while Jade was with Taylor. They conclude that this leaves Brooke, Natasha, and Colleen unaccounted for.
After dismissing other theories, they focus on Brooke, and both admit that they told Perez they suspected her. Whitney proposes confronting Brooke to press for a confession, and Jade agrees.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Now: Brooke”
The next day, Brooke goes to Whitney’s gated home; she has been invited over but suspects a setup. Seeing Jade’s car parked there, she only grows more alarmed when Whitney greets her with forced cheer.
Inside, Brooke has a panic attack, convinced that Whitney and Jade killed Kiersten and now plan to harm or frame her. She realizes that she made a mistake by coming.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Now: Jade”
Seeing Brooke’s fear, Jade regrets the plan. Whitney presses Brooke about her police interview and her alibi during the murder. Brooke says that she was in the bathroom with an upset stomach.
Whitney asks if Brooke drank that night, and Brooke retorts that Whitney was not sober either. As the argument escalates, Jade tries to intervene. Brooke points at Whitney and insists that Whitney “knows exactly what she’s doing (108).
Chapter 19 Summary: “Now: Whitney”
The next day, Detective Perez and another officer arrive unannounced at Whitney’s house. Perez states that she knows that Whitney runs an unlicensed escort service. Whitney admits it, saying she needed the money to cover Colin’s gambling debts.
Whitney describes a recent problem in which a client, Allen Grigsby, stalked an escort named Devin. When Whitney refuses to hand over Devin’s information, Perez threatens to pursue sex trafficking charges and announces that a forensic team will search the house and seize her business records. Since her nanny is present, Whitney agrees to cooperate.
Chapters 9-19 Analysis
By juxtaposing the characters’ internal monologues with their public actions, the narrative continues to expose the chasm between appearance and reality. The back-to-back police interviews in Chapters 13 and 14 exemplify this technique. From Whitney’s perspective, naming Brooke as a potential murderer is a logical conclusion. However, she strategically omits her own secrets, thereby positioning herself as a more credible witness than she is. Brooke’s interview, which follows immediately afterward, reframes the group dynamic, revealing simmering tensions between Whitney and Kiersten. This revelation, which Whitney concealed, casts doubt not merely on Whitney’s words to the police but also on the story she tells herself. Asked to provide an alibi, Whitney is incredulous, reflecting, “All respect I’d held toward [Perez] for being such a badass was gone. Poof. If she thought that was what was going on here [i.e., that Whitney murdered Kiersten], then she was way off base” (71). Yet even her own narration hints at schisms in the friendship—she is hurt, for instance, that Kiersten concealed her pregnancy—suggesting that The Unreliability of Perception in a World of Deceit extends to self-perception. Chapter 16 amplifies the dramatic irony as Jade aligns her alibi with Whitney before they agree to confront Brooke. By providing readers with a more complete view of events, the novel demonstrates how personal biases and omissions construct each character’s version of reality.
This emphasis on performance is central to the novel’s critique of The Performance of Motherhood and Social Status. Brooke’s narration in Chapter 9 establishes her as an outsider because she fails to meet the group’s exacting standards. She feels the group’s disappointment that “it [is] [Brooke] and not Abby” who is present (47), revealing that membership is about accumulating the right social connections. Jade’s frantic efforts to sanitize her house before the other women arrive further illustrate this concern. Her anxiety isn’t about comforting grieving friends but about managing how her life appears, hiding financial disaster behind hospitality. The women’s interactions are exchanges meant to maintain a collective image of perfect motherhood. Any break from this act, like Brooke’s emotional outbursts, is seen as a social mistake. The effort to keep up this appearance—and the lies that effort requires—fuels the envy and resentment that cause the group to fall apart.
The Corrosive Power of Secrets in Friendships thus remains a central interest in these chapters. The “Then” flashback in Chapter 15 is a pivotal moment that pinpoints the origin of the decay in Whitney and Kiersten’s bond. Whitney’s conscious decision to hide her husband’s gambling relapse is, according to Whitney herself, the first major secret between them: “I’d never kept anything from her. Not once. That’s all I could think about on the drive home” (93). Born of shame, the choice introduces a fundamental dishonesty into the relationship’s foundation, normalizing deceit and making larger secrets possible.
Amid this web of deceit, Brooke’s characterization offers a psychological study of how trauma is perceived and weaponized. The narrative provides a dual lens through which to view her: the external perception of her as dangerous and the internal reality of her distress. To the other women, her erratic behavior makes her the most logical suspect. From Brooke’s own perspective, these actions are manifestations of trauma. Her paranoia stems from her awareness of her outsider status, as she correctly intuits that she is being targeted. During the confrontation in Chapter 17, her panic attack is a response to being cornered, while her final, biting accusation toward Whitney, “Oh, she knows exactly what she’s doing” (108), implies how easily and conveniently female expressions of grief and anger are pathologized—in this case, written off as evidence of addiction in a way that allows the other women to displace their own culpability.
The use of dramatic irony, particularly within the characters’ dialogue, is a tool for social critique. For example, at the meeting at Jade’s house, the six women gather under the pretense of mutual support, ostensibly to align their stories before speaking with the police. Everyone is hiding secrets, so Whitney’s resolute declaration to tell the police “the truth” lands with hypocrisy. The statement is a performative gesture of innocence, delivered by a woman who has already decided to lie and is currently running an escort empire from her home under the guise of a talent agency. The irony underscores the characters’ distortions of the truth in the service of self-preservation, which extends to their honesty with themselves.
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