Read Chapter 20: The Runaway

The rain started sometime after midnight, a thin persistent drizzle that slicked the streets and turned the harbor lights into smeared gold. Camille knew because she watched it from Julien’s window, her forehead pressed to the cool glass, listening to the uneven rhythm of his breathing behind her.

He had finally slept. After the confession, after the words had cracked out of him like stones from a split wall, something in his body had simply given up. She’d stayed on the floor beside him, their hands knotted together until his grip went slack, and then she’d eased him onto the sofa and covered him with the blanket she found draped over the armchair.

When she woke at dawn, the sofa was empty.

His apartment was small, and she searched it anyway, a stupid reflexive gesture that confirmed what the open door and the missing keys already told her. His boots were gone. His phone sat on the kitchen counter, screen dark, a single missed call from a number she didn’t recognize glowing faintly at the edge of the lock screen.

She dialed him. Straight to voicemail. His phone was still here, and so his silence wasn’t a choice—it was a physical absence she couldn't reach.

The clubhouse was his next stop. She drove there in a cold fury, the wipers sweeping arcs across the windshield that did nothing to cut through the gray damp of the morning. It was barely seven when she pulled into the empty lot. The front door was unlocked, and she found a bleary-eyed groundskeeper mopping the lobby who told her he’d seen Julien’s truck heading east on the A50 around dawn.

East. Not toward the Mediterranean coast. East meant the interior, the long gray ribbon of highway that cut through the garrigue toward Marseille.

She made three calls before she left the lot. The first was to the club secretary, who confirmed that Julien had not called in, had not left a message, had simply disappeared. The second was to Rey, the old teammate who had warned her about the syndicate. He answered on the second ring, his voice thick with sleep, and when Camille told him Julien was gone, he was quiet for a long moment.

“He’ll go where his father went,” Rey said finally. “Every man who runs from something eventually runs toward the last place they felt safe. Even if it wasn’t safe at all.”

The third call she did not make. She could not call his mother. She did not know the woman, had never met her, and the thought of introducing herself as “your son’s physiotherapist who let him vanish the morning after you arrived” was too absurd to complete.

So she drove.

The A50 unfolded ahead of her, a wet gray ribbon that turned the world into a blur of dull green scrub and limestone outcrops. She passed through Aubagne, where the morning markets were just beginning to stir, and then the highway curved north past the massif, the pale rock of the Calanques rising to her left like a broken tooth.

Marseille hit her like a wall of sound.

She had forgotten how loud a real city was, how raw and unpolished compared to the manicured calm of Montpellier. The old port was a chaos of bobbing masts and tourist boats, of café tables stacked in wet piles and delivery vans honking their way through impossibly narrow streets. She parked illegally on the Quai du Port, wedged between a fishmonger’s van and a pile of plastic crates, and started walking.

She found him on the Rue de la République, half a kilometer from the port, at a café with a yellow awning that had weathered to the color of old newspaper. He was seated at an outside table, his back to the street, a glass of pastis sweating untouched in front of him. His shoulders were a hard line under his jacket, and he didn’t turn as she approached, didn’t flinch when she pulled out the chair across from him and sat down.

“How did you find me?” His voice was flat, drained.

“You’re not that hard to track when you leave a trail of grief behind you,” she said. “Rey told me you’d come here.”

Julien exhaled. His hands were wrapped around the glass, and she saw the tremor in his fingers, the fine vibration of a man who had not slept and had not eaten and was running on the last dregs of adrenaline.

“My father disappeared from this street,” he said. “He used to run a newsstand, three blocks from here. Small thing, not much bigger than a closet. But when the debts got too deep, he just walked out one morning and never came back. No note. No call. He left his keys on the counter and his coffee half-drunk.”

Camille said nothing. The rain had stopped, but the air was still heavy with it, and the café awning dripped fat lazy drops into the gutter.

“I used to think about that,” Julien continued. “About the moment he decided. Was it when he woke up? When he poured the coffee? Did he know, when he left the apartment, that he wasn’t coming back? Was there a moment where he could have turned around, could have decided differently?”

“You’re not your father.” Camille said it flatly, without comfort.

Julien laughed, a bitter sound with no warmth. “No. My father gambled away his life. I gambled away my brother’s.”

Before she could answer, his gaze shifted. Not toward her, but past her shoulder, over her left arm, down the street to where the crowd of morning pedestrians moved between the shop fronts and the café terraces.

His whole body went still.

Camille turned slowly, following his line of sight. A man was walking away from them, maybe forty meters down the pavement. He was broad-shouldered, with dark hair cropped short at the back, and he moved with the loose, rolling gait of a man who had spent his life in deliberate motion. He wore a leather jacket too light for the morning chill and carried nothing—no bag, no phone in hand—just walked with a fixed purpose toward the intersection at the end of the street.

Julien’s breath caught. The glass in his hand stopped trembling.

“Vincent,” he whispered.

Camille looked back at the man. He was nearly at the corner now, his profile briefly visible as he paused to check for traffic. His face was older, harder than the photographs she’d seen in Julien’s apartment, but the resemblance was there—the same heavy brow, the same squared jaw, the same way of carrying his shoulders like a shield.

The man stepped off the curb, crossed the street, and disappeared into the mouth of a narrow alley.

Julien did not move.

The pastis sat untouched. His chair did not scrape back. He did not rise, did not call out, did not run after him. He simply sat, his eyes locked on the empty corner where the man had vanished, and let the moment pass.

“That wasn’t him,” Julien said, and his voice shook. “I know it wasn’t him. But every time I see a man with his build, a man with his walk, a man with the back of his head shaped like his—” He broke off, pressed his thumb and forefinger to his eyes. “It’s worse now. Since I railed into that flanker. Since I hit the pitch again. It’s like he’s everywhere and nowhere, and my body can’t tell the difference anymore.”

Camille reached across the table and took his hand. His fingers were cold, and he gripped hers with a desperate strength, not gently, not cautiously, but with the full force of a man holding on to the last thing that felt real.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

Julien looked at her, and for a moment his face was completely open—raw, exhausted, stripped of every layer of bravado and anger and protection he had built around himself.

“Everyone leaves,” he said. “My father left. Vincent left. What makes you think you won’t?”

She didn’t have an answer for that. Not yet. But she held his hand across the wet café table in the middle of a city that smelled of fish and diesel and diesel and regret, and she felt the tremor in his fingers slowly begin to steady.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it. It buzzed again. And again.

“You should answer that,” Camille said.

Julien shook his head, let go of her hand, and pulled out the phone. The screen lit up with a name she didn’t recognize, and his face went pale as he read the message.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Julien, what is it?”

But he was already standing, already reaching for his jacket, and the look in his eyes was not grief anymore. It was fear.

“That was Moreau,” he said. “A video of me hitting Lacroix just went viral. The club has already released a statement condemning me.”

He looked at her, and the weight of the new fall landed somewhere between them, heavier than everything that had come before.

“And they’re saying you helped me hide it.”