Santa Barbara, which offered better economics courses. His girlfriend and another good friend were also thinking of transferring there, so he was guaranteed a roommate.
Wren and Jerome kept wondering when Greg was going to wake up and see Kristin for what she really was.
That summer Greg told Kristin’s father that he wanted to marry her. But Ralph told Greg he needed to finish college first, so Greg and Kristin settled on getting informally engaged. As much as the Rossums didn’t approve of the couple’s living arrangement, they decided to acknowledge the situation and allowed them to move into another apartment together.
“Kristin loved Greg, and we wanted to help them both to the extent that we could,” Constance recalled.
So, they agreed to pay the rent. They also bought furniture for the couple and a white 1990 Toyota Cressida for Kristin. They were proud of both young people and so pleased that Kristin seemed like her old self again that they happily paid for her tuition, books, clothes, and car insurance. They even threw in a little extra spending money.
Constance took Greg aside and made him promise to tell them if he saw any signs that Kristin was back on drugs. He told her not to worry; he knew what to do. His father was a doctor.
By all accounts, the couple seemed giddy with love, sitting close on the couch and holding hands all the time. Marie, Greg’s mother, described them as lovebirds.
That summer Kristin went with her family for a vacation in the south of France. Every day she would wait by the phone for Greg to call at a prearranged time, and he would follow through, no matter where he was.
Greg waited as best he could to formally propose marriage. Then, on October 25, 1996, he couldn’t wait any longer. The two of them were driving down to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico, to celebrate Kristin’s twentieth birthday with dinner at Lobster Village. As they were driving down the toll road, Kristin opened the glove compartment to store the toll ticket and thought she saw a jewelry box. She was right. After dinner Greg opened the compartment, pulled out an engagement ring, and popped the question. She said yes.
The next day, Kristin drove to her parents’ house in Claremont to show off the ring. The Rossums were happy—cautiously happy—and said they hoped it would be a long engagement.
Chapter 4
Greg, like Kristin, came from a well educated, suburban family. Although their childhoods and teenage years were quite different, experiences in their formative years groomed them to come together as a codependent couple, with strengths and needs that complemented each other.
Greg’s family life trained him early and often to be a protector, an adviser, and a caretaker. As the oldest son in a single-parent household, Greg shouldered the responsibility for the welfare of his two brothers and their mother, whose respiratory problems put her in the hospital starting when they were in elementary school. It is not uncommon for children of parents who are chronically ill or addicted to drugs or alcohol to end up in a romantic relationship with a substance abuser.
Through all of this, Greg somehow learned how to stay positive, or at least to maintain the appearance that everything was fine. And if it wasn’t, then he’d do his damnedest to make it better.
When Greg met Kristin in late 1994, she was eighteen and addicted to crystal meth. At twenty-one, with little experience in the girlfriend department, Greg was determined to be her savior and get her off drugs. His efforts were successful. Their troubles developed in the next few years, as Kristin increasingly wanted her independence. In turn, Greg displayed the typical behavior of someone involved with an addict—he tried to control and protect Kristin and their relationship, even more so when he saw signs that she’d relapsed. The knowledge that she was having an affair and that their marriage was falling apart—especially after living through his parents’ acrimonious divorce—undoubtedly fueled the dynamic.
Gregory Bernard Paul Yvon Tremolet de Villers was the first of three American sons born to Yves and Marie-France Tremolet de Villers. Greg and his brothers grew up in Southern California, across the globe from France, their parents’ native country. But because their mother always felt more comfortable speaking in her native tongue, all three were fluent in it.
Marie-France was born in 1943 in Gaillac, a small town near the Pyrenees. When she was a child, her mother would spread hot vapor rub on her chest to help her asthmatic breathing. Her father’s military career exposed her and her younger sister, Marie-Paul, at an early age to African cultures in Algeria, Morocco, the Ivory Coast, and the Congo. Marie-France was in her twenties, working as a physical therapist, when she met Yves in Mende, a town in the south of France, where her parents had settled. Yves, who was eight years her senior, worked in a hospital there.
Yves lost his father when he was eleven, so his mother raised him and his sisters with the help of two uncles, both members of the French Parliament. When their town of Montpellier was bombed during World War II, Yves’ family hid in a vaulted basement across the street from their home, biting on pieces of wood to keep their mouths open and prevent their eardrums from rupturing. The next morning they learned that thousands had died in the night. Yves saw people gunned down in the street and was awakened one night at 2 A.M. by the Gestapo, who were looking for one of his uncles.
Ambitious and intelligent, Yves started medical school in Montpellier in 1953. He also studied medicine at a university in Marseilles. He trained in surgery and anesthesiology and also interned at a hospital in Nice.
Yves and Marie moved to the Chicago area in 1970 so he could continue his medical studies, and they were married there in 1972. Greg was born the following year, on November 12. Yves did a residency in hand surgery at Northwestern University, one in general surgery at Michael Reese Hospital, and one in plastic surgery at the University of Illinois, where he also taught classes. In 1974 he opened a surgical practice in Monte Carlo, which is in the tiny country of Monaco, on the Mediterranean Sea near the French and Italian borders. A resort area, Monte Carlo has a population of about thirty-two thousand, is a vacation spot for the rich, and is known for its casinos and for being home to the late Grace Kelly after she married its chief of state, Prince Rainier III.
In 1975, two years and three days after Greg was born, Marie gave birth to Jerome Henri Vincent Louis Tremolet de Villers, continuing the tradition of naming their sons after three relatives. The family soon moved to Westlake Village in California, a community that straddles Ventura and Los Angeles Counties. They bought a modest condominium there that December, and Yves opened a second plastic surgery practice, this time with a partner in the neighboring city of Thousand Oaks, a mostly white, family-oriented city of about 117,000 people in Ventura County.
The third de Villers son, Charles Bertrand Jean Francois, who went by Bertrand, or Bert to his friends, was born on March 10, 1979, in a hospital across the street from the family’s condo.
Over the years, Yves would travel back and forth between his dual practices in Thousand Oaks and Monte Carlo. Yves worked as a surgeon at L’Hospital Complex Princess Grace. Back in California, Bertrand remembered that Yves did some work on Walt Disney to fix a broken nose, and that he brought home a Mickey Mouse watch as a token of appreciation.
But pure medicine was never enough for Yves, who had a very active mind. He went on to coauthor a textbook titled Body Sculpturing by Lipoplasty in 1989. A student for life, he also received a master’s degree in business administration, finance, and marketing from the University of Southern Europe in Monaco in 1998.
Two months after Bertrand was born, the family moved to a more upscale neighborhood a couple of miles away, where Yves and Marie bought a two-story house on Silver Springs Drive. Lined with tall, thin
