Read Chapter 33: Aftermath: An Uneasy Peace

Antoine’s car smelled of old leather and cigarette smoke, a relic from a decade Julien had tried to forget. The vineyard gates swung open ahead of them, and Camille killed the engine of her small Renault in the gravel courtyard. Dust settled around them like a held breath.

Julien didn’t move. His hands rested on his thighs, fists half-clenched. Behind them, Antoine’s rental sedan rolled to a stop, its headlights cutting through the late-afternoon haze.

“We could have done this in the clubhouse,” Julien said quietly.

“No,” Camille said. “We couldn’t have.”

She got out first. Julien watched her walk around the hood, her stride steady even now, hours after the club had stripped her title and handed her a cardboard box. She’d packed her things with the same flat efficiency she’d used to tape ankles and ice knees. No drama. No tears. Just motion.

He hated that about her. He loved it more.

Antoine stepped out of his car and straightened his jacket. He was thinner than Julien remembered, grayer at the temples, and there was a softness to his movements now that hadn’t existed when Julien was a boy. Age had filed down his sharp edges. But his eyes were the same—the same careful blue that had watched Julien from the stands at every youth match, never cheering, never criticizing. Just watching.

“This is a beautiful place,” Antoine said, looking at the vines that rolled toward the hills.

“It belonged to Camille’s family,” Julien said. He didn’t offer more.

They walked to the house in silence. Camille unlocked the back door and led them through the kitchen into a sitting room where the light came in low and golden. She poured three glasses of water from a carafe, set them on the table, and sat. Julien sat across from her. Antoine remained standing by the window, his hands clasped behind his back.

“You said Vincent’s death wasn’t investigated properly,” Julien said. “You said you lied to protect me. What exactly did you lie about?”

Antoine turned from the window. “I didn’t lie about what happened. I lied about what I saw—what was in front of me.”

“Which was?”

“Your brother,” Antoine said slowly, “had a congenital brain condition. An arteriovenous malformation. He was born with it. It was a tangle of blood vessels in the left hemisphere of his brain, and it was fragile.”

Julien blinked. “He never told me that.”

“He didn’t know.” Antoine sat down heavily in an armchair, his knees cracking. “We found out during the autopsy. The coroner’s report was clear. He could have lived another forty years, or he could have dropped dead at any moment. It was a ticking clock no one knew about.”

“So the accident—” Julien’s voice caught.

“The accident,” Antoine said, “was a rupture. He collapsed on the pitch, and his skull hit the ground when he fell. That’s what killed him. Not the tackle. Not the hit. The burst vessel in his brain that was already there.”

The room went quiet. Julien stared at the floor. Somewhere outside, a bird called once and fell silent.

Camille leaned forward, her voice careful. “Why did you keep that from Julien?”

Antoine’s jaw tightened. “Because the inquiry was already leaning toward negligence on the club’s part. The pitch had been flagged for poor drainage. The medical staff had missed signs—headaches, fatigue, a loss of coordination in the weeks before. If the full report had come out, the club would have been held responsible for missing those symptoms. There would have been investigations. Fines. Possibly a ban.”

“And the club made sure that didn’t happen,” Julien said.

“They made sure I made it not happen.” Antoine met his son’s eyes. “I was a junior member of the medical board. Not a doctor. Just an administrator. But I was the one who flagged Vincent’s history of headaches in his youth records. The club president at the time called me into his office with their lawyer. They said if I testified that Vincent had been cleared by independent specialists before the season—which he had, because he had been, we just didn’t know about the malformation—then the focus would stay on the medical issue rather than the club’s negligence. They said Vincent’s records would show he’d passed every pre-season screening.”

“He had,” Julien said.

“He had,” Antoine agreed. “But they wanted me to emphasize that. To make sure the official narrative was that no one could have predicted it. And I did. I testified that Vincent’s screening results were normal, which they were. I didn’t mention that there was a shadow on one of the later scans—a shadow no one had flagged because the radiologist who read it was an intern and the senior staff never reviewed his work.

“The truth,” Antoine went on, “is that Vincent might have been saved if someone had caught it earlier. Surgery was possible. It was risky, but it was possible. And I made a choice to bury that so the club wouldn’t be destroyed—and so your career wouldn’t be collateral.”

Julien’s voice was raw. “My career.”

“You were seventeen years old and already being scouted by three national academies. If the story had been that the club missed a fatal brain condition in a promising young player, the scandal would have touched everyone associated with the program. Your name was in the academy’s recruitment files. You would have been tainted by association before you ever turned professional.”

“So you traded Vincent’s justice for my future.”

Antoine didn’t flinch. “Yes.”

The word hung in the air between them like a verdict.

Julien stood. His chair scraped against the stone floor, and he walked to the window, his back to both of them. Camille watched the set of his shoulders, the way his hands pressed flat against the sill.

“I’ve spent ten years believing Vincent was killed because he refused to play their game,” Julien said. “Believing that if I pushed harder, asked the right questions, found the right evidence, I’d uncover some conspiracy that would finally make sense of it. That there was a villain, a specific man, a single moment of malice I could point to and say, *that’s who did this*.”

“There was no villain,” Antoine said gently. “There was a boy with a hidden weakness and a system that failed to find it. That’s not the same thing as murder.”

“No,” Julien said. “It’s worse. Murder, I could rage against. This—” He turned, and his face was open in a way Camille had never seen. “This is just my brother’s body betraying him, and everyone who should have been watching looking away.”

Antoine rose and crossed to stand in front of his son. He was shorter than Julien by a few inches now, and his hands hung at his sides, uncertain.

“I know I can’t undo what I did,” Antoine said. “I can’t give you back the years you spent carrying a weight that wasn’t yours to carry. But I can tell you the truth now, and I can help you with the fight in front of you. That’s all I have.”

Julien looked at his father for a long moment. The silence stretched, and Camille felt her own breath catch in her throat. Then Julien stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Antoine’s shoulders.

Antoine stiffened, then softened. His arms came up slowly, and he held his son with the careful, almost reverent grip of a man who hadn’t touched him in years.

“I’m sorry,” Antoine whispered into Julien’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry, son.”

Julien didn’t speak. He just held his father tighter.

Camille looked away. The moment was not hers to witness, and she gave them the privacy of her turned head, the soft sound of her footsteps as she moved to the kitchen to give them space.

When Julien came through the door a few minutes later, his eyes were red but his face was calm. He found her leaning against the counter, a glass of wine in her hand she hadn’t poured for herself. He took it from her and drank.

“So,” he said quietly. “Everything I believed about Vincent—the syndicate, the retaliation, the murder—it was all a story I built to make sense of a world that doesn’t always offer closure.” He set the glass down. “Moreau’s still guilty of financial fraud. The syndicate still has its hooks in the club. And Vincent still died on a rugby pitch. Those things are all true. They just aren’t connected the way I needed them to be.”

“Does it change what you want to do?” Camille asked.

Julien shook his head. “No. Moreau’s still a criminal. Delacroix is still protecting him. And you’re still the best physio I’ve ever worked with, credentials or not.” He reached out and took her hand. “I’m still going to walk into that board meeting with you. I’m still going to tell them they can fire you, but they’ll have to fire me too. And we’re still going to burn that whole rotten structure to the ground.”

Camille squeezed his fingers. “Your father’s testimony helps. The board can’t dismiss a man who was there at the original inquiry—especially when his account matches Moreau’s confession about the syndicate’s involvement in club finances. It gives us more than a story. It gives us corroboration.”

“I know.” Julien glanced back toward the sitting room. “I just never thought I’d be grateful to have him on my side.”

“People surprise you,” Camille said. “Sometimes in good ways.”

Julien smiled—a small, tired smile, but a real one. He pulled her gently toward him and pressed his forehead against hers. “Thank you,” he said. “For not running.”

“I still might,” she said. “After this meeting.”

“Then I’ll run after you.”

They stood there in the quiet kitchen, the last of the afternoon light fading through the window, two people who had picked up each other’s broken pieces and weren’t yet sure how to fit them back together. But they were holding them. That was something.

From the sitting room, they heard Antoine clear his throat. A moment later, his voice came through the doorway. “We have less than two hours until the board meeting. If I’m going to testify, I need to know exactly what Moreau confessed to and what your lawyer friend has put together. We should make a plan.”

Julien pulled back from Camille and looked toward the door. His father was standing there, older and softer and flawed—but present. For the first time in more than a decade, present.

“Yeah,” Julien said. “Let’s plan.”

He let go of Camille’s hand, but she followed him as he walked back into the sitting room, and when he sat down beside his father, she sat across from them both, a table of survivors gathering their pieces before the storm.