Her smile goes brittle. “Well, it’s not like nonfiction was yours, but here we are.” She gives a little laugh at that, waving one hand in the air. “We both brought our respective strengths to The Villa. That’s what readers responded to.”
What they responded to was Chess’s name, my writing, and the story we could tell them, but I don’t say that.
“We did,” I agree instead, “but lightning isn’t going to strike twice, let’s be real. And what are we supposed to do, stay at another famous murder house, hope another terrible thing happens that we can write about?”
Chess leans forward, her eyes bright. “Okay, you say that like it’s crazy, but what if we did do something kind of like that? Not with the tragedy aspect, but finding other places where famous murders happened, writing about them, what they meant, why people are still interested…”
What she means is that she’ll find a spot, and I’ll end up doing all the work. That’s how it was on The Villa. Seventy percent of that book is the book I started, me, alone, by myself in Orvieto. Why should I have to share with Chess again?
“That might make us seem a little one-trick pony,” I tell her now, opening my menu. Two years ago, the prices would’ve made my eyes water, but now, I can order two of everything and hardly blink.
At times like this, I feel such a weird mix of emotions. There’s guilt, sometimes. I’d be a monster if it didn’t raise its head occasionally. But mostly there’s satisfaction.
Cut yourself free, Noel had told Mari, and she had.
So had I.
But, as I look across the table now, I wonder how free I actually am.
“Well, maybe it’s something to think about,” she says with a shrug that is clearly meant to be read as lighthearted, but actually looks like she’s having some kind of muscle spasm. “I mean, we’re a package deal these days, right?”
What can I say to that?
I’m not so stupid that I don’t get that a huge part of the appeal of The Villa was me and Chess, best friends since childhood, experiencing this tragedy together. And what we did in Orvieto …
That binds you together a lot more than any pinky promise or friendship bracelet ever could.
It was the only way, I tell myself for what must be the millionth time. It’s practically a mantra by now. Matt was the problem, Matt was what drove you apart, and look at all you’ve done now that he’s gone. Just like Mari. Just like Lara.
But on the heels of that, as always, is the other thought.
If Matt was the problem, why don’t you want to write with Chess again?
The waiter stops at the table, his black vest crisp against his white shirt. “Compliments of the ladies by the window,” he says, holding out a very nice bottle of Chardonnay, and Chess and I both glance over to see a gaggle of women watching us expectantly. They’re around our ages, their clothes chic, their hair expensively highlighted, and when Chess and I both wave in acknowledgment and thanks, they dissolve into excited laughs and chatter.
The bottle opened, our glasses poured, Chess and I look at each other.
She raises her glass, dewy with condensation, the Chardonnay inside a sickly yellow. “A toast,” she says. “To The Villa.”
“To The Villa,” I echo, raising my own glass. “And friendship.”
Chess smiles at that, and for a second, I’m ten years old again, and she’s leaning over my desk, smelling like strawberry-scented markers.
I’m glad I’m next to you.
Then her smile curdles. “To secrets,” she adds. “And partnership.”
And that’s when I know this doesn’t end. Any chance I ever had of freeing myself from any of this drowned in that lake with Matt.
I chose Chess.
And I chose her forever.
I clink my glass against hers, and it sounds like a door slamming shut.
“To us.”
MARI, 1993—ORVIETO
No one understands why she wants to come back.
Mari isn’t even actually sure that she understands it herself. It’s just that when she sat in that doctor’s office on Ebury Street and heard those words—inoperable, too far gone, I’m afraid, dreadfully sorry, three months if you’re lucky, less if you’re not—her only thought had been of returning to Villa Rosato, and spending one last summer there.
She won’t get a full summer, she knows. There are no more full seasons left for her. But a week, a week in the sunshine of Italy—that she can have, and so that she takes.
It’s not called Villa Rosato anymore, though. It’s been renamed Villa Aestas, thanks to Lara and her remarkable album, and when Mari hears the travel agent say that over the phone, she has to cover the mouthpiece with one hand while she lets out a sob.
Lara has been gone for more than a decade by then, and of all the things Mari hates about losing her sister so soon, this is the one that hurts the most. How fitting that Lara, the one person it seemed no one wanted there that summer, should be the one to claim the villa in the end.
How she would’ve loved it.
Lara feels so present to her in that house. For the first two days, Mari wanders the hallways and half expects to see her sister around every corner, giggling or sulking, her dark eyes brighter than stars.
Noel is there, too. He slouches on the sofas in her memory, he sings from a rowboat out on the pond, he winks at her from his favorite spot by the fireplace, and there are times she swears she can still smell his cologne, like he’s just left the room.
If Johnnie is still there, she won’t let herself think of him.
But Pierce …
Pierce haunts every one of her steps.
He was not a good man. She can understand that now, at thirty-eight, in a way she didn’t at nineteen. He wanted to be good, but he didn’t know how, and he took his selfishness and immaturity and tried to make them into virtues, not flaws.
But he was young. He was so bloody young. They all were, and they’d made terrible choices, and they’d mucked it all up like young people do, but they had been trying to be something better.
Something bigger.
It’s the memory of Pierce that sends her back to that little desk under the window, that has her pen moving yet again. The real story of that summer, all the ugly bits, but the beautiful parts, too. That night with Pierce and Noel, the first time she heard Aestas.
Mari even lets Johnnie have his goodness, because he did have some, after all. It was there inside him that day by the pond, when he told Mari her hair was gorgeous and he smiled his crooked smile.
She writes and writes until she gets to the last night, the night that ended everything.
Mari has spent nearly twenty years not thinking about that night, but she lets herself remember it all now.
She was sitting at her desk, finishing Lilith Rising, the storm raging outside, and from somewhere downstairs, Pierce was calling her name.
She’d ignored it. The end of the book was too close; she was too close, and what could Pierce possibly want?
The heavy sounds, those meaty thwacks, her annoyance, her If he and Johnnie are fighting again, I swear to god …
And then finishing the book. Writing The End.
She had wanted to share that moment of accomplishment with Pierce, despite all of it, so she’d gone downstairs and walked straight into a nightmare.