Excerpt from The Villa by Rachel Hawkins, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

CHAPTER ONE

Somewhere around the time she started calling herself "Chess," I realized I might actually hate my best friend.

It was the third name she'd given herself in the nearly twenty years I'd known her. When we'd met in fourth grade, she was just Jessica. Well, "Jessica C.," since there was also "Jessica M.," and "Jessica R.," and then one girl who just got to be Jessica, like she'd claimed the name first, and everyone else just had to fucking deal with it. So I guess it wasn't a surprise that by the time we were sophomores, Jessica C. had turned herself into "JC," which eventually morphed into "Jaycee."

That lasted until halfway through college. Sometime between her third and fourth change of major, she became simply, "Jay," holding on to that moniker until ten years ago, right after we both turned twenty-five and she'd finally broken up with that asshole, Lyle. That's when Chess was born.

Chess Chandler.

I can't deny that it sounds good, and it definitely looks good printed in giant font on the book I'm currently holding in my lap as I wait for Chess to meet me for lunch.

She's late, because she's always late, even though I'd purposely shown up fifteen minutes after I'd told her to meet me, hoping to avoid this very situation. But of course, just as I sat down, I'd gotten a text from her. Leaving now!

So I was on my second iced tea, and my third piece of bread at this little café in Asheville, the kind of place I'd thought Jessica—Chess—would like, waiting for the real Chess while the picture of her splashed across her book cover beamed back at me.

She's sitting on the floor in the photo, wearing a white shirt and jeans, her feet bare, her toenails painted a bright melon, pose casual and smile bright under the title You Got This!

That's her thing: the self-help beat. She sort of fell into it when a friend of ours from college, Stefanie, started a website, some kind of women and wellness thing that I can't even remember the name of. Chess started out doing a little advice feature for the site, and one of her answers, encouraging a woman to break up with her shitty boyfriend and leave her shitty job, went viral.

I understood why. The response was classic Chess: breezy and funny, but also getting to the heart of the matter in a way that was blunt without being cruel. You know what you have to do here—I mean, you wrote to me, you're obviously smart (except where it comes to guys. And jobs. But we can fix that).

I'd been getting pep talks like this from her for years, after all. Still, I thought the biggest it would get was a BuzzFeed article called "Twenty-seven Reasons We Want to Make This Advice Columnist Our Bestie!!"

But somehow, it just kept growing. Suddenly, her Insta- gram had thousands, then hundreds of thousands of followers. She stopped writing for Stefanie's site and took a job at Salon, then the Cut, and then there was a book deal. Things My Mama Never Taught Me hit every bestseller list there is, and before I knew it, Chess was famous.

And honestly, she deserved to be. She was good at this stuff. I've read all her books and watched all her videos, including her big TED Talk that has something like twenty million views on YouTube. I've also spent a lot of time wondering how someone you once played Barbies with can now be talking to Oprah—at Oprah's damn house, no less—telling women how to get their lives on the "Powered Path."

I tear off another hunk of bread.

My life is most definitely not on the Powered Path these days, and if I'm honest, that might be part of the reason I don't like Chess that much anymore.

Well, that and the fact that she's now—I check my phone—thirty minutes late.

Just when I'm starting to think I should go ahead and order, the door of the café opens, and she breezes in, tall and very blond, a whirlwind in shades of white, one hand already lifted in greeting as she shoves her giant sunglasses on top of her head, a pearl-gray leather bag slung over one shoulder. She's always like this, perpetually in motion, her body seeming to move in ten directions at once, but every gesture somehow graceful, fluid.

Excerpted from The Villa by Rachel Hawkins. Copyright © 2023 by Rachel Hawkins. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.