Read Chapter 6: Aunt Odette's Ghost

The next morning, Clara woke with dust in her hair and a crick in her neck from a night spent on the cracked leather sofa in the bakery's back office. She'd meant to go back to the inn. She'd meant to call the airline. Instead, she'd found a broom in the pantry and swept until her arms ached, then fallen asleep surrounded by flour sacks that smelled of someone else's life.

Sunlight streamed through the grimy windows, illuminating the old wooden counter, the display case with its chipped glass, the faded painted moon above the door. The sign outside—*Le Pain de Lune*—creaked on its hinges like a tired old friend.

Clara pressed her palms flat on the counter. "Okay. You have one day."

One day to clean. One day to decide. The fête was Thursday. She was leaving Thursday. The lie she'd told Madame Beaumont at the café—that she was leaving tomorrow—was wearing thin already.

She pulled on the yellow rubber gloves she'd found under the sink and attacked the interior with a bucket of soapy water. It was absurd. Therapeutic in a way she hadn't expected. The repetitive motion quieted the loop of spreadsheet numbers and feasibility projections running through her head. Forty thousand euros. Her savings, nearly to the euro. A bakery she hadn't asked for, in a village that had apparently been waiting for her.

By noon, the counter was clean enough to reflect her face. The shelves gleamed. She'd cleared a decade of dust from the back room and found intact bags of flour, a chrome mixer the size of a small car, and racks and racks of baking trays that only needed a good scrub.

She was wiping down the wall behind the worktable when her knuckles knocked against something hollow.

She paused. The floral wallpaper was peeling at the seam, and beneath it, her fingers traced a rectangle cut into the plaster. A small door, painted to match the wall, so perfectly camouflaged she would have missed it entirely.

She pulled at the edge. It swung open.

Inside, a drawer. Lacquered oak, polished to a sheen that made the rest of the bakery look like a slum. A brass pull shaped like a crescent moon. Clara's breath caught.

She pulled.

Locked.

She tugged harder. Nothing. She inspected the front, the sides, the top. No keyhole. No latch. Just smooth, seamless wood, as if the drawer had been sealed shut by magic and never meant to open again.

She thought of Élise, her great-aunt, whose face she remembered only in fragments. A woman who laughed too loud at funerals. Who mailed her odd postcards with no return address. Who, according to the stories her mother never finished telling, had done something scandalous in the sixties that no one would talk about.

Clara sat back on her heels, staring at the stubborn drawer. Somewhere in her bag, she had that old rusted key, the one that had been hanging in the window like a dare.

She didn't need it. She wasn't staying. She was cleaning, then she was calling a taxi, then she was gone.

She was still staring at the drawer when the front door creaked open.

Julien Moreau stepped inside, his shoulders filling the frame. He wore a canvas apron dusted with powdered sugar, and he held a small white box tied with twine.

"Ah." He stopped, eyebrows rising. "You are still here."

Her spine stiffened. "I'm cleaning."

"I see." He looked around, taking in the gleaming counter, the scrubbed shelves, the neat stacks of trays. Something flickered across his face—surprise, maybe, or respect. "You have been busy."

"I couldn't leave a dead woman's dust to settle on my conscience." She tugged off the gloves and tossed them onto the worktable with more force than necessary. "What do you want?"

He held out the box. "In France, we bring bread to the bereaved. Even when they are the reason for the bereavement."

She stared at the box, then at him, waiting for the punchline.

"It is a fougasse," he said. "Olive and rosemary. You will not have tasted it before. It is a specialty of the region."

"I know what fougasse is," she said, though she'd only learned it from a travel show the night before, unable to sleep.

"Do you?" A ghost of a smile played at his lips. He set the box on the counter and stepped back, hands sliding into his pockets. "Forgive me. I did not expect to find you working. I expected you to be on a plane."

"Noted." She crossed her arms. "I'll try to conform to your expectations better."

The smile faded. His gaze drifted past her shoulder to the open panel and the lacquered drawer. His expression changed. It shuttered, like a window closing against a storm.

"Where did you find that?"

"The wall." She watched him carefully. "Why? What is it?"

Julien was quiet for a long moment. Then he sighed, rubbed the back of his neck, and sat on the edge of the worktable, facing her. "Your aunt kept things. Important things. She was a private woman—more private than the village gave her credit for."

"I've noticed." Clara gestured at the balancing keys still mounted on the back wall. "The keys. The puzzle in the window. She didn't do anything the simple way, did she?"

"No," Julien said. "She did not." He nodded toward the drawer. "That is where she kept her recipe book. Her grandmother's recipe book. Three generations of baking. The kind of breads and pastries you cannot find anywhere else in France."

Clara's pulse quickened. "A recipe book."

"She told me about it once." Julien's voice dropped. "She said it was the soul of this bakery. That without it, Le Pain de Lune was just flour and water. A business. An address." He met her eyes. "It was never found after she died. The notary inventoried everything—all the contents, all the rooms. The drawer was listed as empty, because no one could open it."

"You're saying the recipe book is in there."

"I do not know what is in there." He stood, brushing invisible dust from his hands. "All I know is that Élise showed me that drawer once, twenty years ago, when I was an apprentice. She told me that when she died, the book would go to whoever could figure out the lock. I thought it was a joke."

"She was eighty-something. She was eccentric." Clara looked back at the drawer. "She didn't seem like the type to play games."

"No," Julien agreed. "She was not the type to play games. She was the type to make you play hers."

He moved toward the door, then stopped. "You are leaving tomorrow?"

"That's what I said."

"Good." He didn't sound like he believed her. "Then you will not need to worry about the drawer, or the book, or the forty thousand euros."

He stepped out, pulling the door closed behind him. The bell chimed overhead, a cheerful sound that felt out of place.

Clara stood alone in the bakery, the fougasse sitting warm on the counter, filling the air with rosemary and olive.

She moved to the drawer. She knelt in front of it and ran her fingers along its seam, looking for a gap, a hinge, anything. The wood was flawless, sealed tight as a drum.

Then her hand brushed the wall beside it, and she felt it. A small depression in the plaster, hidden beneath a curl of peeling wallpaper. A keyhole. Not in the drawer itself, but hidden in the wall, so cleverly it blended with the natural decay of the building.

She pulled the rusted key from her bag. It slid into the hole with a satisfying click.

She turned it.

Something released. A soft, silent mechanism, deep within the wall.

She could feel it, even if she couldn't explain how. The drawer was open.

Her heart hammered as she pulled the brass crescent. The drawer slid out smoothly, and inside, pressed flat beneath aged tissue paper, was a leather-bound book. The cover was faded, embossed with a gilded moon and the words *Le Pain de Lune* in elegant script.

Clara lifted it out. The pages were yellowed and soft, crackling as she opened to the first page. Handwritten, in ink that had faded to a warm sepia.

*For the one who finds this: You have asked the right questions. Now you must learn to listen for the answers.*

She turned the page. And kept turning, her fingers gliding across recipes and margin notes in two different hands—one elegant French, one cramped and hurried. Years and years and years of them.

At the back, tucked into the spine, was a folded letter. The envelope was addressed in handwriting she recognized from old birthday cards her mother had thrown away without opening.

*To Clara.*

Her hands were shaking now. She hadn't expected to be seen. Not from beyond the grave, not by a woman she'd barely known.

She set the book down carefully, the letter untouched on top of it.

The taxi was booked for seven a.m. The fête was Thursday. The bakery was clean.

Clara closed the drawer and stood, the book in her hands, the key warm against her palm.

Outside, the lavender fields shimmered under the midday sun.

She couldn't leave now. Not with a locked drawer she'd opened, a book meant for her, and a letter she was too afraid to read.