Read Chapter 26: A Financial Tangle

The morning light poured through the kitchen windows, catching the dust motes that drifted lazy circles above the prep table. Camille had been up since five, slicing peaches for the festival's signature tart, her knife moving in the steady rhythm that usually quieted her mind. It didn't today. The bank letter sat in her apron pocket, a paper weight against her hip.

She'd read it twelve times since the postman dropped it through the slot at dawn. The language was dry, bureaucratic, almost gentle: *Notice of Default and Foreclosure Proceedings*. Her mother's house—her childhood home, the one she'd poured her savings into alongside her mother after her father vanished—was being sold out from under them because Étienne had taken out a second mortgage. Without her knowledge. Without her signature.

The fraud case had recovered the joint account funds. It hadn't touched the mortgage he'd quietly arranged eighteen months before their separation, using the deed she'd signed during the renovation loan as collateral. The paperwork was clever. Almost elegant in its deviousness.

"Something burning?"

Julien's voice came from the doorway, warm and laced with the first coffee of the day. Camille looked down at the peaches, already scorched on the cutting board where her knife had paused mid-slice.

"Just lost track." She scraped the ruined fruit into the compost bin with practiced efficiency. "I'll start another batch."

Julien crossed to the stove, poured himself coffee, and leaned against the counter with the casual ease she'd grown used to over the past weeks. His eyes found the letter's corner sticking from her apron. "That the bank again?"

She'd told him about the first letter, the one that had arrived before the Paris trip. He'd offered then to help, and she'd declined with the same defensiveness that now tightened her jaw.

"It's foreclosure." The words came out flat, stripped of the panic she felt. "Ninety days. They'll auction the house."

Julien set down his mug. His face did that thing it did when he was calculating—subtle shifts of muscle that betrayed a mind working fast beneath a calm exterior. "Ninety days is enough time to challenge it. The fraud judgment gives you standing."

"The mortgage predates the fraud finding." Camille turned back to the stove, needing her hands occupied. "It's separate. Legal. Étienne was clever enough to keep them disconnected."

"Camille."

She didn't turn around. The pan hissed as she laid fresh peach slices across it, the sugar beginning to caramelize.

"There's another way to look at this," Julien said. "The house is half yours. You sell it outright, pay off the mortgage, keep the equity. You control the process instead of the bank."

"And lose my childhood home anyway." Her voice cracked on the last word. She'd been so careful, so deliberate, holding herself at a distance from him while his father's reckoning unfolded. She didn't want him to see the cracks in her armor now.

"Or I can cover the debt. A loan, if you want to call it that. No interest. Payment plan that fits whatever timeline works for you."

She turned, and the sharp motion made the pan clatter against the burner. "I told you no already."

"You told me no before you knew the house was in default."

"The answer doesn't change just because the numbers got bigger."

Julien's jaw tightened, the only outward sign of his frustration. "This isn't about pride, Camille. It's about your mother's house. Your father's orchard. The place where you learned to cook—"

"The place I can't afford." She pressed a hand to her forehead, trying to slow her racing pulse. "I appreciate the offer. I do. But I need to handle this myself. Étienne already made me feel like I couldn't survive without him. I won't make the same mistake with you."

The words hung between them, heavier than she'd intended. Julien's Coffee cup went back to the counter with careful precision.

"That's not the same thing," he said quietly. "But I understand why it feels like it is."

She nodded, not trusting her voice. The first tart went into the oven, the door closing with a soft click that felt like an ending.

---

The drive to her mother's house took forty minutes through countryside that had once felt like home and now felt like a reckoning. The plane trees along the drive were older, broader, their branches interlacing overhead in a canopy that filtered the afternoon light into dappled patterns. Her mother was in the garden, on her knees among the lavender rows, her gloves streaked with soil.

"Camille." Marie-Claire looked up, shading her eyes. "You should have called. I would have made lunch."

"We need to talk." Camille sat on the stone bench beside the path, and her mother rose slowly, brushing off her knees before joining her. The letter changed hands in silence. Marie-Claire's face moved through confusion, then comprehension, then a weary resignation that cut deeper than anger would have.

"He did this before the divorce," her mother said, not a question.

"Yes. The documents are dated eighteen months ago. The signature looks like mine. It isn't."

"The house is in both our names. Half yours." Marie-Claire folded the letter with methodical slowness. "If he took out the mortgage against your half, they can only seize yours."

"Which means the foreclosure will force a sale of the entire property. They split proceeds, pay the bank, and give me whatever remains. Which will be nothing after fees."

Marie-Claire looked at the house—two stories of pale stone, shutters faded to the color of dried honey, roses climbing unchecked over the eastern wall. "I raised you here. Your father walked these floors every night. Some nights, after he left, I would stand in his study and just breathe the dust, trying to remember if I'd ever known who he was at all."

"I'm sorry, Maman."

"For what? You didn't forge my husband's signature." Marie-Claire's hand found hers, squeezed. "But I won't let you lose this house to that man. Let me call Jean-Marc at the bank. He owes me a favor. We can negotiate—"

"No." Camille said it firmly, the same word she'd given Julien. But with her mother it came softer. "I've been running from decisions my whole life. Running to Paris. Running from Julien. Running from my marriage when it crumbled instead of fighting for what was mine. I'm done running. I'll sell the house myself. I'll pay the debt. I'll grieve it properly."

"Camille—"

"I'm going to lose it either way. At least this way I keep my dignity."

Marie-Claire studied her for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "Your father was stubborn like that too. It drove me mad. It also made him the only man I ever truly loved."

They sat together in the silence of the lavender-scented afternoon, and Camille thought about the Swiss lawyer's file, still unopened in her bedroom drawer. Perrine had called twice. Each time, Camille had let it ring. The house was being sold. Her ex-husband was in prison. Her father might be alive. Somewhere, if she opened that file, the past would unravel a different way—maybe a softer way, maybe a harsher one.

But right now, sitting beside her mother in the garden where she'd learned to crush lavender buds between her fingers and squeeze the oil into her grandmother's recipe, she felt the weight of what she was losing settle into her bones.

She would sell the house. She would pay the debt. She would do it alone.

And when she returned to the B&B that evening, Julien was waiting on the terrace with two glasses of pastis and a check, already written, on the table between them.

"Before you say no," he said, sliding it across the stone. "I want you to know this isn't about pity. It's not about saving you. It's about me wanting to be the kind of man who stands beside the woman he loves when she's facing a storm." He paused. "Even if she's stubborn enough to face it alone."

Camille looked at the check—enough to cover the mortgage, with room to spare—and then at Julien, whose eyes held more risk than the money ever could.

"I don't know if I can accept this," she said.

"I know." He didn't pull it back. "But I'm asking you to try."