Villa

Two best friends, Emily and Chess, rent a stunning Italian villa for the summer. It's the same villa where, decades earlier, a rock star was brutally murdered, an event that has since become the stuff of dark, romantic legend. For Emily, the villa is a last-ditch effort to salvage a friendship that has been slowly eroding under the weight of jealousy and professional rivalry. She hopes the shared history and decadent isolation will be a kind of glue, forcing them to reconnect and mend what’s broken. For Chess, the villa is a backdrop. It’s a stage for her next bestseller, a place to perform the role of a successful author while subtly mining their shared past—and Emily’s present turmoil—for material. They are living in the same house, drinking the same wine, and staring at the same sunset, but they are telling themselves two entirely different stories about why they are there and what the summer is for.

This dynamic of shared space and divergent realities—where friendship can curdle into a creative and personal rivalry—is a landscape Rachel Hawkins navigates with precision. A former teacher turned full-time novelist, Hawkins has built a career exploring the dark corners of female relationships, particularly how ambition, love, and history can become entangled. She was drawn to the idea of a beautiful, sun-drenched setting that concealed a sinister past, mirroring the way a close friendship can hide years of unspoken resentment. "Villa" emerged from her fascination with this contrast: the idyllic surface versus the gothic darkness underneath, and how two people can inhabit the exact same story but live in completely different worlds.

Module 1: The Haunted Friendship

The story revolves around two lifelong friends, Emily and Chess. They are two sides of the same coin, bound by a history that's as comforting as it is suffocating. The first core idea is that long-term friendships are layered with love, resentment, and inevitable change. Emily is a cozy mystery writer whose career has stalled. Her life feels like a complete mess. She’s gone through a humiliating divorce and is battling a mysterious illness. Chess, on the other hand, is a self-help guru phenom. Her book, The Powered Path, is a massive success. She’s a brand. She’s everything Emily is not.

Emily admits it herself. Somewhere around the time her friend started calling herself "Chess," she realized she might actually hate her. This is a complex cocktail of admiration, irritation, and the painful awareness of her own perceived failure. Yet, when Chess calls with her signature affectionate greeting, all that resentment melts away. She’s flooded with a familiar warmth. This duality is the heart of their relationship. It's real, it's messy, and it sets the stage for everything that follows.

This leads to a related insight. Public personas and personal branding can create distance in personal relationships. Emily knew Chess as Jessica, then Jaycee, then Jay. Now, the world knows "Chess Chandler," a name that looks great on a book cover. Emily watches Chess perform her public persona—the effortless energy, the curated casualness—and feels tired just watching her. She even hate-reads Chess’s books, looking for sentences to roll her eyes at. The brand has become a barrier. It makes the friend she grew up with feel like a stranger, a performance artist whose success is both impressive and alienating.

So what happens next? Chess, in a grand gesture of friendship, invites the struggling Emily to spend the summer at a luxurious Italian villa. Villa Aestas. It’s an offer of a "hard reset." A chance to escape the wreckage of her life and find inspiration again. For Emily, it’s an irresistible escape. A chance to leave her empty house, post glamorous photos to spite her ex-husband, and maybe, just maybe, start writing again. But as we soon learn, this idyllic setting is anything but simple.