Read Chapter 10: The Reading

The kitchen clock read half past four when they filed back through the door, the satchel thumping against Élodie's hip like a heartbeat. Camille set the journal on the worn oak table, its leather cover cracked and salt-stained from years hidden in the cliff crevice. Inès hovered at the window, arms wrapped around herself, while Élodie pulled out a chair and sat heavily, chin lifting toward the book as if daring it to speak first.

"Who reads?" Élodie asked.

"I will," Camille said, though her hands trembled as she opened the cover. The pages were dense, handwriting lean and forward-leaning—their father's hand, the same that had signed birthday cards and left notes by the coffee pot. She'd recognize the slant of his T's anywhere.

The first entries were mundane. Dates, tides, notes about the bakery. Camille skimmed, her voice steady, until her father's script changed—shorter lines, darker pressure on the page.

*March 12th. Third night in a row. The boats run without lights past Pointe du Hoc, hugging the shallows where the patrol boats can't follow. They're too organized for local fishermen. Someone's running a schedule, and someone's paying them well.*

Inès turned from the window. "He was watching them. From the cliffs."

"Keep reading," Élodie said, but her voice had gone thin.

*March 18th. Robert confirmed my suspicions today. He heard it from the dockworkers—crates marked as machinery, but the weight's wrong for what's on the manifests. Too heavy for engines. Too light for lead. I asked him to keep his ears open. He's been nervous lately, more than usual, and I don't like the look in his eyes when the subject comes up.*

Camille paused. Robert. The baker. The same man whose roof their father had financed, whose name sat in the margins of their mother's ledger.

"R.B.," she murmured. "I thought it was a person. It was Robert Benoît."

"Don't stop," Élodie said. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the chair's edge.

*March 22nd. I've traced the payments. Four years of money moving through a local account—always the same amount, always the same date, always into a holding company registered in Le Havre. The name on the paperwork is Lefèvre. Pierre Lefèvre. He's the notary's father, retired now, but his signature's all over the shell company like a fingerprint. The old man's careful, but not careful enough. He's been skimming off the coast for a decade, and the local gendarmes either don't see it or won't see it.*

"Lefèvre," Camille repeated. "Maître Lefèvre's father?"

Inès stepped closer, jaw tight. "The notary? The one handling the estate?"

"The same family." Camille's mouth went dry. She'd sat across from the younger Lefèvre three days ago, discussing inheritance law, watching him smile with practiced sympathy while her father's name was still missing from official records.

*March 28th. I have enough. Names, dates, account numbers, the dock schedules—it's all here, documented and sealed. Tomorrow I'll take it to the authorities in Caen. Not the local precinct; too many connections. I'll mail a copy to the regional prosecutor as insurance. I won't let them bury this. Not after what I've seen coming off those boats at night.*

The next page was dated April 3rd.

*I've decided to tell Marguerite tonight. She deserves to know what I've found, even if it frightens her. She's always been the practical one, the one who plans for every ending. But this—this is bigger than us. If something happens to me, she needs to know where the truth is buried.*

The ink stopped. The following pages were blank, and then a single line, scrawled as if by a shaking hand:

*April 4th. They know.*

Camille turned the page. Nothing but bare paper, the fibers rough and waiting. She flipped another, and another, until she reached the end. The journal's final entry was cut mid-sentence, a word abandoned, the pen dragging a furrow across the page:

*I heard the engine before I saw the lights. Two of them, idling below the ridge, men I recognize from the—*

Nothing.

The kitchen fell silent. Inès touched the page with two fingers, tracing the unfinished word. "He was writing this when they came for him."

"We don't know that," Camille said, but her voice lacked conviction. She'd been defending their mother's murder letter to Élodie for days, arguing against the easy narrative of abandonment. Now the truth sat heavier than any accusation: their father hadn't fled. He'd been silenced.

Élodie pushed back from the table, pacing to the pantry and back. "The notary. We spoke to him. He shook our hands and offered his condolences while his family was—" She stopped, pressing a fist to her mouth.

"We don't know the son was involved," Camille said. "His father died years ago, didn't he? I remember Maman mentioning it."

"A convenient death," Élodie muttered. "For a man who ran a smuggling operation for a decade and never got caught."

Inès had gone very still, one hand pressed to her collarbone. When Camille looked at her, there was something new in her face—not fear, but recognition.

"The locket," Inès said slowly. "The one Maman left me."

Camille blinked. "The man in the photo."

"I always assumed he was an uncle, or a family friend. The inscription didn't match anyone I knew—'To my dearest L.'" Inès pulled the chain from beneath her shirt, the small oval gleaming in the fading light. "But the face. I've been staring at it for two days, trying to place it. The jaw, the way he holds his head."

"What about it?" Élodie asked.

Inès held the locket out. Inside, the miniature portrait of a man with dark hair and a guarded expression, formally posed. Camille had seen it herself, dismissed it as an antique curiosity.

"I saw that face today," Inès said. "In the journal."

Camille's breath caught. She snatched the journal, flipping back to the earlier pages, scanning for descriptions. Her father had been methodical, noting encounters with names and physical details. Near the entry for March 22nd, after the paragraph about the shell company, he'd written:

*Met the old man outside the post office. Gray at the temples, walks with a slight limp, scar above the left eyebrow. He didn't see me. But I saw him. The face is familiar—I've seen it in a photograph somewhere, years ago, though I can't place the context.*

Camille looked at the locket again. The man in the portrait had a small, faded scar bisecting his left eyebrow.

"Maman kept his picture," Camille said slowly. "Why would she keep the photograph of the man who—who might have been responsible for Papa's disappearance?"

Élodie grabbed the locket, examining it ruthlessly. "Unless she was trying to identify him too. Unless she was investigating, just like the journal says, and this was evidence."

Inès shook her head. "It's inscribed *To my dearest L*. This isn't evidence. This is intimate. Maman wouldn't carry a keepsake from the man who destroyed our family."

"Unless she didn't know who he was until later," Camille countered. "The inscription could be decades old—from before she met Papa. She may have kept it out of nostalgia, or forgotten it entirely, and only recently realized what it meant."

The implications settled over them like a cold tide.

Their father had identified Pierre Lefèvre as the leader of a smuggling operation. He'd planned to expose him. A day later, he vanished. And their mother, years afterward, had hidden a journal instructing them to *wait*, had kept a ledger tracking her husband's movements, had left each daughter a piece of a puzzle meant to assemble into something terrible.

"Lefèvre," Élodie said, testing the name. "The family who handled every legal matter for our family for three generations. Who holds the deed to this house. Who probably knows exactly what we're doing right now."

Camille looked at her sisters—Élodie's jaw set in stubborn fear, Inès's hands shaking around the locket. Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the window panes like a warning.

"The estate isn't finalized," Camille said quietly. "The documents are still with Maître Lefèvre. He doesn't know we have this."

"And if he finds out?" Inès asked.

Camille didn't answer. Instead, she closed the journal, pressing her palm flat against the cracked leather as if she could feel her father's urgency still pressed into the fibers. They'd come looking for treasure. They'd found a crime. And somewhere in the vaulted office of Maître Lefèvre sat a stack of documents that might contain their father's name, their mother's accounts, and the final truth of what had happened on this coast forty years ago.

"Tomorrow," she said, "we go to the notary. And we don't tell him what we know until we know he doesn't know it himself."

Élodie's laugh was hollow. "That's a plan?"

"It's the only plan," Inès said. Her voice was steadier than it had been all day. "Maman said to wait. But Papa didn't wait, and look where that got him."

The words hung in the kitchen like a verdict.

Camille stood, gathering the journal and the satchel. Upstairs, in her mother's study, she placed the book in the drawer beside the ledger, side by side—two records of a man and his vanishing. The compass sat on the desk, its needle still spinning, still refusing to settle.

She touched its cracked face.

Her father had been investigating a smuggling ring. Her mother had kept his secrets, pursued his trail, left her daughters a map to a cliff that had yielded this journal and nothing else. The "X" had marked not treasure but a truth that was only beginning to unfold.

And in the morning, they would stand before the notary whose family had profited from their father's disappearance, and they would ask him questions he had spent forty years learning to deflect.

The needle spun. Camille closed the drawer.