The Chateau: A Novel

By Jaclyn Goldis

A dream girls trip to a luxurious French chateau devolves into a deadly nightmare of secrets and lies in this “twisty, well-paced murder mystery that never fully lets go” (Sarah Penner, New York Times bestselling author).

Welcome to picturesque Provence, where the Lady of the Chateau, Séraphine Demargelasse, has opened its elegant doors to her granddaughter Darcy and her three friends. Twenty years earlier, the four girlfriends studied abroad together in France and visited the old woman on the weekends, creating the group’s deep bond. But why this sudden invitation?

Amid winery tours, market visits, and fancy dinners overlooking olive groves and lavender fields, it becomes clear that each woman has a hidden reason for returning to the estate after all these years. Then, following a wild evening’s celebration, Séraphine is found brutally murdered.

In the midst of this shocking crime, a sinister Instagram account pops up, exposing snapshots from the friends’ intimate moments at the chateau, while threatening to reveal more.

As they race to uncover who murdered Séraphine—and is now stalking them—the friends begin to suspect each other. Because the chateau houses many secrets…several worth killing for in this “mesmerizing story of betrayal and revenge” (Megan Collins, author of The Family Plot).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
• Release date: May 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781668013038

Jaclyn Goldis

Jaclyn Goldis is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and NYU School of Law. She practiced estate planning law at a large Chicago firm for seven years before leaving her job to travel the world and write novels. After culling her possessions into only what would fit in a backpack, she traveled for over a year until settling in Tel Aviv, where she can often be found writing from cafés near the beach. She is the author of The Chateau and The Main Character.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Jade

In the prelude to sunrise, just after I’ve returned to my room and drifted back off to sleep, I awaken to a scream. I bolt up in bed, shove my sleep mask off my face. I reach out to toggle the lamp, but where is the switch? Disorientation in the dead of night is doubled when you’re across the world, in someone else’s home. Finally, I grasp the switch and wince as light illuminates the cavernous room, the herringbone marble fireplace and towering windows framed in gauzy cream drapes, the leafy branches of an oak tree swishing against the exterior of the panes. In the thick silence that has ensued, I analyze the sound I thought I heard—its scratchy, desperate contours. Did I dream it? I sag back into my nest of pillows. I suppose I did.

I grab my phone to see if one of the girls has texted. No text, and mercifully no Instagram notification from @imwatchingyou88. Only the time blinks back at me. 6:05. So I stole not even ten minutes of sleep after returning from my little errand. My heart slaps my chest—did someone see me? Does someone know?

No. Impossible. I force my mind to turn over other affairs—the fact that my birthday is officially over. Forty. Thank the Lord. Thirty-nine felt like a forced march, but now that I’m here, in this new decade, I remind myself, again, that I have everything I’ve ever wanted. A kind, gorgeous husband; two amazing kids; a career that has steadily skyrocketed. And I’m hotter than ever, hotter even than most of the twenty-four-year-olds who clamor to take my spin classes. Forty isn’t our grandmothers’ forty, right?

My unconvincing pep talk is interrupted by another scream. My breath stalls, hovers, until I gulp for it. The sound rollercoasters my eardrums. I’ve never heard anything so primal. And its origin is clear. Darcy.

I hear footsteps outside my door. Arabelle?

Belle? When there is no answer, I shout, I’m coming! The few words I manage sandpaper my throat. Darcy needs me. Us. Someone. But still I am fixed in place to this linen duvet.

In the twenty years Darcy Demargelasse Bell has been my best friend, I’ve hardly ever heard her scream. Darcy is exceedingly patient and compassionate, not the type to overreact. Recently, though, I’ve witnessed her in a couple of disproportionate blowups—an unusually short fuse with her kids, with Oliver. It’s not nice of me to say, and I wouldn’t aloud. These are the kindnesses best friends pay each other, to trip over each other’s failings and then straighten out the rug.

Silence has once again descended like a tarp on the chateau. I pad down from the bed and reach for my tee draped on the olive velvet chaise, then tug it back on. My feet shiver against the terra-cotta tiles. For a moment the view from my window transfixes me: the manicured grounds, the still swimming pool, the shimmering moon. It is a Starry Night, like the one conceived by Vincent van Gogh, who painted his most acclaimed works at a sanitorium nearby. His muse was this very horizon that has shaped me in indelible ways.

I think about what I vowed before coming here. What I still must do.

Then my eyes catch on a shadowy figure on the outskirts of the pool, wandering past the hedges. Raph? The groundskeeper. But why would he be walking about before morning? I step closer to the window, but then he’s gone, disappeared around the corner, back to his little cabin on the outskirts of the property, I presume.

It is the lovely part of summer in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. June. I’ve never been here in summertime, but this isn’t my first time at Séraphine’s grand chateau. Darcy used to bring all of us to visit her grandmother during the semester we met, when we studied abroad in Avignon, fifteen miles away. This time of year, lavender fields swathe the countryside, providing endless backdrop fodder for all the tourists who flock. But summer aside, my teeth are now chattering like someone banging on a door knocker. My nerves are the obvious puppeteers.

Darcy is staying upstairs, down the hall from her grandmother’s suite. Across from Vix’s room, too. Arabelle and I are on the main floor in the hall by the stairs, across from each other. For me to hear Darcy scream from upstairs in this massive place, she had to scream really loudly, right? I bite down on my lip, then set out the door. Shuffles of feet echo ahead of me.

Arabelle? I call out. No answer. Anyway, didn’t she pass by before?

My head is fuzzy from the previous evening’s revelries, and buzzing from what I just did, only a little time ago. God, how much did I drink last night? I’m usually a strictly kombucha girl. Why did I let Darcy insist on that last shot of pastis?

Voices above, but I can’t yet make out their edges. Shadows ping off the walls like intruders.

Suddenly I hear weeping and then a different cry overlaid, more strangled. It is clear now that life will divide into a before and after this morning. This pronouncement may sound dramatic, but I have a compass for trauma. Not mine, necessarily, but that of those who came before me. And is there really a difference, when it all converges in your bones?

The cold stone floor absorbs my tentative footsteps. Somehow, I can’t coax myself up the last step. My icicle feet make me think of Darcy. When for years she struggled to get pregnant, one doctor asked if she wore slippers. When she said no, that she liked the feel of wood floor on her soles, he shrugged. Cold feet, cold uterus. When I heard this, I felt like punching the guy. Instead I brought her UGG slippers. I remember how we hugged, and I said, fiercely, Warm fucking uterus. Okay?

When I finally dart past the landing, I see the door flung open to Séraphine’s suite. Inside the opulent room, Arabelle hovers at the mouth of the door, her face sucked of color—the same gray as her silk pajamas. Then Vix is standing and Darcy kneeling, both beside the imposing poster bed made of mahogany wood and rich-people carvings. I walk slowly over. My eyes rove to the crimson stains on the sheets. The unmoving shape. The knife plunged in her chest.

Yes, the old bitch is dead.

I close my eyes, and my hand goes to the necklace at my throat. One diamond. The only one that remains.

When I open my eyes, I’m going to have to rearrange my face into something that resembles upset.

CHAPTER TWO

Darcy

Two Days Before

Come mark your collective onset into middle age with a woman so old she will make you feel young again.

I run my fingers over the thick cream invitation, embossed with Grand-mère’s coat of arms. Three lions pawing at a crown. In case the calligraphy doesn’t scream it, the coat of arms does: We are important people.

Well, Grand-mère’s money screams it, too.

I like the coat of arms. I use it on my own stationery.

Middle age, though—is forty middle age? Surely not. That’s fifty, right? Or at least forty-five. Leave it to Grand-mère to subtly twist the knife.

Anyway, yes, I am forty, two months in. Vix turned forty six months ago. Arabelle, two years ago. She’s the group grandma, and she accepts the label with grace. Probably because she’s the hands-down stunner, the one who most turns heads. Also, she looks like she’s thirty-two, max. And Jade is the baby. Still thirty-nine. Her birthday is tomorrow. We’ll be at the chateau together. Jade says not to go out of our way, that she wants something small—yet we will give her something big. Or I will. I’m the one who plans these things, and I’ll say it’s from all of us. Forty deserves it. A grand surprise. Though when I said I wanted something small for mine, Jade threw me a cozy dinner party at her Hamptons place. With quail. Somehow the quail of it makes me irritated all over again.

Mama. Sticky Mila fingers on my biceps. Are we there yet?

Not yet. I gaze down tenderly at my four-year-old daughter’s perfect, innocent face—strawberry blond hair like me, big blue eyes like Oliver’s. The best of us, both her and Chase. Deservedly so. In the end, the reward did match our effort. We’re still on the descent, angel. Nearly there.

Well, when we get to France, Mila says it with her father’s Midwest a, can I take a picture of the world?

Of course. I grin at Oliver on Mila’s other side—a genuine smile, even though my stomach crimps. Oliver grins back, pinned down by our sleeping one-and-a-half-year-old son, Chase, who still qualifies as a lap child. I know that later we will quote Mila’s take-a-picture-of-the-world to each other, smiling in satisfaction at the perfect humans we have created.

Mila focuses back on the goats she is coloring in her Provence coloring book. I found it at one of those niche Francophile stores in Williamsburg where Brooklyn parents swarm to infuse their children with culture.

I glance back at the invitation, reading again the peculiar sentence scrawled in ink in French, right below the calligraphy. The translation of it being:

And Darcy, I must speak to you about my Last Will and Testament. Remind me, if I don’t remember.

Grand-mère’s Will? Fear scratches my insides. And why would Grand-mère not remember?

At ninety-four, Grand-mère’s memory is still exceptional. She remembers every maid and the decades of their transgressions. All of my friends, and their transgressions, too. Her memory for the wrongs has always superseded the rights. But I haven’t seen her in a year. Has there been a decline? We don’t speak on the phone. Grand-mère doesn’t believe in the phone, or the internet. She believes in letters. Letters are civilized. (The fax machine is, peculiarly, allowed. It’s why I am the only person in the greater New York area who still owns one.) Grand-mère has a lot of beliefs, and she expects everyone around her to share the same, precise ones.

Why did Grand-mère invite my friends and me for this trip? This question has been circling my mind for the few weeks since she summoned us. The last time Grand-mère had us all together was nearly twenty years ago. Grand-mère likes my friends, of course. We used to visit her chateau on the weekends when we studied abroad. But that was ages ago. And why invite just us? Women only. No husbands? No kids?

The rest of the girls think the invitation innocuous—an old lady looking for some kicks. But I know her well enough to be certain there is more to it.

My eyes flit toward the window to take in the view, but on their way my eyes are distracted by Mila’s mussed hair and Chase’s wispy baldness and Oliver’s thick black hair that he’s recently grown out so the top part swoops up, with the sides shorn. I think of the thousands of times my hands have tangled in my husband’s hair. I love looking at their heads, all three of them. Counting them. Reassuring myself they are there. Remembering. Hair turns to love turns to sex turns to… darker things, too.

But now I need the treetops. My eyes greedily mop up the view. We are almost to Avignon, but it’s not the same somehow. Disappointment floods me, but not surprise. I expected this, the dulling of what this place used to do to me. I am like an addict who has turned to my drug one too many times. There isn’t a dose big enough now to make me forget. It used to reassure me, the first glimpse of the trees, but now as the clouds have gone and green twists across the brown, I feel like a dinghy bobbing unmoored in a deep ocean.

Even though Oliver and the kids weren’t invited, we decided to make a family vacation out of it. Oliver and the kids will stay in town and do their own thing, and then after the reunion, we’ll all go to Paris. It’s been a bit of a sticking point between Oliver and me, because our finances aren’t exactly conducive to such a trip, but Oliver insisted, saying it would hardly make a dent in our credit card debt. Which is frightfully true. But in the end, Grand-mère covered most of our travel costs. And I’m enormously relieved that my first time ever sleeping away from my children will be mere miles, not across oceans. Jade has decided to come without her family, because her kids are older, in sleepaway camps now, and her husband is a principal in a venture capital fund, which is code for work-around-the-clock. Vix and her girlfriend recently broke up, and she doesn’t have kids. And Arabelle, also childless, lives in Nice with her husband, who stayed behind to run their hotel, one of the poshest in southern France. She’s driving into Saint-Rémy today.

I could be insulted that Grand-mère doesn’t care to see her own great-grandchildren, but what good would insult do? It is useless to feel emotions that have no hope of rectification. That’s a belief I inherited right from her. Anyway, I remember how long it took Grand-mère to engage with me. I was six, and we had tea, and my hands shook as I tried not to spill anything or leave behind crumbs on the antique brocade sofa.

The five of us together again. Grand-mère and her girls. That’s what she used to say. The most affection I’d ever heard her express, and it wasn’t directed at my grandfather, or my father or me. It was directed at my friends. Or maybe it was just directed at Vix—her beautiful, precious Victoria.

Can I do it, I wonder?

I am a mother. The mommiest mom, Jade recently accused me of being. She didn’t intend to wound me, but it hurt. I know I have taken mother as an identity—what defines me. I was empty before it, and mothering has filled me.

But for Jade it came easy. The first time she went off birth control, when she and Seb weren’t trying, but weren’t not trying. Those oops-I-got-pregnant girls still make my fists ball. And then just after Jade got her period again, when Sea was not even a year, she conceived Lux. I’ve always been happy for Jade, don’t get me wrong. Though even as I insist it to myself, I know there are layers underneath that I don’t feel like unpacking. Just, Jade is that type of person, who thinks life simply bends to her will. And because she thinks that, it does.

Whereas I tend to think life is a game. A deck of cards, really. And you don’t get to choose your hand, but you do get to choose your play.

This week with Grand-mère and my friends: This is my hand. And I have a plan. The only question is—do I have the guts to follow it through?

The plane makes a sharp, stomach-dropping descent, and my eyes catch on Oliver. He gives me an easy grin enunciated by the dimple in his left cheek, the same intoxicating package of a smile that just over a decade ago made me a goner. I used to think it was a smile that conveyed, I am a good man. I will love you and take care of you until the end.

I think we only see what we want to see, one hundred percent of the time.

Almost there, Oliver mouths. I convince my lips to smile back.

Then his eyes flutter closed. His head shifts to rest on the window, and I know my husband will fall into a quick sleep. Ten minutes until we land, but he will maximize it. Oliver is a gold-medal sleeper, fast and hard and long, difficult to rouse. The opposite of me.

My fingers find my phone. I flip quickly to our family album, thumb up through the icons until I land upon one picture in particular. The kids in coordinating Easter wear, holding chocolate bunnies, with Chase’s teeth gnashing, aiming to lop off a head. Chase: my miracle baby in more ways than one, having survived open-heart surgery as a newborn. If pictures could speak their view count, this one would say that I’ve hovered over it, zoomed in, stared until my eyes ached from the screen glare, at least a thousand times. My children are here, right here, but still, I like soaking in their sweetness from all angles, especially those of the near past. Mere months ago, but a far simpler time.

All of a sudden, I am certain. I can do it. I can, and I will.

CHAPTER THREE

Vix

I still can’t believe you checked a bag, Vix. Jade isn’t looking at me or my admittedly overstuffed suitcase; she’s reapplying her Pillow Talk trifecta. Lip gloss, lipstick, and liner, the latter of which glides on via this trick she learned on TikTok that involves her pouting her lips so she looks like a walrus.

I shrug. You and Arabelle are always doing runway-esque looks. I decided to step up my game.

There’s that pleasing sound of an expensive lipstick clicking shut as I sip on my café crème. I even ordered it like the cool French girls do, by referring to it as un crème. It’s about the only thing that’s stuck from study abroad. Which says more about my need to caffeinate than anything.

You’re the girl who insisted on a carry-on backpack through Cambodia, Vixen, Jade says. Er… Vix.

Silence. I look at the floor, compose myself. It’s strange how that nickname—what my closest friends have called me forever—can suddenly rouse in me something red hot.

We were practically infants in Cambodia, I say, shoving Vixen from my mind. "In your early twenties, you can actually wear a pair of flowy elephant pants every day, and still look hot. By the way, I did look hot. Do you want me to resurrect elephant pants?"

Jade smiles. I don’t want you to wear elephant pants. I mean, well… you do you.

I always do.

Actually, please do wear elephant pants. To dinner. I’d like to see Séraphine’s face.

I smile tightly. Jade is still scrutinizing me with an air of suspicion, like a private investigator, which I get. Minimalism is one of the qualities on which I pride myself. For instance, after the plane, I changed out of my sweats and into street wear: black bike shorts and a beige tee with shoulder pads, paired with my studded black sandals that Darcy calls orthopedic. (But Gen Z would call all the muumuus she wears cheugy. So really, who is the cool barometer here?) I can, and will, wear each of these items with several other things I’ve packed, all of which are currently rolled into compression cubes in my carry-on. I don’t get Jade’s reticence to re-wear items. When you buy your perfect piece, the nicest of its category that you hunted down and invested in, why wouldn’t you want to wear it over and over again?

I’m the friend Jade calls when Seb makes her cull the ten pairs of shoes she wants to bring for a weekend in Copenhagen. No, you don’t need two pairs of black boots. No, wedges aren’t their own category.

I won’t argue this point now, not when I am eager to switch off the topic of my luggage.

"Guys! Bonjour! Raph is here!" Thank God. Darcy. She whooshes in, not with her typical calm and even keel, but in a wave of frenetic energy, bags hanging off her like she’s a human coatrack.

Who’s Raph? I ask.

Darcy gives a quick cheek kiss to Jade, whom she no doubt saw within the past couple of days because those two do everything together. All three of us live in the New York area, but they do the type of things you do when you have kids, which unites them more frequently. As for me—it’s been a week since Darcy and I saw each other. She moves in for a hug, and I have that familiar debate with myself: hug, or awkwardly beg off. It’s easier just to hug. But still I can’t help but wince.

Oh shit. Darcy flings herself back and studies me with that concerned look I’ve come to despise. Shit, Vix. I don’t know how I forgot for a second. She pauses, then says, They feel bigger.

The doctor expanded them again.

Four months ago, I had a preventative mastectomy and reconstruction. It was the responsible decision. Can’t explain how many times I’ve heard that echoed back at me. I was one of the lucky ones. Stage zero. The cancer was in my milk ducts, hadn’t spread. But it could have. I didn’t want the mastectomy; most stage zero breast cancers don’t ever progress. But Juliet really pushed it. Because you see, I have the BRCA mutation. It was a one-two punch—breast cancer and the genetic risk of getting it again, and much worse. She said I had to think about the people who love me, not just myself. So I agreed to the surgery. And then after I did it, Juliet left me.

That’s unfair to her, I suppose. It’s more complicated than that, as all relationships are. It involves little lies and big ones, and Séraphine and this trip, too, in fact. But Juliet isn’t blameless, either. She left me at my smallest, my weakest. Now I am hurt and sad, and trapped inside a body that doesn’t feel like mine.

I hadn’t realized that reconstruction is painfully drawn out, part of the whole wide world of cancer that only those in the unlucky club can fully understand. Some women get permanent implants placed in their chests at the time of mastectomy. Others, like me, aren’t eligible for that, so the process takes longer. Now I have a balloon-like tissue expander placed over my pectoral muscles. (Whenever my surgeon says pectoral muscles, I feel like a male bodybuilder.) Over the course of months, my surgeon fills the balloons with saline until my breasts are the right size. But for now, I have these painful half breasts. Saggy little lumps. Raisins on a log.

I’m sorry, Darcy says again. Sorry is my current least favorite word. It’s what the doctor said five months ago when the biopsy results came in. It’s what Juliet said two weeks ago when she left me.

It’s okay. It’s not okay, but it’s not Darcy’s fault. And she’s been amazing through this. Still, my chest stings in some unknown place.

How are you doing? she asks, a question I also hate. But she means well. She calls me every day, asking it.

Fine, I say, the same thing I always say, forcing a bright tone. Hey, where are Oliver and the kids? I want to say hi.

They already left for town. She smiles, but I know it’s an effort. Darcy has never left the kids before, not even for a night. She’s a Supermom, capital S. Not being derisive. She really is the best mom, so loving, so involved. But she worries so much. Every object, like a simple rubber band, becomes an evil device bent on harming children. She could find safety defects in a rainbow. Jade is a wonderful mom, too, but far less ruffled. But Darcy’s path to motherhood was different, arduous. It’s like she is so grateful she finally has them, that she must savor every instant and cushion every stumble.

How are you feeling after the flight, Vixie? Darcy is staring at me now, trying to see inside me, it feels like, to figure out where my brain is zigging. To figure out how I really am.

How am I? Hell if I really know. I miss being the girl without cancer. And I miss my boobs so much, I want to scream. I loved my boobs. I was always known as the girl with good boobs. Back when going-out tops were a thing, mine were all the plunging, sequined varietal.

I’m fine, I finally settle upon before reaching for a new topic, anything else. God, I forgot how the air is here. Even in the airport, I start to feel inspired. I gesture vaguely around, my hand landing in the direction of a striking woman in palazzo pants who’s hastening past with a cream carrier case. "I’ve been blocked for months, you know, with my art. Maybe France is the je ne sais quoi I need."

Great! Darcy frowns and types off a text.

So who’s Raph?

The new groundskeeper.

Oh, right. Croissant? I flake off a piece.

Ooh, God yes, please. Darcy shares my belief that carbs and sugar unite to form one superessential food group. I don’t even bother offering the croissant to Jade.

Darcy is wearing the Insta-mom famous Nap Dress—the one that sells out the second it hits the website. To be honest, the dress’s popularity baffles me. It looks like a potato sack with frilly cutouts for arms, like a Victorian nightgown. Darcy’s strawberry blond hair is shorter now, blunt cut and shoulder-length. It reminds me of the shy girl I first met in a nude drawing class in Avignon, whose face was even redder than her prim, straight, strawberry hair. When we all finished our drawings, hers got the biggest laugh. She hadn’t even attempted the penis—just chopped it fully off and castrated the poor guy, to boot. Whereas I had been riveted by the first penis I’d ever seen in real life. And in the decades since, my experience of penises has remained relegated to nude drawing workshops.

I’m not surprised Darcy cut her hair before this trip. Séraphine doesn’t approve of long hair. Except mine. My natural hair is a rich chestnut, but recently I had it highlighted with some blond. Something—anything—to distract myself from the rest of me, or the parts that are smack dab in the middle, at least. The hairdresser called my new color bronde, and said the streaks complement my olive skin and pull the flecks of gold from my brown eyes. She swore I could pass for twenty-five, and for some moments I felt that young and free again, with my bouncy blowout and her fanning out my hair, lavishing the compliments. I was like a puppy, lapping them right up. I called her my fairy godmother. She smiled, then told me the exorbitant price for her services. Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, she said, laughing, as I winced and paid, and then she waved me off as if into a fairy-tale ending. It was only later, alone, that I looked at myself in the mirror, and saw the same tired, sad, wrinkled me, but with admittedly beautiful hair. Now I play with a curl, nearly down to my butt. My long hair is the one thing that still makes me feel feminine. Séraphine won’t deprive me that. She’s been amazing through my whole breast cancer experience this past year.

Actually, she’s been amazing always. Full stop. She’s encouraged my art, believed in me more than anyone. Perhaps even more than I believe in myself. She’s like a second mother to me. I wonder if that’s why there is always some subtle, invisible distance between Darcy and me. Sometimes I think Darcy regrets having brought me along when we spent that first weekend at the chateau.

You checked a bag? Darcy’s eyes flitter from my suitcase back to me.

Right? says Jade. Who is this, and what has she done with our friend?

Get over it, guys.

Silence, the awkward kind. Because normally they wouldn’t get over it. One of them would try to unstick a zipper. When I’d swat their hand away, they’d keep pressing on. Jokes, insults. The kind that people who have known you for twenty years have built into an arsenal. But nope. I’m the boobless cancer girl whose girlfriend just broke up with her, to boot. So for now, my luggage is safe.

Okay, let’s go, says Darcy. "You guys! Now her face spreads into a smile, with giddy, excited kiddish energy that for once doesn’t have to do with her kids. The four of us together again, in Provence."

I can’t wait to crack open some champagne, Jade says.

You’re drinking? I ask. Jade never drinks. It’s not just the calories, she says, but the puffiness. And how the alcohol impedes her fasting window. What about your fasting window?

No fasting window today. Jade grins.

I’m very glad to hear you say that. Darcy pulls out a bottle of champagne and paper cups from one of her many bags. Come on, ladies.

Ladies? I groan. When did we become ladies?

When we turned forty.

Speak for yourself. I’m still thirty-nine. Jade winks. You’d think she was twenty-nine for how frequently she reminds us she’s the baby. Well, who wouldn’t enjoy being the babied youngest? I certainly wouldn’t if I still had a three in front of my age, even if for one more day.

I watch Jade set off to the exit. She’s wearing one of those matching workout sets with a revealing burgundy top that has an inexplicably numerous amount of straps, crisscrossing in ways not requisite to hold its shape. Not the most appropriate to see Séraphine after all these years. Which I feel like Jade relishes a little bit.

Still, I’d toss her a sweatshirt if my suitcase actually had clothing inside.

CHAPTER FOUR

Darcy

Shotgun, I say, claiming the front seat. My cheeks flame when I realize that I’ve probably not said that since I was twelve. I hold a perspiring water bottle to my right cheek, then my left.

There are buckles clicking and champagne popping. I made it. I slip my sunglasses on and down half the glass Vix passes me.

Your grandmother is very excited to see you, Raph says as he navigates across the Rhône on our descent south. His voice is deep, but lighthearted. It’s always strange to hear a person’s voice, how different it might reconcile with their name. Not that the name Raph isn’t conducive to young people, but when Grand-mère wrote me about her new groundskeeper, I assumed he’d be older, grayer, like groundskeepers of past. I was wrong. I peg Raph as a few years younger than us, maybe. But is that how everyone looks to me now? He’s tall, lanky, boyishly cute, with a distinctly Southern accent. When he was speaking with the parking attendant, I heard him pronounce all the syllables, unlike Parisians.

I think about switching to French, but my French isn’t as good as it once was. And right now I can’t muster the energy to do yet another thing I will fail at.

How is she? I ask him.

"Bon, bon," he says absently, making a sudden turn. Not that a man would notice the nuance I am digging for.

Jade and Vix are chattering in the back, and I gaze out at all the happy people picnicking on the river shores, spread out on the grassy banks among baguettes and cheese and charcuterie spreads, as kids frolic down to the quays. I down the little champagne that’s left in my glass, then pass it back. Refill me?

Vix is holding court over the champagne bottle. She takes my glass.

Normally I would have crammed in back with the two of them. But I didn’t call shotgun because I get carsick, or because I’m particularly keen on sitting next to Raph. My eyes rove over to him as he runs a hand through his curly mop of brown hair with zero style, whose shade of brown if it were to be identified in a flip book of paint swatches would probably be called Regular Brown.

God, I’m being a bitch. He does have good eyes. Excellent blue ones. If my past could speak, it would say I’ve always been a sucker for blue eyes, especially ones like Raph’s, which are more turquoise to Oliver’s navy. Honestly, Raph is cute. On the hot side of cute, really. I’m married, not dead. He’s wearing a dark gray T-shirt that highlights his tanned biceps, and skinny gray jeans a smidge darker than his shirt. He has a mole by his mouth that, strangely, doesn’t detract from his cuteness.

I jolt when I realize I’m staring. He’s driving, but a person can tell when eyes are on him. And by his perplexed glance over at me, I know that he has noticed me looking. I swivel toward my window, gazing defiantly out. It’s all just nerves about seeing Grand-mère. About being back at the chateau, all of us together. About my financial troubles. About sleeping away from the kids for the first time. But mostly it’s about her. Sitting right behind me, like everything is fine. Like she has succeeded in deceiving me. Like I’m not going to fight back. Seeing her at the airport—it was harder than I expected to fake it.

I make myself

Reviews for The Chateau

[kalliegrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Maybe 3.5 stars, a great setting, characters who act like adults for most of the book, rich history, and then wacko plot twists to finish it off. Not the fastest thriller, there's a lot of internal dialogue and fluff, but it's still an enjoyable read.

[rmarcin-630843 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Four friends are called to gather in Provence at the chateau of Séraphine, an elderly and very wealthy grandmother, to Darcy. Three of the friends, Darcy, Vix, and Jade, met 20 years earlier when they studied abroad, and the other, Arabelle, was a childhood friend, having lived at the chateau with her own grandmother, Sylvie. Darcy's husband, Oliver, and their children come, but stay elsewhere. When Séraphine is found stabbed after telling the foursome she needs to tell them the truth, they are all suspects. What follows is an investigation, and a tale of revenge and hatred is revealed. The final twist is chilling!