Chapter One
It was March in the Napa Valley, just under sixty miles north of San Francisco, and Joy Lammenais’s favorite time of year. The rolling hills were a brilliant emerald green, which would fade once the weather grew warmer, and get dry and brittle in the summer heat. But for now, everything was fresh and new, and the vineyards stretched for miles across the Valley. Visitors compared it to Tuscany in Italy, and some to France.
She had come there for the first time with Christophe twenty-four years before, while she was getting her master’s in business administration at Stanford, and he was taking graduate classes in oenology and viticulture. He had painstakingly explained to her that oenology was everything about making wine, and viticulture was about planting and growing grapes. His family had been making famous wines in Bordeaux for centuries, where his father and uncles ran the family winery and vineyards, but his dream had been to come to California and learn more about the wines and vineyards and vintners in the Napa Valley. He had confided to Joy that he wanted a small winery of his own. It had just been a vague hope at first, a fantasy he would never indulge. He assumed that he would go back to France to follow the expected path, like his ancestors and relatives before him. But he fell in love with California and life in the States, and became more and more passionate about the vineyards in the Napa Valley during his year at Stanford. His father’s sudden death at an early age, while Christophe was at Stanford, left him with an unexpected windfall of money to invest, and suddenly made establishing his own winery in the United States not only enticing but feasible. After they both finished graduate school in June, he had gone home to France in the summer to explain it to his family, and came back in the fall to bring his plan to fruition.
Joy was the most exciting woman he’d ever met, with a diversity of talents. She had a natural gift for anything related to business or finance. And at the same time, she was a painter and artist, had taken classes in Italy over several summers, and could easily have pursued a career in art. She struggled with the decision for a while in college. Her teachers in Italy had encouraged her to forget business. But in the end, her more practical side won out, and she kept her painting as a hobby she loved, and focused on her entrepreneurial goals. She had an instinctive sense of what the best deals were, and wanted to work in one of the Silicon Valley high-tech investment firms, before starting her own venture capital firm one day. She talked to Christophe about it constantly.
She knew nothing about wine when they met, and he taught her during the year they spent together. She wasn’t really interested in vineyards and wineries, but the way he explained it all brought it to life for her and made it seem almost magical. He loved making wine as much as she did painting, or her fascination with creative investments. Agriculture seemed like risky business to her. So much could go wrong, an early frost, a late harvest, too much rain, or too little. Christophe said that was part of the mystery and beauty of it, and when all the necessary ingredients came together, you wound up with an unforgettable vintage that people would talk about forever, that could turn an ordinary wine into a remarkable gift of nature.
When she visited the Napa Valley with him, again and again, she began to understand that making wine was in his soul and DNA, and having a respected label of his own was the ultimate achievement to him, and what he hoped for. She was twenty-five then, and he was twenty-six. She had been fortunate to get a job with a legendary venture capital firm right after they graduated and loved what she was doing. And when Christophe came back from France at the end of the summer, looking for land to buy, and vineyards he could replant exactly the way he wanted them, according to everything he had been taught in France, he asked her to go with him. He respected Joy’s advice about all the financial aspects of any deal. She helped him buy his first vineyard, and by November, he had bought six, all of them adjoining one another.
The vines were old, and he knew exactly what he wanted to plant there. He told her he would keep his winery small, but he would have the best pinot noir in the Valley one day, and she believed him. He explained to her about the fine points of the wines they tasted, what was wrong with them and what was right, how they could have been different or better, or should have been. And he introduced her to French wines, and the wine his family made and had exported from Château Lammenais for generations.
He had bought an additional piece of property on the hill overlooking his vineyards and the Valley, and said he was going to build a small château there. In the meantime, he was living in a cabin with one bedroom and a comfortable living room with a huge fireplace. They spent many a cozy night there on weekends, while he shared his hopes with her, and she explained to him how to make the business side of it work, and how to design his financial plan.
They spent Christmas together in his cabin, and stood on the small porch in the early mornings, admiring nature at its finest. With his father gone then, and his mother many years before, he didn’t want to go back to France for Christmas with his uncles, he wanted to spend it with Joy. She had no family to go home to either. Her mother had died young, of cancer when Joy was fifteen, and her much older father had been devastated and died of grief three years later. She and Christophe created their own world in the place he had brought her to, and he had cooked a remarkable Christmas dinner for her of goose and pheasant, which set off the wines he had chosen to perfection.
In the spring, he began building his château, just as he said he would. She learned that Christophe was a visionary of sorts, but remarkably he always did what he said he would, and turned his ideas from the abstract to concrete reality. He never lost sight of his goals, and she showed him how to get there. He described what he saw in the future, and she helped him fulfill his dreams. He had beautiful plans for the château.
He had the stone brought over from France, and said he didn’t want anything too imposing or too large. He based the design loosely on his own family’s four-hundred-year-old château, and gave the architect countless sketches and photographs of what he had in mind, with the alterations that he felt would work on the property he had chosen, and he was relentless about the proportions. Not too big and not too small. He had picked a hill with beautiful old trees surrounding the clearing where he wanted to build his home. He said he was going to put red rosebushes everywhere, just like they had in France, and laid it all out with a landscape architect, who was thrilled with the project.
The house was well under way by summer when he asked Joy to marry him. They had dated for well over a year by then. He was constructing his winery amid the vineyards, at the same time he built his château, which was a jewel. They were married at a small ceremony in a nearby church at the end of August, with two of his vineyard workers as their witnesses. They had no real friends in the Valley yet. They had each other, which was more than enough, for a start. They agreed that the rest could come later. They were establishing their life together, and she had great respect for Christophe’s passion for the earth and his land. It was in his bones and in his veins and in his heart. The grapes he grew were living beings to him, to be cherished and nourished and protected. And he felt the same way about his wife. He cherished her like a precious gift, and she blossomed and thrived in the warmth of his love, and loved him just as deeply.
The château wasn’t yet complete on the first Christmas they were married, and they were still living in his simple cabin, which suited their quiet life. Joy was three months pregnant by then, and Christophe wanted their home finished in time to bring their first child there when it was born in June. Joy had quit her job in Silicon Valley when they married, since she couldn’t commute that far, and she worked hard at helping him set up his winery. She handled the business and he dealt with the vines. Her belly was round and full when they moved into the château in May, just as Christophe had promised. They spent a month there, while she painted beautiful frescoes and murals at night and on the weekends, waiting for their first child to arrive, and she worked in the office of their new winery every day. He had named it after her, and called it Château Joy, which was the perfect description of their life.
They woke up excited to go to work every day, and had lunch together at the house, to discuss progress and the problems they were solving. He had planted their vines, using all the precepts he had grown up with, and two of his uncles had come to visit them, approved of everything they were doing, and said it would be the best winery in the Napa Valley in twenty years. The vines they had planted were growing well, and the château already felt like home to them. They had furnished it with old French provincial antiques they had found at country auctions and antique stores and picked out everything together.
The baby arrived as gently and peacefully as the rest of their plans had taken shape over the past two years. They went to the hospital in the morning when Joy told him it was time, shortly after breakfast. They drove down the hill and to the hospital, and by late that afternoon, Joy had a beautiful baby girl in her arms, as Christophe looked at Joy in awe. It had all been so easy and simple and natural. The little girl had her mother’s pale blond hair and white skin, and her father’s deep blue eyes, from the moment she was born. It was obvious that her eyes would stay blue, since her mother’s eyes were blue as well. And her skin was so creamy fair that Christophe said she looked like a flower, and they named her Camille.
They went home to the château the next day, to begin their life together. And Camille grew up with two adoring parents, in an exquisite small château, amid the beauty of the Napa Valley, looking out over her father’s vineyards. And Christophe’s uncles’ prediction proved to be true. Within a few years, he was producing one of the finest pinot noirs in the entire region. Their business was sound, their future secure, they were respected and admired by all the important vintners in the Napa Valley, and many of them sought advice from him. Christophe had years of family history behind him along with his own nearly infallible instincts. His closest friend was Sam Marshall, who owned the largest winery in the Valley. He didn’t have Christophe’s history or knowledge of French viticulture, but he had an instinctive sense for growing great wines, was brave and innovative, and owned more land than anyone else in the Valley, and Christophe liked exchanging ideas with him.
His wife, Barbara, and Joy were friends too, and the two couples often spent time together with their children, on weekends. The Marshalls had a little boy who was seven years old when Camille was born. Phillip was fascinated by the baby when the two families had lunch together on Sundays. Christophe would cook a big French meal for them, while he and Sam talked business and the women watched the children. Joy let Phillip hold Camille when she was two weeks old. But most of the time he preferred climbing trees, or running around the fields, picking fruit in the orchards, or riding his bike in their driveway.
Sam Marshall had been a local boy who had worked hard for everything he had and took his business seriously, as Christophe did, which Sam admired him for. It had always annoyed Sam when successful businessmen from the city, or as far away as LA, or even New York, bought a piece of property, planted a few vines, called themselves vintners and winemakers, showed off without any real knowledge, and were pretentious about it. Sam called them “Sunday vintners,” and couldn’t tolerate them, and neither could Christophe. Although Christophe believed the secrets of making great wine had to be handed down for generations, he respected Sam for learning everything he knew in one. But Sam was so hard working, so hungry to learn, and so respectful of the earth and what they eked from it, that Christophe had a deep affection for him, and both of them preferred the company of the serious vintners like themselves, who had valuable information and experience to share. The wine business attracted a lot of amateurs. People who had money and bought established wineries, mostly newly rich, who wanted to show off. And the Old Guard aristocratic social set from San Francisco had come to the Valley over the years too. They kept to themselves, gave elaborate parties within the confines of their elite group, and snubbed everyone, although they occasionally acknowledged the more important vintners, including Christophe, who had no interest in them.
Camille grew up in the happy atmosphere her parents created around them, among the wine-making dynasties in the Napa Valley, and a few close friends. Their land grew as her father bought more of it, planted more vineyards, and added an Italian vineyard manager named Cesare, from Tuscany, whom Camille knew her mother didn’t like, because she made a face every time he walked into the office or left the room.
Joy had continued to take care of the business end of the winery as Camille grew up, and hung out around the winery or played in the vineyards after school. And she always said she wanted to be like her mother and father and work at their winery one day, and go to Stanford just like them. She thought everything they did was perfect, and she wanted to continue in the same traditions. She’d been to Bordeaux many times with her parents, to meet her cousins and great-uncles and aunts, but she loved being in the Napa Valley, and thought it was the most beautiful place on earth. Like her father, she didn’t want to live in France, and Joy agreed with both of them. The Marshalls remained their closest friends, and Phillip alternated between being Camille’s nemesis and her hero as he grew up. Seven years older than she was, he teased her a lot. He was a senior in high school when she was only ten. But more than once, he had protected her if he saw anyone bullying her when he was around. She was like a little sister to him and she was sad when he went away to college and she only saw him during vacations after that.
Joy was forty-four, and Christophe a year older, the summer Camille turned seventeen, when Joy discovered she had breast cancer in a routine mammogram, and it rocked their world. The doctors decided to remove only the lump and not the breast, and thought they could cure her with aggressive chemotherapy and radiation for a year. Christophe was beside himself, and Joy was desperately ill after her treatments, but she went to the winery for a short time every day, and Camille did everything she could to help her. Joy was incredibly courageous, and determined to beat the dreaded disease. There were some very dark times that winter, but Joy never lost her will to live, and did whatever she had to do to be cured. She said afterward that she did it for Camille and Christophe, and a year later, she was cancer free, in remission, and they could all breathe again. It had been a harrowing year, and the fact that Camille had been accepted at Stanford meant nothing to any of them until after they knew that Joy was healthy again.
She and Christophe celebrated Camille’s high school graduation, and gave her a party just before school ended, on her eighteenth birthday. All was right in their world again. The party was for young people Camille’s age, mostly her classmates, and a group of parents had come to enjoy the party with Joy and Christophe. The Marshalls were there and they said Phillip was traveling constantly now, working on promoting their wines and doing well. He had spent six months in Chile, working at a friend’s winery, and he had been in Cape Town the year before, since both were grape-growing regions often compared to the Napa Valley. He was learning the business all around the world.
They were relieved to see Joy looking so well, and after dinner, Sam’s wife, Barbara, confided to Joy in a whisper that she had made the same discovery as Joy had a year before, and was having surgery in San Francisco the following week, in her case a double mastectomy. She was ten years older than Joy, and very worried about what lay ahead. The two women talked about it for a long time, and Joy insisted that she would be all right. Barbara looked as though she wanted to believe her but didn’t quite. She was very much afraid and so was Sam. At first, they had decided not to tell Phillip, they didn’t want to worry him, and had put it off as long as they could. But with Barbara’s surgery imminent, they were going to share the bad news with him when he got back from his latest trip.
Joy had been very open with her daughter, and Camille had seen how sick her mother was during chemo. Joy had been concerned about her family history, since her mother had died of breast cancer at forty, but Barbara had no family history of it at all. Lightning had struck her randomly out of the blue, and no matter how successful her husband was, or how much money they had for treatment, or how much they loved each other, Barbara was very sick. She was a beautiful woman and admitted to Joy that she was worried about being disfigured, and the pain of reconstructive surgery. Their marriage was as solid as Joy and Christophe’s, and this was the greatest challenge they had ever faced, just as it was for the Lammenaises. And they knew that other marriages in the Napa Valley were not all as wholesome as theirs. There was always a lot of gossip about the local community and who was sleeping with whom. It was a small, very competitive area with a lot of social ambition, and many extramarital affairs among the people they knew.
Joy and Christophe had never been part of any of the racier local groups, and didn’t want to be. Nor had Sam and Barbara. They were down-to-earth people, in spite of Sam’s massive success. Barbara had been a flight attendant before they married. And now he had the biggest, most profitable winery in the Valley, which was a lure to the social climbers and nouveaux riches. There was a lot of money invested in the Napa Valley, and many vintners making big fortunes, like Sam and Christophe, and several others. The Marshalls’ only concession to their position and the empire Sam had founded was the Harvest Ball they gave every year in September. More as a joke, after a trip to Venice they’d taken, Barbara did it as a masked ball one year, in elaborate costumes, and everyone they’d invited liked it so much that the Marshalls continued doing it as a masked ball and established an annual tradition. Joy and Christophe had gone every year despite Christophe’s protests about how ridiculous he felt in a Louis XV costume with satin knee breeches, a wig, and a mask.
“If I have to do it, so can you,” Sam had told him repeatedly. “Barbara would kill me if I didn’t,” he said ruefully. He indulged her willingly to make her happy, and she looked beautiful in whatever costume she wore each year. “We should have given the party as a barbecue the first year, then we wouldn’t have to dress up like fools every time now,” Sam grumbled good-naturedly, but it was always a spectacular evening with fabulous buffets, dancing to an orchestra they brought in from San Francisco, and fireworks over their endless vineyards. Unlike Joy and Christophe’s elegant little château, their house was vast and high-tech modern, had been built by a famous Mexican architect, and housed their world famous collection of contemporary and modern art. They had seven Picassos they lent frequently to museums, numerous Chagalls, and work by Jackson Pollock, which thrilled Joy to see, given her profound love for fine art.
Camille spent the summer after her high school graduation working in the winery office with her mother, as she had every summer since she turned fifteen. It was her fourth year, and her parents were excited about her going to Stanford, and so was she. She planned to go to business school to get an MBA after she worked for her parents for a few years, to take a break before grad school. She had no intention of ever working anywhere else, although her father said that a year with his family in Bordeaux would do her good, and help her French, which was useful in their business, but she never strayed far from them, and didn’t intend to. She was happiest at Château Joy, with her parents, working and living with them.
Joy visited Barbara Marshall regularly over the summer. Once she started chemo, she was desperately sick, and her husband and son looked terrified whenever Joy or Christophe saw them. She was sicker than even Joy had been. And once Camille started Stanford, she came home on weekends more often than her mother thought she should. She told Christophe that Camille was too attached to them, and her life more insular than was good for her at her age. Joy thought she should venture into the world, at least for a while.
“She wants to be here,” he said, smiling at his wife, and then kissed her. “She’s our only child, don’t chase her away.” He loved it when Camille was with them, and the fact that she wanted to be there. They had often talked about having another child when Camille was younger, but their life had seemed so perfect as it was, and after Joy’s cancer was cured, it was too late.
Christophe always said he didn’t mind not having a son. He wanted Camille to run the winery one day when they were older, and he was certain she’d be good at it. She had her mother’s head for business, and he had kept the winery and vineyards at a manageable size intentionally. He didn’t want an empire as large as Sam Marshall’s, and he kept Château Joy special, small, and exclusive by choice. What they had seemed the perfect size to them, and he and Joy ran it with ease, with the occasional battle with Cesare about the vineyards.
Cesare had been with them for years, and Joy still treated him like an interloper and never trusted him. He was sloppy with his petty cash accounts, and thought accounting to her for the money was unnecessary and an imposition. She was merciless about challenging him, which enraged them both, and they argued constantly. He rarely left her office without slamming the door. Christophe suspected he pocketed small amounts from his expense account, but Cesare knew their grapes and vineyards intimately and treated them like his children. He had flawless instincts for what needed to be done, and Christophe valued him as the best vineyard manager in the Valley, and tolerated his sloppiness with money in exchange. He cared more for their grapes than their petty cash. Joy had no patience with Cesare and was unwilling to let it go, and she argued with Christophe about it too.
Christophe forgave Cesare his small transgressions easily, knowing his deep love for their winery and how knowledgeable and conscientious he was about their grapes. A few lost dollars on his expense account didn’t seem like a deal breaker to him, balanced with all the rest.
Christophe was the brilliant vintner of Château Joy, who had made it the success it was, and his wife was the practical side of the business, and handled all the nuts and bolts and kept their accounts in good order. They were a perfect team.
Camille was happy at Stanford, and met many people from around the country and the world, but the minute she had a chance to go home, she did. She was an econ major, as Joy had been in college. And most of the students she met hoped to find jobs with high-tech finance firms in Silicon Valley, or planned to head to New York for jobs on Wall Street. All Camille wanted to do was finish school and help her parents at their winery. She had three months left before graduation, her senior thesis to finish, and final exams to get through, when she was in Napa for a weekend, and noticed a medical slip on her mother’s desk, to remind her that it was time for her mammogram. It brought back instantly to Camille the terrible time five years before when her mother had been diagnosed with cancer, and she had gone through treatment for a year, but she’d had no recurrence since.
Barbara Marshall hadn’t been as fortunate. She had wasted away on chemo, as the cancer continued to spread, and died eight months after she was diagnosed. Sam and Phillip were devastated. She had been gone for a little over three years when Camille was almost ready to graduate from college. Phillip was running the winery with his father, had a lively reputation in the Valley, and went out with a lot of different girls. He liked fast, expensive cars and pretty women, and Camille saw him often in his red Ferrari, never with the same girl twice. She teased him about it, and he still treated her like a little sister, but the seven years between them made a big difference at twenty-two and twenty-nine. He was part of an adult world, among the serious vintners in the Valley, their sons were close to him in age, and they had in common the responsibilities they would have to take on one day. They had much to learn in the meantime, which Phillip took seriously, and his college days were long behind him. He pointed out that Camille had time before she had to take her place in an adult world, and his attitude annoyed her. She knew as much about their winery as Phillip did about his father’s, but Phillip didn’t act that way with her. He still treated her like an adolescent and not the grown woman she felt she was.
Camille had heard her parents say that Sam had been dating a congresswoman from LA for almost two years now, but she had never met her, and Sam was always alone or with Phillip when she saw him. Losing Barbara had aged him and he looked more serious than before. It had been a sad loss for them all, and always made Camille nervous for her mother when she thought about it.
“You still get your mammograms twice a year, don’t you, Mom?” Camille asked her after she saw the notice on her desk.
“Of course,” Joy said, sitting down with one of their enormous ledgers, as she smiled at her daughter. “I can’t wait to turn some of this over to you when you come home.” She was well aware of how capable Camille was, how organized and efficient. She had learned it from her mother. And Camille knew a lot more about the intricacies of making wine than her mother did. Christophe had taught her a great deal, ever since she was a child, far more than Joy had learned after years in the business. It was in Camille’s DNA too, just like her father’s. Joy was involved in operations and finance. Camille and Christophe were in love with the wine.
“Hang on, I’ll be here in three months.” Camille smiled at her mother. Joy had cleared an office for her, and was excited at the prospect of seeing her there every day. It was the last part of their dream coming true, having her work at the winery side by side with them, from now on. And she would take over one day when they were ready to retire, although that was still a long time away. Joy was forty-nine, and Christophe had just turned fifty.
Joy was busy for the next month, after Camille’s visit home, with a multitude of projects that landed on her desk, and Christophe was choosing labels for a new wine, and wanted her help selecting them. Joy designed their labels herself, and he was having trouble deciding between the two he liked best. Camille had already cast her vote when she was home.
It was four weeks after Camille’s last visit when Joy found the reminder in a heap of papers she’d shoved in a drawer, and called the hospital for an appointment for the mammogram. It was cursory, since she had just passed the five-year mark and was considered cured, but it made her nervous anyway, lest lightning strike again. Her own mother had died when she was younger than Joy now, but as Christophe said, they led a charmed life, and nothing bad was going to happen to them. She always tried not to think of Barbara Marshall’s sad fate when he said it.
Joy made the appointment, and used the opportunity for some other appointments in the city, since she didn’t go there often. It was an hour and a half away, but San Francisco felt like it was on another planet when she was in the Napa Valley. She had no desire to go anywhere, although Christophe had to travel periodically to promote their wines, and went to Europe and Asia, and he was anxious to take Camille with him when she came to work full-time.
The hospital had Joy’s history, and the mammogram was routine. The technician asked her to wait to put her clothes on until a doctor had checked the film, but the woman who performed it smiled as though everything was fine, and Joy was relieved, as she sat alone in an exam room, and answered text messages for work.
The doctor who came into the room was young and she didn’t know him. She couldn’t read anything in his eyes as he pulled up a stool and sat down facing her. He had her mammogram films in an envelope in his hand, and spoke to her as he went to put them up on a light box on the wall. He pointed to a gray area on the breast where she hadn’t had a problem, and turned to look at her with a serious expression.
“There’s a shadow here I don’t like, Mrs. Lammenais. If you’ve got the time, I’d like to do a biopsy on it today. With your history, I don’t think it’s smart to wait. It won’t take long, but I’d really like to know what that is.” Joy felt as though her heart were going to leap out of her chest or stop entirely. She had heard those same words five years before.
“Are you worried about it?” Her voice sounded like a croak to her own ears.
“I’d be happier if that shadow wasn’t there. It could be nothing, but we should know what’s going on.” After that, his voice was a blur, and she heard him from a great distance, and followed the technician like a robot to another room, where they took off her gown and covered her with a drape, she lay on the table, they numbed the area, and did a biopsy which was painful, and her heart was pounding the entire time. She kept thinking of the hellish year she’d had of chemo, of Barbara Marshall dying after eight months, of her own mother, dead of breast cancer at forty. There were tears sliding out of her eyes, while they did the biopsy, and she was sobbing as she ran out of the hospital when it was over and hurried down the steps. They said they’d call her with the results, but she didn’t want to hear them. She could sense what was coming. They said that lightning didn’t strike twice, but she already knew it had. She could feel it in her soul. And what was she going to tell Christophe and Camille if she had cancer again? She couldn’t imagine, and she felt like she was already dead when she got into her car and drove back to the Napa Valley, blinded by her tears. Joy tried to focus on her driving, but for the first time ever, she felt sure she was going to die. How could she be lucky twice?