Read Chapter 15: The Genealogy

The church smelled of candle wax and damp stone, the same smell that had clung to Isabelle's clothes since childhood. Saint-Guénolé's oldest records were kept in a vaulted side chapel, away from the tourists who came to photograph the carved sea serpents above the door. Father Le Goff had been wary at first—church records, he'd said, were not for casual reading—but a letter from Aline Marchand, written in her precise hand and bearing the family seal, had loosened his tongue.

"The Marchand register," he said, sliding a leather-bound volume across the oak table. "It goes back to the founding of the parish. Your grandmother consulted it often, toward the end."

Isabelle's fingers hovered over the cracked spine. "Yvonne was here? In this church?"

"Every month, like clockwork. She'd sit in that very chair for hours." The priest's eyes crinkled. "I thought she was praying. Perhaps she was, in her own way."

Yann leaned over the table, salt still crusted in his hair from the rescue. He hadn't left her side since the coast guard had pulled them from the rocks, and she hadn't asked him to. The locket at her throat was warm again, a steady pulse against her skin.

The register opened with a sigh. The first page bore the name *Amélie Marchand, née du Rocher, épouse, 1691–1764*, a date of death that made Isabelle blink. "The first lady lived to be seventy-three?"

"Read it again," Yann said, his voice low.

She traced the faded ink. "1691 to 1764. She outlived nearly every daughter she bore." Her eyes moved down the page, past the line of daughters with their early deaths—eighteen, twenty-two, nineteen—until she reached a bracketed note in a different hand, smaller and more recent. *Ligne continuée par la branche cadette.*

"It says the line was continued by a younger branch." Isabelle looked up at Father Le Goff. "The cadet branch. Who does that refer to?"

The priest frowned. "I never noticed that annotation. It's not in the parish hand."

Yann pulled the register closer, his finger moving down the page. "There are several Marchand daughters who have no death dates at all. Look here—Jeanne, born 1788. Marguerite, born 1803. Héloïse, born 1851." He counted under his breath. "Five of them, spread over two centuries. And none of them are crossed out."

Isabelle's mother had been right. The letter had said some women disappeared, choosing to vanish rather than be taken. But five? Five women who had walked away from everything—family, inheritance, names—to break the chain of grief.

"Do you have correspondence records?" she asked. "Letters sent from this parish, maybe?"

Father Le Goff stroked his chin. "We keep what the families leave behind. There's a trunk in the attic—letters no one claimed after the war. I can't promise anything."

Yann was already on his feet. "Where's the attic?"

They found the trunk beneath a layer of pigeon droppings and yellowed newspapers, its brass clasps rusted shut. Yann pried them open with a pocketknife while Isabelle held the lantern. Inside: baptism records, faded photographs, a child's shoe, and a bundle of letters bound with twine, the top one addressed in a hand she recognized from her grandmother's desk.

*To the poste restante of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon.*

The envelope had been forwarded, then forwarded again, the stamps layered like geological strata. The final address was in Quebec.

Isabelle's hands shook as she untied the twine. The first letter was dated 1978.

*My dear Céline,* *If you are reading this, it means I have finally found the courage to write what I could not say aloud. You were right to leave. I know that now. But every full moon I wonder if you are watching the same sky, and I pray, selfishly, that you think of me.*

Céline Marchand—or Céline Moreau, as her married name appeared in the later letters—had been the living branch of the family tree. She had died in 2009, but the correspondence continued. Yvonne's letters, then no more. Until a final letter, dated three months ago, in a hand that was not Céline's but her granddaughter's.

*Dear Isabelle,* *Grandmother spoke of the castle often, and of the women before her who chose the sea over the shore. She kept every letter from Yvonne, and she asked me to send this if ever her family should ask for the truth. She believed the sea would not have all of you. She wanted you to know someone survived.*

There was a key in the envelope, small and bronze, with a number stamped on it: 47.

"A safety deposit box," Yann said. "In Brest, if the postmark means anything."

Isabelle turned the key over. The warmth from her locket spread through her chest. "Her granddaughter says there are more letters. More records—things Céline collected that no one else would think to keep."

"From your cousin?" Yann's voice was careful. "You have a cousin."

"Apparently." Isabelle laughed, a brittle sound that echoed off the chapel walls. "All my life I thought I was alone in this. My mother wanted it that way—to protect me, to protect everyone. But Céline's granddaughter wrote because she thought I deserved to know the truth."

Father Le Goff cleared his throat. "The deposit box—you'll need identification, and the death certificate of the original holder. These things take time."

Isabelle looked at Yann. He was already reaching for his jacket.

"How fast can we get to Brest?"

The wind had picked up by the time they stepped outside, whipping the harbor flags into a frenzy. Dark clouds gathered on the horizon, heavy with rain. Isabelle pulled her coat tighter and felt the key press against her palm, a small point of certainty in a world that had become nothing but questions.

"Yann," she said, as they reached the car, "what if the letters stop?"

"What letters?"

"The curse," she said slowly. "What if it's not the sea taking them? What if it's silence? The women who left—Céline, the others—they didn't die. They just stopped being Marchands. They stopped being real."

Yann opened the passenger door for her, his hand resting on the frame. "You're not going to stop being real, Isabelle. You're going to Brest. You're going to open that box. And whatever you find inside—" He met her eyes, and she saw something fierce in his, unyielding as the cliffs behind him. "—you're going to face it the way you faced the storm. Standing up."

Isabelle got in the car. The locket was warm against her throat, but as they pulled away from the church, she could swear she felt it pulse, once, like a heartbeat.

In the rearview mirror, a figure stood in the church doorway. By the time she turned to look directly, it was gone—only Father Le Goff, locking the heavy wooden door behind him, alone in the gathering dusk.

But the locket had gone cold.