Read Chapter 2: The Locket

The floorboards of the guest room creaked under Camille’s weight as she crossed to the window. The storm had passed, leaving behind a sky the color of bruised lavender, and the last of the rain dripped from the eaves in a lazy, arrhythmic patter. She pressed her palms against the windowsill, the wood rough and scarred with paint from a dozen repaintings, and looked down at the garden.

It was worse than she remembered. The rose bushes were wild, their branches tangling inward like unspooled thread, and the stone path to the back gate was cracked. But there—beneath the dead leaves and the wet, matted grass—was the old fig tree. Still standing. Still stubborn.

She let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

Behind her, the guest room held its own quiet archaeology. A brass bed frame with a mattress wrapped in plastic, waiting for renovation. A nightstand with a drawer that stuck. The wallpaper was faded, a pattern of pale blue cornflowers that Julien’s grandmother had probably chosen decades ago. Camille’s suitcase sat open at the foot of the bed, but she hadn’t unpacked. She wasn’t sure she was staying.

She turned from the window and knelt beside the bed, peering underneath. Old habits. When she was seventeen, she had hidden a diary in this room—or had it been the next one over? The layout blurred in her memory, assembled more from longing than fact.

Her fingers found the edge of a loose floorboard near the baseboard, one corner lifted just enough to catch her nail. She felt a small pulse of curiosity, the same thrill she’d had as a girl, when the world above her had been too loud and she had needed a place to put the things she couldn’t say.

She pried the board up. It came free with a dry, reluctant groan.

Inside the gap was dust, a few dead moth husks, and a small velvet pouch, brittle with age. Camille picked it up carefully, the fabric thin as paper under her fingers. She loosened the drawstring and tipped the contents into her palm.

A locket.

Silver, tarnished to a dull gray at the edges, with a faint engraving of a sprig of lavender on the front. The chain was broken, hanging in two thin, useless strands. Camille’s stomach tightened. She knew this locket. She had seen it once, on a girl she no longer recognized, at the edge of a lake on a summer night when the air smelled of pine and cheap wine.

Her fingers worked the clasp. It resisted, then gave with a small click.

Inside, on a disc of aged ivory paper, was a photograph. A girl, seventeen, laughing at something just out of frame. Her hair was a wild, dark tangle, and she wore a swimsuit with a faded floral print, one strap slipping off her shoulder. The girl was Camille. Young. Unburdened. Before her mother’s illness. Before the flight to Paris. Before the divorce.

The girl in the photo had no idea what was coming for her.

Camille stared at the image for a long moment. The laugh in the photo was real—she remembered that day. She remembered pulling Julien into the water by his wrist, his protest turning into a laugh that cracked with surprise. She remembered the way his hand had found hers under the surface, fingers laced, secret and electric.

She snapped the locket shut. Her fingers closed around it, and for a moment she had the mad thought that the chain could be repaired. That maybe it had never really broken. That maybe—

The floorboard creaked behind her.

She turned, shoving the locket into her pocket with the guilty speed of a thief. Julien stood in the doorway, a stack of folded linens in his arms. He had changed into a clean shirt, and his hair was still damp, dark at the temples. He looked at her on her knees, looked at the loose floorboard, and his eyes narrowed just slightly.

“Find something?” he asked. His voice was neutral, the kind of neutral that worked hard to stay that way.

“Old floorboard.” Camille stood too quickly, brushing dust from her palms. “Thought there might be something worth hiding from the rain under there. It’s just—” She gestured vaguely. “Just an old board. I’ll put it back.”

Julien set the linens on the end of the bed. The mattress was bare, and the linens looked like they belonged to a different era—lace-trimmed, slightly yellowed at the folds. His grandmother’s. He didn’t sit. He didn’t come closer. He stood with his arms at his sides, and for a long beat neither of them said anything.

“You’re in the wrong room,” he said finally. “This one’s for guests. There’s a smaller one down the hall, if you’re staying.”

The words hung between them, deliberately light, but Camille caught the edge beneath them. *If you’re staying.* As if she had anywhere else to go. As if her car, sitting dead in the driveway, had any other destination.

“I don’t know what I’m doing yet,” she confessed. The words came out smaller than she wanted.

Julien’s jaw tightened. He looked at her, really looked, and for a moment Camille saw the boy she remembered beneath the guarded lines of his face. The same serious brown eyes. The same way he had of holding something back, like he was deciding whether to trust you with it.

“Your car,” he said. “I called a mechanic in Saint-Rémy. He can come tomorrow morning, but you’ll need a part he’ll have to order. Could be a few days.”

A few days. Camille nodded slowly, as if she had options. As if there was anywhere else on earth she wanted to be.

“I should call someone,” she said, but even as she said it, she knew she wasn’t going to. There was no one to call. Her mother was gone. Her husband—ex-husband—was in Paris, probably already moving on with the younger woman from his office. Her friends had drifted, the way friends do when you stop returning calls, when you stop leaving the apartment, when your whole life becomes a quiet unraveling you don’t want to narrate aloud.

“There’s a phone in the hall,” Julien said. “But it’s late.”

It was not late. The sky outside was still a bruised, weary blue. But Camille understood the truce behind the words. He was not asking her to stay. He was simply letting her.

“Thank you,” she said. “For letting me in. For the tea. For—for being here.”

Julien looked away, at the window, at the fig tree, anywhere but at her. “I didn’t have much of a choice. You were soaked.”

“You had a choice.” Camille stepped closer, and the floorboard popped under her heel, still loose. “You could have turned me away.”

“I don’t turn people away in a storm.” He said it simply, like it was a rule he had copied down long ago and never crossed out.

Camille’s hand moved to her pocket, where the locket pressed against her thigh. Her fingers closed around the shape of it, the broken chain a fragile, sharp tangle. She thought about that summer, about the night she had first kissed Julien behind the garden shed, his lips tasting of peach and hesitation. She thought about the way he had written to her for months after she left, letters she had never answered. The girl in the photo. The woman she had become. The distance between them measured in years and silence and a marriage that had crumbled like stale bread.

“Julien.” His name came out unplanned.

He turned back to her. His face was patient, waiting, and there was something in his expression that made her throat tighten.

“The floorboard,” she said. “Are you renovating this whole place?”

A pause. He looked at the house, at the bare walls, the bucket in the corner catching a drip, and for a second Camille saw the weight of it settle on him. The magnitude of the work. The loss of the woman who had raised him.

“Trying to.” He picked up the stack of linens again, tucking them under his arm. “My grandmother left the house to me, and I’m trying to bring it back. One room at a time.”

“She would have wanted that.” Camille didn’t know why she said it. She barely remembered Julien’s grandmother—a small woman with sharp eyes and a short way of speaking, who had never quite approved of Camille, though she had never explained why.

Julien’s mouth curved, just barely. “She wanted me to sell it.”

Camille blinked.

“She said it was too much for one person. That I should let it go. Get out of the past.” He shook his head, the motion small, almost to himself. “But I can’t seem to do that.”

The words landed in the space between them. Camille felt the weight of the locket in her pocket, the press of silver against her skin. She understood the sentence he hadn’t said. She understood it, because she had been saying it in reverse for sixteen years.

“The guest room down the hall,” Julien said, shifting the linens in his arms. “It’s small, but the bed’s made. You can use it tonight.”

She held his gaze. “Tomorrow, I’ll figure something out.”

“Tomorrow,” Julien repeated. It sounded like an agreement, but Camille knew better. Tomorrow had been their favorite promise once. It had never once come true.

Julien left. His footsteps retreated down the hall, and Camille waited until she heard a door close before she sank onto the edge of the bed, the springs groaning beneath her.

She pulled the locket from her pocket. In the dim light, the lavender engraving was barely visible. She held it up to the window, and for a moment the tarnish made it look like something silver, something new.

The girl in the photograph stared back at her, frozen in a laugh she could not remember giving.

Camille looked at the loose floorboard. She could put it back. She could close the gap, let the locket lie buried under the dust and the dark, where it had been forgotten for years. That would be the clean thing. The moving-forward thing.

Her fingers lifted the floorboard. The gap yawned open, dark and empty.

She put the locket in her pocket instead.

She walked to the window. The fig tree stood in the dimming light, and she watched it, this tree she had climbed, this town she had fled, this life she had so carefully left behind.

She stayed until the light failed completely, and the only thing she could see in the glass was her own reflection—older, sharper, exhausted. And she thought, with her hand pressed against the locket: *Tomorrow means nothing unless you stay for it.*