Read Chapter 6: The Missing Father

The hammer slipped from Camille’s damp palm and clattered across the floorboards of the guest bedroom. She bent to retrieve it, wiping her brow with the back of her wrist, and that was when the front door opened downstairs—not Julien’s heavy tread, but something lighter, quicker, a woman’s voice calling out in that sing-song Provençal accent that Camille remembered from her childhood.

“Julien? Tu es là?”

Camille straightened, tool belt creaking around her hips. She had stripped down to a thin cotton tank top hours ago, the afternoon heat pressing through the open windows like a wet hand. Renovating one guest room had seemed manageable in theory. In practice, she had sweat through her shirt and learned exactly which floorboards squeaked when you stood in the wrong spot.

She stepped into the hallway, and the woman below looked up at the same moment. Paused. Blinked.

“Oh,” the woman said. “You’re not Julien.”

“I’m Camille.” She descended the stairs, suddenly aware of her appearance—dusted in plaster, ringed with sweat, her hair tied up in a knot that had long since abandoned dignity. “I’m… staying here. Renting the attic room.”

The woman’s face shifted through several emotions in quick succession—surprise, curiosity, then a smile that didn’t quite reach her dark eyes. She was older, maybe mid-sixties, with silver-streaked hair pulled back from a sharp face that Camille recognized in the jawline, in the way she held her head slightly tilted, assessing.

“You’re Camille Roux.”

Not a question. The hair on Camille’s arms stood up.

“Yes.”

“I’m Mireille.” The woman set her market basket on the kitchen table and extended her hand. “Julien’s mother. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

The weight of that sentence hung between them. Camille shook her hand, felt the dry, calloused grip of someone who had worked in gardens and kitchens all her life.

“I imagine you have,” Camille said.

Mireille’s smile flickered. “I bring him vegetables on Thursdays. He never comes to the market anymore—too busy fixing this old place up. When I heard tapping and hammering from the street, I thought he’d hired someone.” She looked Camille over again, slower this time. “I didn’t expect you.”

“Julien and I are… working together.” Camille gestured vaguely toward the ceiling. “On the renovations.”

“Yes. He mentioned that.” Mireille moved past her, beginning to unpack vegetables onto the counter with practiced efficiency—tomatoes, zucchini, a bundle of fresh thyme that filled the kitchen with its smell. “He mentioned the other thing too. The loan.”

Camille’s stomach tightened. “He told you.”

“He tells me everything important.” Mireille’s hands didn’t stop moving. “Eventually.”

The earlier warmth in the room cooled. Camille stood at the edge of the kitchen, suddenly unsure whether she should help or leave or pretend she had urgent business elsewhere.

“That ex-husband of yours,” Mireille continued, “he must be something, to forge your name on a loan and leave you to drown in it.”

“He’s something.” Camille’s voice came out flatter than she intended. “I’m contesting it. Julien’s helping me.”

“I know.” Mireille finally paused, turning to face her fully. There was no hostility in her expression now, but there was evaluation—a weighing of worth that made Camille feel seventeen again, standing before Julien’s mother after the harvest festival, knowing she was being measured for something she hadn’t yet learned to be. “I just wonder what help he’s getting in return.”

“We made a deal. I help with the B&B.”

“And after that?”

Camille opened her mouth, but no answer came. The question sat in the silence, fat and unignorable.

Footsteps sounded on the porch. Julien came in carrying two paint buckets, his shirt dark with sweat at the collar, and stopped short when he saw them both in the kitchen.

“Maman.” His tone was wary. “You said you’d knock.”

“I did knock. You didn’t answer.” Mireille resumed her unpacking, unbothered. “So I let myself in. You don’t mind, do you?”

Julien set the buckets down with a thunk. His eyes moved between his mother and Camille, searching for evidence of damage already done. “What were you talking about?”

“Camille was telling me about the renovations,” Mireille said smoothly. “I was congratulating her on her work ethic. Her mother never had one.”

The air left the room. Camille felt the words land like stones in her chest, Mireille’s tone somehow both light and deliberate. Julien’s jaw tightened.

“Maman.”

“What? I’m paying a compliment.” Mireille picked up her now-empty basket and moved toward the door, pausing to kiss her son on both cheeks. “Dinner Sunday. Bring your tenant.” She glanced at Camille, then added, “If she’s still here by then.”

She was gone before Julien could respond. The door clicked shut, and the kitchen fell into that particular silence that follows a storm.

“I’m sorry,” Julien said finally. His shoulders had dropped, and for a moment he looked younger, less guarded. “She’s…”

“Protective.”

“That’s one word for it.”

Camille crossed her arms. “She mentioned your father.”

Julien’s face shuttered. The openness that had just appeared vanished as quickly as it had come. He moved past her, toward the stairs, picking up a paint bucket.

“We don’t need to talk about him.”

“She said he disappeared. Ten years ago.”

“Camille.” His voice was sharp now, cutting. “I said we don’t need to talk about him.”

She let him go. Watched his back disappear up the stairs, listened to his footsteps cross the floor above her. Ten years ago had been the summer before he left for Paris. The summer everything between them broke. She had always assumed his father was simply absent—a peripheral figure she’d never met, a man who existed only in passing references. She never thought to ask where he was now.

On the table, among the scattered zucchini and tomatoes, a photograph lay face-down. Mireille’s market basket had been just a little too full—something must have fallen out.

Camille picked it up. Turned it over.

A man, maybe sixty, standing in front of the village fountain. Sun-weathered skin, sharp jaw, dark hair gone gray at the temples. He was laughing at something out of frame, one hand raised in mid-gesture, caught in an unguarded moment.

She knew those eyes. She had seen them yesterday.

In the village square, watching her from across the street. A man in a faded blue jacket who had looked at her just long enough to make her skin prickle before turning away into the crowd.

Camille’s hand tightened on the photograph. The man in the image was younger—thinner—but the shape of his face was unmistakable. She had gone to the pharmacy yesterday afternoon to buy bandages for a cut on her thumb, and he had been standing outside the boulangerie, studying a loaf of bread with unusual intensity.

Had he been studying her?

Footsteps approached on the stairs. Camille stuffed the photograph into her back pocket just as Julien descended, now wearing a clean shirt, hair slicked back with water from the bathroom sink.

“I need to run an errand,” she said. “Before it gets dark.”

His brow furrowed. “We still need to sand the window frames.”

“Tomorrow. I’ll do double tomorrow.”

She didn’t wait for his answer. She was already out the door, heading for the village, her hand pressed against the photograph in her pocket.

The man from the photo had been standing in front of a building she now recalled with sudden clarity—a small guesthouse on the rue des Oliviers, its shutters painted green, its entrance half-hidden behind a climbing rose bush.

If Julien’s father had been in the village for days, that meant he was staying somewhere.

And Camille had just realized exactly where.