The Villa(64)

I want to tell a particular person.

I want to tell Chess.

Even after everything.

She’s the only one who will get this, who will get why it’s so significant. And she’ll make these other connections, find different ways of looking at the story.

She’ll take it, another part of my brain reminds me. This is yours. With these papers, if you can get them verified, you don’t just have a measly $10,000 payment for a cozy mystery, you get a chunk of a seven-figure advance. You pay your lawyer. You get even better, scarier lawyers, and you keep every dime of your money, forever.

So I shove down that stupid, childish impulse, that desire to run to my best friend, to confide all my secrets. Instead, I keep listening to Aestas, keep making notes, and later, I sleep and I dream, but all my dreams are of bloodshed and screams, and Chess is there—she’s always there, somehow.

I can’t avoid her forever and, after hiding Mari’s pages even better than I did before, I make my way downstairs the next morning.

I’ll confront her, I’ve decided. Tell her what I found, what I read. She can’t be mad given that she did the same damn thing to me, and her betrayal is now a lot fucking bigger than mine.

Chess is on the phone when I get downstairs, standing in the kitchen, and I’m just about to interrupt her when something makes me pull up short.

It’s the way she’s standing.

The late morning light is making a halo around her, and Chess could be sixteen again. She has one foot crossed in front of the other, her head tilted down as she talks into her cell phone, and her free hand is playing with the neckline of her shirt.

“Well, if you didn’t miss me, I’d be worried,” she says, and whatever the person on the other end says makes her laugh.

“Baby, you know this stuff takes time,” she all but purrs, her voice rich with promise, and I back out of the kitchen before she’s seen me.

Chess isn’t dating anyone as far as I know, but it’s not totally unthinkable that there might be a guy she just hadn’t mentioned. Chess hasn’t been serious about anyone in a long time, but there are always men around. This must just be one of them.

But she was almost whispering, keeping her voice low. Like she was hiding from me.

Why?

And it’s more than that. It’s completely crazy, but there’s something about the furtive way she was talking that reminds me of those times I’d walk in on Matt, speaking in that low voice to whoever was on the other end of the line. An illicit intimacy that I wasn’t part of.

It’s not a comfortable comparison, but it lodges there in my brain and I can’t stop touching it, like a sore tooth.

I’m settled by the pool when Chess finally comes out of the house. I’m pretending to read Lilith Rising again even though, at this point, I practically have it memorized.

“There you are!” she says brightly. “I’ve missed you!”

I look at her smiling face and think, You lying bitch.

But I smile back. “Same. But I’m feeling better now, so I’m trying to soak up these last few days.”

“Ugh, I know. Can you believe we only have a week left?”

“Fastest summer of my life.”

“That’s what happens when you spend it with your bestie,” she says, and I grit my teeth and nod.

“Yup. So, who was on the phone?”

Chess had been turning to go back inside, but she pauses now, facing me. “What?”

“Earlier I came down, and you were on the phone.”

Tell me it was some guy you’re seeing. Tell me it was some guy who’d like to be seeing you. Just don’t lie to me. If you lie to me, I’ll have to ask myself why.

“Oh.” She waves that off. “Just my mom. You know Nanci, doesn’t want a thing from me until suddenly she wants everything from me. I guess Beau is late on condo payments, so it’s Chess to the rescue again!”

I watch as she walks back inside, the pages of Lilith Rising squeezed tight in my hand.



* * *



WE’RE IN THE drawing room that night, the room I’ve started thinking of as our room, sitting on the sofas opposite each other. Music is playing again, Aestas, of course, but Chess is typing away on her laptop while I’m flipping through my phone. We’ve got wine on the table, but neither of us is really drinking it, and I keep stealing glances at her.

Rose’s email came in this afternoon. Just a short couple of lines, telling me she hasn’t heard anything from Matt’s lawyers, so no, of course she hadn’t mentioned the new book idea to them.

I read it three times before deleting it.

It can’t be Chess. It can’t be Chess and Matt. That doesn’t make any fucking sense. The guy she dated before Nigel had been a hedge-fund guy who drove a McLaren and owned a yacht. Matt got seasick on a cruise to Cabo San Lucas.

It’s Mari’s pages, getting in my head, that mess with her and Pierce and Lara. That’s what’s making me suspect Chess.

Or maybe I’m just looking for another reason to be angry at Chess. Something solid and valid, something that feels a little less petty than, You were mean about me in your book!

But this is the last thing I should want, because I’m not sure I could survive it. Matt’s betrayal hurt, but Chess doing that to me …