Read Chapter 11: Claire's Ultimatum

The knock came at nine in the morning, sharp and insistent, three raps that echoed through the shuttered dining room. Camille had been scraping burnt sugar from a copper pot—a small, meditative task she’d taken on to quiet the chaos of the night before—and she froze, hands slick with warm water and lemon juice.

Through the kitchen window she saw Claire’s silver Peugeot parked at an angle in the gravel, doors still open like a pair of wings.

Julien was already answering. His voice carried through the corridor, low and measured. Then Claire’s, not low at all. Camille set the pot down and moved toward the pantry, a soft-bellied space with a narrow vent opening onto the main hall. It wasn’t an intentional choice. It was the only place to go without crossing the line of sight.

“You cannot be serious,” Claire said. Camille heard the slap of a handbag on the reception desk. “Seven months of me reworking your books, dragging bookings out of every travel site that exists, and you want to hand the kitchen to a woman who’s been here for two weeks and already knows where the bodies are buried.”

“She’s a chef,” Julien said. “She’s better than I am. You ate what she made.”

“I ate what my *partner* made and told him it was excellent. That is what you call professional courtesy.”

“You told me it was ‘unexpectedly decent.’ That’s what you call professional courtesy. And then you ate three servings of the daube.”

A silence. Camille pressed her eye to the vent—a hairline gap between two aged boards. Claire stood at the desk, arms crossed, jaw tight. Julien leaned against the wall opposite her, arms loose at his sides, wearing the same gray sweater he’d worn last night. He looked like he hadn’t slept.

“I’m not here to discuss my appetite,” Claire said. “I’m here to talk about the *conversation* that happened last night, which I walked into. Just in time, by the look of things. She knows about your father.”

“She would have found out eventually.”

“From you, Julien. She was supposed to hear it from *you*.” Claire’s voice cracked on the word itself, and for a moment Camille saw the woman underneath—not the sharp-elbowed business partner, but someone older, worn thin by the same grief and secrecy that plagued the entire household. “When you were ready. The way we agreed.”

“We didn’t agree on anything. You decided. You and Maman. You decided everything about that man’s disappearance, about what I was allowed to know, about how I was supposed to feel about it.”

“And look how well that’s gone.”

Claire took a step toward him. Through the vent, Camille watched the distance between them shrink to the length of a forearm. There was something familiar—intimate even—in the way they stood, their angry posture nearly mirrored. Two people who knew each other’s rhythms far too well.

“I’m not leaving the partnership,” Claire said. “But I won’t work like this. Not with her roaming around, opening drawers, reading your grandmother’s recipes. That kitchen was Odette’s. I watched her cook in it when I was a girl. I will not watch another woman stand where she stood and pretend she has any right to it.”

“Camille isn’t pretending anything.”

“Camille is an accident. A beautiful, convenient accident you’ve convinced yourself is a solution. But your father is sitting in that guesthouse six streets away, and she knows it, and I can’t be your partner if you keep choosing the accident over the mess.” Claire picked up her bag. “Either she leaves, or I do.”

She didn’t wait for an answer. The front door closed behind her with a click—soft, final, somehow worse than a slam. Julien stood alone in the hall for a long moment. Then he dropped his head low and ran both hands through his hair, a gesture Camille had seen the boys make in school when a test had gone badly. She pressed her palm flat against the pantry wall to steady herself.

The vent was condensation-cold. She watched him do nothing for almost two full minutes—no phone call, no pacing, no shouting. Just standing, listening to the silence Claire had left behind.

Then he moved. He walked away from the desk, past the dining room, past the kitchen door without looking in—Camille’s body went rigid against the shelf—and out the service entrance toward the garden. The door clicked shut, and the house breathed empty.

Camille counted to ten. Then she stepped out of the pantry.

She walked up the stairs slowly, each foot heavy as if the treads had turned to mud. In her room, she pulled the worn canvas duffel from the back of the wardrobe—the one she’d brought from Paris, not the new things she’d started to collect—and laid it open on the bed.

Her mother’s photograph. Three shirts. The repaired locket, still warm from her palm. The daube recipe, transcribed in her own handwriting, tucked protectively into the duffel’s inner pocket before she could argue with herself.

The anonymous text glowed from her phone on the nightstand: *Noon. Rue des Oliviers. Come alone.*

It was eleven minutes to ten.

She zipped the bag and set it by the door.

Downstairs, the kitchen was warm and unsuspecting, copper pots gleaming in a shaft of morning sun. The pot she’d been scrubbing sat abandoned on the counter. Camille ran her fingers over its rim—it was the one Odette had favored for the daube, the seasoning worn thin and dark with years of use.

She heard Julien’s footsteps on the gravel, coming back toward the house.

She didn’t run. She simply picked up her bag, left her key on the counter, and walked out the front door into the lavender-scented air—with only one question she couldn’t answer: whether leaving was what he wanted her to do.