“Besides,” Chess adds now, guiding me farther into the house, “people get murdered in all kinds of houses, so why not gorgeous villas?”
She has a point, but it isn’t the elegance of the house that I was thinking about. It’s that this place exudes a warmth, a serenity that feels totally at odds with someone getting their brains bashed in.
But I don’t want to think about any of that right now.
Right now, I want a shower, a glass of wine, and at least two hours of sitting on that patio outside, thinking about absolutely nothing at all.
“Do you want the big tour?” Chess asks, sweeping a hand out in front of her.
I don’t, really. I think it might be fun to explore the house completely on my own, finding out its secrets and surprises for myself.
But I can tell that Chess has been looking forward to this, playing Lady of the Manor, so I smile. “Go for it.”
She claps her hands, then threads her arm through mine, pulling me along.
It’s smaller than I’d thought it would be, cozier. You hear “villa,” and you start thinking of some sprawling mansion with wings and secret passageways. But Villa Aestas is homier than that. There’s an appropriately grand staircase just past the front door, leading up to a landing with a hallway on either end, bedrooms branching off in both directions. There are at least four bedrooms that I see, and Chess leads me to one on the right, opening a door with a flourish.
“Obviously if you don’t like it, you can pick one of the others, but this room felt the most Em-ish to me,” she says. She’s leaning against the doorframe, smiling her Chess-iest smile, and, as always, she’s right.
This bedroom is small, but it faces the pond and the sloping back lawn, and in the distance, I can just make out the walls of Orvieto.
There’s a white desk under the window, and the bed is done up in shades of blue, calm against the white walls with their framed prints of bucolic Umbrian scenes. Lace-trimmed curtains float in the breeze. The room is perfect, down to the details, like it’s a movie set.
“Admit that I’m good,” Chess says, and I turn to her, my throat suddenly tight.
“You’re the best,” I reply, and I mean it. Not just because she’s invited me here, or because she picked out this lovely space for me, but because, for all the weirdness that’s happened between us over all the time I’ve known her, she really, truly is my best friend.
She hugs me again, her grip tight, and then pulls back. “You’re going to write so many brilliant words at that desk, I just know it.”
I give a slightly watery laugh, rubbing my nose. “You have more faith in me than I do.”
Chess shrugs, drifting back toward the door. “I always have.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I end up getting that glass of wine and those hours to myself, sitting in a padded lounge chair on the patio, eventually drifting off, awakening to the sun setting and the mouthwatering smell of roast chicken, lemons, and garlic drifting from the open door to the kitchen.
I find Chess there, a dishcloth tucked into her belt as she stirs a pot on the stove, her own glass of wine in one hand. Her phone sits on the counter, and I hear music playing from hidden speakers somewhere in the house. It takes me a minute to pick out the tune, and when I do, I laugh, making her turn around.
“Are you seriously cooking and listening to Avril Lavigne?” I ask her, and she gestures at me with her spoon, dripping some kind of viscous sauce on the stovetop.
“I am listening to my incredibly special ‘Em and Chess BFFs Playlist,’ thank you very much.”
She nods at her phone, and I pick it up. Sure enough, she’s got a playlist pulled up called “JessieC+EmmyMac4Eva （1998–2018）” filled with songs that bring back an avalanche of memories from all the years we’ve known each other, from singing into hairbrushes in her bedroom to drunken karaoke the night before my wedding.
Even the title is nostalgic. “Jessie C” and “Emmy Mac” were old nicknames for each other. I stopped using hers because she never liked people referring to her as any normal offshoot of Jessica, and she’d stopped using mine once I’d become Emily Sheridan instead of Emily McCrae.
But it’s nice, seeing those old versions of ourselves side by side again.
Touched, I put the phone back down and push myself onto the counter, feet dangling as I watch her cook. “Why does it end in 2018?” I ask, and she turns, a wrinkle of confusion between her brows.
“Hmm?”
“The playlist,” I say. “It starts in 1998, which was the year we met, but it ends, like, five years ago.”
“Ah,” she says, turning back around. “I made it for our twentieth anniversary party.”
Now it’s my turn to be confused. “What twentieth anniversary party?”
“The one I was going to throw,” Chess replies as the music shifts into something from High School Musical. “It was going to be this huge thing, like a real anniversary party, but a friendship anniversary. I was gonna have it at my place in Kiawah, invite all our friends, family. Everybody.”
It sounds sweet, but also slightly unhinged, which is kind of Chess’s entire brand. “Why didn’t you do it?”
She turns back to me, placing the spoon in a little ceramic cradle on the counter and folding her arms. “Well, I got busy. That was the year The Powered Path came out in paperback, and suddenly everything went…”
She waves her hands around because is there any word that can sum up just how nuts things went with that book? Chess had been successful before that, of course. Things My Mama Never Taught Me had done really well, and The Powered Path hardcover had done even better, but the paperback had really skyrocketed.
That’s when Oprah had happened, and Chess had suddenly been on TV, in magazines, the kind of famous that meant people actually recognized her on the street.
“And then you were so busy,” she continues, then gives me a look out of the side of her eye. “Wasn’t that the year Matt started all the Baby Stuff?”
Ah, yes. The Baby Stuff.
That had come later, actually. It started Thanksgiving a couple of years ago when Matt got up at our family dinner, held my hand, and announced to everyone that we had decided to “start trying for a family.”
We’d talked about it hypothetically, not in a way that felt all that serious, and I certainly hadn’t wanted to announce it to anyone. I still remember sitting there, my hand sweaty against Matt’s palm, my face red as I thought, Do my parents really need to know that we’re about to start having a lot of sex?
But that was Matt. Very much a “state your intentions, follow through” kind of guy, and my parents had looked so genuinely happy about the idea, and it just felt easy to go along with it all, I guess. Like Chess, Matt was good at kind of sweeping you up in his plans while making you think it had been your idea all along.
I hadn’t known it then, but that was the beginning of the end. That Thanksgiving dinner with Matt shooting me a look for refilling my wineglass even though I definitely wasn’t pregnant yet, and my mom pulling up her Ancestry.com account to see what family names we might want to use, and my brothers joking about who would be the favorite uncle, and me thinking, This is great, this is what I want, I’m just out of sorts that he announced it so early, that’s all.