Read Chapter 29: A Helping Hand

The knock came at ten in the morning, and Camille almost didn't answer it. She was sitting on the floor of the attic, surrounded by boxes of her mother's things—linens yellowed with age, chipped porcelain, a wedding dress preserved in tissue paper that made her chest ache. The house in Grasse was a museum of half-truths, and she'd been excavating it for two days.

The knock came again, firmer.

She set down the letter she'd been reading—her father's looping handwriting, another one her mother had never shown her—and padded down the narrow stairs. Through the frosted glass of the front door, she saw a familiar shape.

Julien.

She pulled the door open, and there he was, standing in the morning light with a duffel bag at his feet and a paper bag of pastries in his hand. He was wearing the blue linen shirt she'd always liked, the one that made his eyes look like the sea after rain.

"You're supposed to be at the B&B," she said. Her voice came out rough from disuse.

"I am at the B&B." He smiled, tentative. "It just happens to be the one you're standing in."

"I told you I'd handle this alone."

"And I told you I'd help." He shifted his weight. "You didn't answer my calls, Camille. Not one. I drove here because I was worried, and I brought croissants, so you can't be too angry."

Against her will, something in her chest loosened. She stepped aside.

The attic was worse than she'd left it. Boxes were open, their contents spilling across the floorboards like evidence. Julien took it in without comment, setting the pastries on a dusty trunk.

"How much have you gone through?" he asked.

"Most of my mother's things. The letters are all here." She gestured to a milk crate overflowing with envelopes. "He wrote to me. Every year. For every birthday, every Christmas, every anniversary of the day he left. She kept them all."

Julien didn't say anything. He crouched down, picked up one envelope, examined the faded stamp. "May I?"

She nodded, and he slid out the letter—one from her fifteenth birthday. She watched his eyes move across the page, saw the slight tightening of his jaw as he read.

"He talks about you," Julien said quietly.

"What?"

"Here." He held out the letter. "He says he hopes I'm treating you well. That you always had a stubborn streak and I should be patient with it."

Camille took the page from his hands. She'd read it this morning, but she hadn't noticed that line. She'd been too busy hating her mother to see what her father had written.

*I hear from Claire that you're seeing the Favier boy. He has kind eyes, that one. Be patient with him—and let him be patient with you. You'll need someone steady, my Camille. You were always a heart looking for a home.*

She pressed the letter to her chest, found she couldn't breathe for a moment.

"He read Claire's letters," she said, almost to herself. "He knew about us. All those years, he was watching from wherever he was."

"He never stopped being your father."

Camille looked up at him. Julien's eyes were bright, and she realized he was holding his own grief in check for her sake. She thought of his father, of the years Alain had been gone from Julien's life in a different way—still present, but wearing a mask of guilt.

"How did you do it?" she asked. "When Alain came back. How did you let yourself trust him again?"

Julien sat down on the floor across from her, stretching his legs out beside a box of her mother's shoes. "I didn't, at first. I was angry. I told myself I didn't need him. That the B&B was mine, that I'd built it without him, that his secrets were his problem."

"But?"

"But then I saw him crying in the kitchen one night, alone, holding my mother's old recipe book." Julien's voice went soft. "And I realized he wasn't the only one who'd been hiding things. I'd been hiding too. Hiding how much I missed him, how much I wanted him to be proud of me. I'd built an entire life around being fine without him, and I wasn't fine."

Camille set the letter down carefully. "What did you do?"

"I stopped being fine." He smiled, wry. "I let him see the mess. The uncertainty. The fear that I'd fail at the only thing he'd left me." He reached across the gap between them and took her hand. "You're not going to fail, Camille. Whatever you find in this house, whatever your father left you—you're going to live through it. And I want to be there when you do."

She looked at their joined hands. His palm was warm, familiar in a way that made her want to lean into it. But the boxes around her were full of betrayal, and she'd learned what happened when you let someone close.

"I don't know what I'm doing," she admitted. "I came here to sell this house and walk away. Now I'm digging through thirty years of secrets and I still don't know what he left me. I don't even know what I want."

"What do you want, Camille?"

The question hung between them. She thought about the B&B, about the lavender fields at dawn, about the kitchen where she'd found her rhythm again. She thought about the way it felt to cook beside him, their movements synchronized without words.

"I want to make something of my own," she said slowly. "Something that's mine. Not my mother's, not Étienne's, not even my father's." She looked up at him. "The restaurant at the B&B is beautiful, Julien. But it's your design, your menu, your reputation. I love it—but sometimes I don't know where I fit in it."

Julien was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "What if it was ours?"

"Ours?"

"Joint," he said. "Co-chefs. Your name on the sign next to mine." He squeezed her hand. "I've been thinking about it since the festival planning. The kitchen works because we both bring something different. Your sauces, my grill. Your instincts, my experience. We could call it something new. Something that means both of us."

The idea settled in her chest like a stone dropped into still water. Ripples spread outward—fear, yes, but underneath it, something bright and wanting.

"You'd really do that?" she asked. "Put your name beside someone who ran away from you ten years ago?"

"I put my name beside someone who came back." He let go of her hand and reached into his pocket, pulling out a small key. "Before I left, Alain gave me this. Said it's the key to the old wine cellar beneath the main house. He said—" Julien hesitated. "He said my mother dreamed about turning it into a chef's table. A long table, family style, where people could eat what we cooked and feel like they were part of something."

Camille stared at the key. "He told you to give this to me?"

"He told me to give it to whoever I'd want to build that with." Julien's voice was steady. "It's yours if you want it, Camille. Not as a condition. Not as a trade. Just as a question."

The key was cool in her palm. She closed her fingers around it.

"I found something," she said. "This morning. Down in the cellar."

Julien's eyebrows rose. "The document?"

"Not exactly." She stood, pulling him up with her. "There was a false wall behind the wine racks. Inside, I found a box. It had this—" She reached into her pocket and pulled out the key her father had left, still on its worn leather cord. "And this."

She held it up. Two keys now, one old and one new. Her father's and Julien's.

"Do you know what it opens?" Julien asked.

"No." She looked at the key, then back at him. "But I think I know who might."