Wished

Chapter 1

1

Anna

“Now there’s a view I will never get tired of,” Dorene says in her scratchy early-morning, post-cigarette voice. Her words are laced with a suitable amount of appreciation and awe even though we have the same view every single week, at 6:30 a.m. sharp, Monday morning.

“I agree,” I say, not caring that I sound wistful and half-in-love. It’s early. I’m tired. I’m allowed to sound wistful and in love.

Besides, it’s true. I’ll never get tired of this view. There’s no place like the Barone Estate right before the sun peeks over the still waters of Lake Geneva. The sky is the pink of an iced raspberry, with golden clouds feathering over calm purple waters. A cool, insubstantial mist drifts off the water and curls over the soft, grassy shore, tangling around my ankles, wet and cold. Swifts swoop and swirl above in acrobatic glee and the breeze they ride on teases my cheeks.

The sweet morning scent of dew-covered grass and summer clover hangs in the air, waiting to be burned away by the sunrise. Far across the lake are the mounded blue hills of deep, cool evergreen forests. They promise pine and loam and quiet. Curving along the shoreline are the still-sleepy stone edifices of Geneva. The streetlights wink out in expectation of day. It’s a romantic, beautiful picture. But the best view of all is the chateau towering above us.

The first time I saw it, three years ago, I thought I’d been transported to another time. The chateau is starkly beautiful. Austere in its severity. It’s three stories of cold, gray stone, hewn from the surrounding mountains and cut to withstand centuries of bitter winds and unexpected twists of fate.

There are two conical towers with rooflines that sweep sharply like the edge of a dangerously angled mountain slope. The windows are narrow and lead paned. In the sunrise they’re limned with gold.

The chateau is notable because of its lack of decoration. No arches. No gables. No finials. No columns or spires. No whimsy or romance. In my mind its beauty is in its bareness.

What’s more beautiful? The loud, bright colors and heavy perfumes of the jungle, or the endless silent glide of an arctic glacier, towering and alone in the deep, dark sea?

The Barone Chateau is terrible in its beauty. Beautiful in its aloneness. Not even its proximity to Geneva, its perch at the edge of the jewel-like mountain lake, or the wild, untamed gardens that bloom and blossom around its base, can fool anyone into imagining this home is anything but what it is. A fortress.

A lonely, stark fortress that rejects romance, denies softness, and laughs at love.

All the same. It’s beautiful.

On Monday mornings, when we wend down the long, winding gravel driveway, I sometimes feel like the chateau is only waiting. Maybe it’s been waiting for years. It’s caught in that breath-held moment right before sunrise when the world is at its most magical. You only have to step outside right before the sun crests over the edge of the world to find it.

You can breathe in the pine-needle and wet-grass smell. You can listen for the quiet melody of the wood thrush carried on the gentle breeze. You can let the cold mist rise off the lake and bring a shiver over your skin. The world is whispering, “Just wait and see. This day is going to bring the most wondrous, magical things your way.”

It’s just like that moment between making a wish and blowing out your birthday candles. There is so much magic and expectation between dragging in that great gust of air and blowing out your wish.

That’s how I feel about the Barone Chateau.

It’s captured in that moment, waiting for the sun to rise and the wish to be made.

I arch my back and glance up at the sheer wall of the eastern tower. The stones emit a dull gray glow in the early-morning light. The late-spring air is cool, almost brisk, and I rub the goose bumps on my arms.

Dorene knocks her fist against the back of her van and then swings open the doors. They let out a querulous creak, like they’re protesting the early-morning wake-up thump. The van should be used to it though—Dorene always gives it a whack before opening the back end. She’s superstitious and has specific rituals to make sure her day goes the way she’d like. Whacking the van before opening the doors is one of those rituals. She also plugs and unplugs the vacuum three times before the first use of the day. And she refuses to clean any rooms with books in them. I don’t know why. That’s just Dorene. I don’t mind—I like rooms with books. They’re cozier. Homier. Happier.

The astringent scent of bleach and furniture polish greets us as Dorene and I pull free the supplies we’ll need to clean. We move in the steady choreography of partners who have been working together for years.

Dorene brought me on seven years ago, after my stepdad left and my mom and I were in a tough spot. She told me, “This may not be the job you dreamed of, but it’s a job, and that’s more than you have now. What do you say?”

I said yes.

Before that day, I’d only known her as our frizzy-haired, wrinkled neighbor who chain-smoked in a lawn chair on the stoop while watching angsty art films at maximum volume on an ancient portable TV.

I never knew she watched art films because her late husband was a French director in the eighties, or that in her twenties she sang mezzo-soprano in the opera, or that once she drove naked through the streets of Paris in a stolen Bugatti convertible, belting out “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. The owner of the Bugatti proposed to her after that escapade. She turned him down.

Dorene drops a bucket full of cleaning supplies to the gravel and grunts as I pull out the vacuum.

“It’s too bad,” she says, giving the chateau a gimlet-eyed appraisal, “that the owner of this chateau is not as appealing.”

I think about Maximillian Barone. He’s here sometimes, when we’re cleaning. It’s a full-day job for us, from 6:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. There are twelve bedrooms, six bathrooms, a mammoth kitchen, a butler pantry, a staff kitchen, two formal living rooms, a library, two home offices, a gym, a garage full of exotic and vintage sports cars . . . You get the idea. It’s a big job.

Usually, he’s gone by the time we’re punching in our code at the front door, but sometimes he’s still here. Or sometimes he works from home.

I have to admit, I like those days. The chateau feels less empty and less cold. All those closed-up rooms echo with too much emptiness when it’s just Dorene and me.

We dust them, we vacuum, but the deep cleaning is reserved for the rooms Max uses. His bedroom. His office. The library. The kitchen. The gym.

If he’s here and he sees me he gives a quick nod, a polite, “Madame,” and that’s that.

There’s only one time in three years he’s said more than that single word to me. It was the first time I saw him, the fourth time we cleaned his home. I felt I already knew him a little. It’s hard not to learn things about someone when you clean their house.

I knew he had a sweet tooth and that he loved milk chocolate and hazelnut ice cream. I knew he preferred mint toothpaste and that he used a hand-milled soap that smelled like autumn rain in the mountains. I knew he was meticulously neat and always picked up his laundry and made his bed. I knew he listened to classical music in the library from the playlist left open, and I knew he watched British detective shows while making his dinner from the episodes paused and waiting to resume. I knew he was slowly working his way through the stack of Dickens novels on his nightstand, although I didn’t know whether he was reading them because he liked Dickens or because Dickens put him to sleep. I knew he had straight black hair, thick stubble, and from the clothes he owned, he was probably in his early thirties.

I’d never seen him. I hadn’t looked him up. But I thought I knew him. A little.

I thought I had him figured out.

Then I walked into his office, pushing the vacuum in front of me, the roaring hum drowning out all ambient noise. I didn’t expect him to be home. Dorene was upstairs working her way through the bathrooms. I had a pair of headphones on and I was listening to Motown. My family’s from Detroit, and when I was little we always played Motown when we cleaned our house every Saturday.

I was sashaying with the vacuum, doing a sort of half-dance, half-push move. The main office was large, with old, honey-colored wood floors, a massive desk, and a computer that collected dust like a miser hoarding gold coins. There was a large potted plant in the corner that I liked to say hello to while I dusted its leaves. The room always smelled like warm leather, printer toner, and sunshine on wood floors.

I didn’t look at the desk. I was watching the vacuum as I thrust it across the wood floor in time with the music and my mostly terrible singing voice. But then a slow tickle swept over my spine until a buzzing tingle, almost like the vibration of the vacuum, infused my whole body.

I was vibrating with a strange awareness I’d never felt before.

The office didn’t smell like printer toner. Instead it smelled like coffee, hazelnut croissant, and Max’s hand-milled soap.

I paused in a spray of sunlight falling through the lead paned window and slowly turned toward Max’s desk.

He was there, watching me as if he’d just asked me a question and he was waiting for my answer.

I couldn’t say anything.

I couldn’t move.

The blasting chords of Motown disappeared. The roar of the vacuum receded. The familiar, comfortable lines of the office faded.

He was beautiful .

He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

Not classically beautiful. Not magazine beautiful. Not movie-star beautiful.

When I say beautiful, I mean he was beautiful like the chateau.

Looking at him was like looking at the desolate sweep of an arctic winter the moment before the sun rises for the first time in months. I was struck, pierced, and flayed by the promise of that sunrise.

I forgot the vacuum roaring in my hands, I forgot the music blasting in my ears, and I stared at Max while I waited for the sun.

He had thick, night-dark hair that was short on the sides and long enough to run your fingers through on the top. His eyes were dark brown and framed with thick lashes. They had a spark of intelligence, drive, but also the closed-off, distant expression you’d expect from the man who called this fortress his home. His features were sharp. Hard cheekbones, a square jaw, deep-set eyes that saw everything and trusted no one. He was thirty, maybe. There was a hint of hardness in the set of his shoulders that spoke of years of hard work or hard living. But there was also a softness lingering at the edges of his lips that promised he smiled sometimes, and when he did, it was glorious.

I’d never been in love before.

I didn’t know what it felt like.

But I thought, probably, this was it. This tingle sweeping through me like a shooting star casting across the night sky—this had to be love. My heart thudded wildly in my chest and I felt every beat, like it was pumping out the word, love, love, love .

Then Max spoke again.

He spoke to me.

I realized I couldn’t hear him. The vacuum was loud; my music was louder. A flush ran over my cheeks and down my neck and chest.

I flipped off the vacuum, yanked my headphones free.

The office was electric in the silence.

“Sorry? What did you say?” I asked, and I was surprised my voice came out sounding normal, as if I was asking my sister to pass the salt.

I didn’t realize I’d spoken in English until the words were already out of my mouth.

Max didn’t even blink.

By that point in time, I realized that whatever he’d said, it wasn’t words of undying love and devotion. It wasn’t, “You’re an angel fallen from heaven!” or, “This is love at first sight!” or even, “What are you doing tonight?”

No.

Because while Max was the sunrise at the end of my arctic winter, I was ...

Me.

My messy hair was knotted in a bun and hidden beneath a wrinkled, bleach-stained red bandana. I was wearing very large, very round green tortoiseshell glasses (this was in my era of fashion-forward glasses, which, in hindsight, were very, very ugly). I had on my gray, bleach-stained Detroit Tigers sweatshirt, baggy bleach-stained jeans, and years-old tennis shoes with shoelaces that had disintegrated into stringy, ugly wads of fabric. My hot-pink rubber gloves hung from my pocket, and I had a dirty rag hanging from my other pocket. Beyond that, I was sweaty, breathing hard, and an uncomfortable shade of bright red.

The music from my headphones blasted between us, the Supremes telling us that love can’t be hurried.

So there I stood, dumbstruck by love, and Max glanced at me without seeing me and said with careful politeness, “Could you please wait until I’ve left to clean in here?”

His English had a British accent with only a hint of French. He must’ve learned British English as a kid or studied in Britain for school. Lots of people do. It’s like my French. Since my mom and I didn’t move here until I was eleven, my French is forever tinged with the American Midwest.

But his accent wasn’t why I didn’t answer right away. It was his voice. Before, I’d thought it was love. Once he spoke, I knew it was. And this man, he barely looked at me. In fact, he’d already looked away. His gaze was on his computer screen, scrolling through whatever business I’d interrupted.

I was glued to the floor, disbelieving that I’d finally experienced what my dad always said I’d find—the kind of love that lasts lifetimes—and the man was as indifferent to me as the ocean is to the sky.

I stood for a moment longer, too stunned to move, the Supremes still singing tinnily through my headphones. Max looked up one last time, his eyes moving to the vacuum in my hand, not to me.

“Are you all right?” He finally looked at me. But that was even worse than him not looking at me, because there was nothing in his expression—nothing except a cold, stark, gray stone wall.

He was Maximillian Barone. And I was Anna Benoit. And it was clear from his expression that the two of us weren’t destined to be.

Love at first sight had soared like a swan on summer winds for a joyous, wondrous moment, and then it took a tumbling nosedive out of the sky and smacked the stones of the chateau to die a painful, squawking, feathery death.

My insta-love was insta-gone.

That yanked me out of my tingly, love-infused delusion. “Sorry. Yes. Sorry.”

I dragged my vacuum across the wood floor and stumbled backward out of his office. Max didn’t watch me go.

Since then, for three years, if we ever cross paths, he’ll say, “Madame,” and I’ll say, “Bonjour, monsieur.”

And that is the extent of our interactions.

But for Dorene to say he isn’t appealing?

“That’s not true,” I say, not able to deny that even though I squelched any tingly feelings, I still admire the man.

I know him even more than I did the first time I saw him. I’ve heard him on business calls—direct, fair, intelligent. He’s serious on those calls, never smiling, always firm. But then I’ve heard him on the phone to Fiona Abry, the woman he actually loves, and his voice always has an intimate, happy quality that hints at the warm sunlight he keeps hidden behind tall stone walls.

I even saw, months ago, an engagement ring on his nightstand. It was beautiful, and I knew right away he’d designed it himself. And I suppose it’s okay to admit that when I saw it, there was a hollow, empty feeling in my stomach that even a dozen chocolate mocha truffles from my favorite chocolatier didn’t fill. Nothing could.

So. I guess that insta-love isn’t completely insta-gone.

Dorene smirks at me and slaps my pair of pink rubber gloves into my hands. I scoff and shove them into my pocket.

“Why don’t you ask him on a date?” she asks.

According to Dorene, in her day she had thirty-six marriage proposals, most of them after a first date. She never remarried after her first husband, but that didn’t mean men didn’t try. She says marriage proposals are as easy to get as well-wishes on a Sunday.

She’s well aware I’ve had two boyfriends, no marriage proposals, and no weddings.

“Why would I do that?” I busy myself checking my inventory. I’m cleaning the rugs in the library today.

“Because you’re young. Because you’d like to have unforgettable sex before you die. Because he’s nice to look at. I don’t know. Choose one.”

“How about I chose none?” I say, lifting my bucket and grabbing the vacuum with my other hand. I start toward the front door.

I hear the van doors slam behind me and a hard thwack on the door.

Dorene hurries after me, her steps crunching on the gravel. “I’m only saying, I see that glint in your eye every time we pull up. You can’t fool me. It’s not a craving for coffee. It’s a craving for a certain man.”

Ugh. She watches too many romantic movies. “I’m confiscating your television.”

She snorts, then continues. “You depress me. Twenty-five years old and all you do is work, take care of your sister, read that boring Charles Dickens, and go to bed too early. No drinking. No smoking. No sex. You are tragic.”

“And you are the nosiest neighbor I’ve ever had.”

Also, yes. After I saw Max read Dickens, I bought Nicholas Nickleby . It’s not my fault I was hooked.

“Ask him on a date.”

I punch our code into the front door. It’s exactly 6:30 a.m. The security system records our arrival, all our entries and exits. The bolt unlocks and I swing the door open.

“No,” I say. “Didn’t you know he’s in love with Fiona Abry?”

“She married someone else.”

I stop in the threshold. Turn to look at Dorene. She’s fluttering her eyelashes innocently. It’s not a look that works for her.

“Didn’t you hear?” she asks.

I shake my head. My gut clenches and a funny feeling trips through my insides. “Why? Who?”

Dorene shrugs.

How could Fiona say no? How could anyone say no? How could anyone not want to marry Max? He’s ... he’s ...

“I see that look on your face. You’re going to ask him, aren’t you?”

I grip the door handle, shake my head, then step inside the cold, dark interior of the chateau. “No,” I say, “I’m going to clean his house.”

And that’s all I’m going to do.

Forever and ever and ever.

After Dorene stomps inside, I close the front door, shutting out the golden sun finally rising over the deep, placid lake.