Read Chapter 28: Selling the House

The key turned with a reluctance that felt personal. Camille pushed the door of her childhood home and stepped into air that smelled of dust, dried lavender, and forty years of someone else’s life.

The house in Grasse had been rented out for the past decade, first to a family with three children who’d painted the hallway a terrible shade of mustard, then to a retired schoolteacher who’d let the garden run wild but kept the shutters in good repair. Now it stood empty, waiting for a buyer who would likely tear down the walls her father had built with his own hands.

She walked through the rooms like a ghost visiting old haunts. The kitchen window still looked out onto the same plane tree, its branches heavier now, touching the roof tiles. She remembered standing at that sink as a girl, washing dishes while her father sat at the table doing accounts, his fingers stained with soil from the garden.

*Stop it,* she told herself. *You’re here to work.*

The estate agent had given her a checklist. Clear the attic. Remove personal effects. Note any damage. The sale would be handled remotely—she’d already signed the power of attorney documents at a notary in Aix. Ninety days. That’s all she had.

She climbed the narrow stairs to the attic, her footsteps echoing in the stillness. The light switch clicked but nothing happened; the bulb had finally given out after years of neglect. She pulled out her phone and used its flashlight to sweep the space.

Boxes. So many boxes. Her mother had been a keeper of things, a believer that every item carried a memory worth preserving. School reports. Old Christmas cards. A collection of souvenir spoons that had always seemed absurd to Camille but now made her throat tighten.

She worked through the afternoon, separating trash from keepsakes, donation piles from items her brother might want. The task was mechanical, which was a mercy. It kept her hands busy while her mind stayed stubbornly in the present, refusing to wander into the past.

Until she found the box.

It was tucked beneath a stack of her old school textbooks, plain and unmarked, tied with twine that had bitten deep into the cardboard over the years. Something about it made her pause. Her mother had labeled everything—*Camille’s christening*, *Roux family photos 1985–1992*, *Winter coats*. This box had no label at all.

She cut the twine with her house key and lifted the lid.

Letters. Dozens of letters, rubber-banded into thick bundles. She pulled out the first one and recognized her father’s handwriting immediately—the slanted, impatient script she’d seen on birthday cards and school permission slips. The postmark caught her eye. June 2010.

The year she turned nineteen.

She opened it with trembling fingers.

*My dear Camille,*

*I know you probably don’t want to hear from me after everything, but I wanted you to know that your mother told me about your first year at the culinary school. I’m proud of you, even if I’m not allowed to say it to your face. You always had a gift for making people feel at home at a table. I hope you’ll find a way to use it.*

The letter was dated exactly one week before her father had disappeared.

She sank onto a stack of old curtains and read another. Then another. Each letter was dated—every year, the same week in June, her birthday. *My dear Camille. Happy birthday, my darling. I know it’s been a long time.*

The handwriting changed over the years. Steadier at first, then looser, almost shaky in the later ones. The paper was different too—sometimes hotel stationery, sometimes plain sheets torn from a notebook, once a napkin that had been carefully flattened and pressed.

The last one was dated three years ago.

*My dear Camille,*

*I have to write this quickly. I know your mother has her reasons for keeping me away, but I want you to know that I never stopped thinking about you. Not for a single day. If you ever read these, I hope you’ll understand that what happened wasn’t about you. None of it was about you.*

*I left something for you. In the cellar. You’ll know it when you see it.*

*I love you. I always have. Even when I wasn’t allowed to show it.*

*Your father*

The letter slipped from her fingers. She stared at the pile of envelopes, the decades of words her father had written and her mother had intercepted. All those years she’d believed he’d left without a word, without a thought for the daughter he’d abandoned. All those years she’d carried the weight of his silence, the invisible scar of being forgotten.

He hadn’t forgotten her. He’d written her letters every year, and her mother had hidden them.

The tears came before she could stop them, hot and sudden, bending her double in the dusty attic light of the phone’s flashlight. She sobbed for the father she’d mourned, for the girl who’d learned to stop waiting for a birthday card that would never come, for the years of hurt that had calcified into something she’d thought was strength.

*How could her mother do this?*

She had grown up hearing how hard it had been for her mother to raise her alone, the sacrifices that had been made, the man who had walked away. That narrative had shaped everything—her caution with men, her fear of abandonment, her refusal to let anyone close enough to hurt her. And it had all been built on a lie.

Or perhaps not a lie. Perhaps her mother had truly believed she was protecting her. Perhaps she’d thought the letters would reopen wounds better left closed.

But that didn’t make it right. It didn’t give her back the years of knowing her father had loved her, that he’d thought of her, that he’d wanted to be part of her life even when he couldn’t.

She sat in the attic for a long time, the letters spread around her like fallen leaves. When her phone buzzed, she startled. Julien’s name lit up the screen. She stared at it, wanting to answer, wanting to hear his voice, but she didn’t trust herself to speak without breaking down again.

The buzzing stopped. Then a moment later, a text.

*Just checking in. Found anything?*

She looked at the letters in her lap. Then she looked at the message again.

*I found them,* she typed, then deleted it. *I’m fine,* she typed, then deleted that too.

Finally, she wrote: *The house is full of ghosts.*

His reply came almost instantly. *Do you want company?*

She should say no. She’d come here to do this alone, to prove to herself that she didn’t need anyone. But the letters were still warm in her hands, and her father’s words were still echoing in her chest.

I left something for you. In the cellar.

She hadn’t checked the cellar yet. She’d been so focused on the attic that she’d forgotten what her father’s letter said, or perhaps she hadn’t forgotten—perhaps she’d been too afraid to look.

She stood up, dusting off her knees, and walked to the cellar door. The old wooden stairs creaked under her weight as she descended into the dark, using her phone again for light. The cellar smelled of earth and wine and something faintly chemical—old paint or rat poison.

She scanned the walls, the shelves of preserves her mother had canned decades ago, the rusted bicycle that had belonged to her brother. And then she saw it.

A cardboard box, newer than the others, tucked behind the hot water heater. She pulled it out and opened it, already expecting documents, legal papers, something connected to the Swiss lawyer’s file.

Instead, she found a photograph her father had taken of her on her first day of school. She was wearing a yellow dress, her hair in pigtails, and smiling so wide her eyes were closed. She remembered that day. She remembered him taking the picture.

That was the photograph from the year before he left.

On the back, he’d written in pencil: *My sunshine. If you’re reading this, it means you still have your piece of me.*

Beneath it, a single key.