Read Chapter 14: The Missing Pages

The morning light came thin and grey through the kitchen windows, the kind of pale Normandy light that made everything look washed clean. Élodie had made coffee—strong, the way their mother used to—and the three of them sat around the scarred wooden table with the journal open between them like a fourth presence.

Camille had her phone pressed to her ear, pacing by the garden door. She was trying to secure the morning train to Le Havre. Élodie nursed her cup with both hands, watching the steam rise, and Inès had pulled the journal toward herself, running her fingers over the pages as if she could read them by touch alone.

"Two seats in second class, yes, and one more if something opens up," Camille said into the phone, her voice clipped and efficient. "No, we need to be there by noon at the latest."

Inès wasn't listening. She was staring at the last page of the journal, her brow furrowed. Something was off. She had read this page three times yesterday, the same way they all had, but now, in the sharper light of morning, she noticed the asymmetry of it. The binding. The way the paper sat differently than the pages before it.

"Camille," she said quietly.

Camille held up a finger, still talking to the train company. "Yes, I understand, but if there's a cancellation—"

"Camille." Inès's voice was sharper now, and Élodie set down her cup.

"What is it?" Élodie asked, leaning forward.

Inès turned the journal sideways, holding it up to the light. The last page was thicker than the others, and along the inner margin, she could see the faint, jagged edge where paper had been cut away. Not torn, not ripped out in haste. Cut. Deliberately and cleanly.

"There were more pages," Inès said. "After this one. Someone removed them."

Camille lowered her phone. "What?"

Inès placed the journal flat on the table, pointing to the bound edge. "The last page isn't attached right. It's as if someone inserted this page and then cut away what came after it. Maybe to make the book end where they wanted it to end."

Élodie moved around the table to look over Inès's shoulder. "You think—"

"I think someone didn't want us to read whatever came next." Inès turned the page slowly, feeling the weight and texture of the paper. "And I think whoever did it was careful. They wanted it to look natural, like the journal just ended."

Camille hung up the phone without saying goodbye to whoever was on the other end. She crossed the kitchen and stood behind her sisters, looking down at the exposed page. "But if the pages were torn out, the writing that was on them is gone. We can't know what they said."

Inès was already reaching for the pencil that lay beside the sugar bowl. She didn't know why she did it—perhaps something she'd seen in a film once, or the way her art restorer's brain worked when she examined old canvases. She held the pencil at a low angle, the way she might shade a sketch, and ran the graphite gently across the final page's surface.

Élodie inhaled sharply.

"I'll be damned," Camille whispered.

Lines emerged from beneath the pencil lead, not the dark, legible script of the journal's other pages, but a ghostly impression pressed deep into the paper. The missing page had been written on while lying on top of this one, and the pressure of the pen had left an invisible record. Now, in soft grey graphite, the words surfaced.

It was an address. The letters were faint but unmistakable, pressed into the paper in a looping hand that Inès recognized from the rest of the journal—their father's writing.

*No. 12, rue de la Paix, Le Havre.*

Below it, a date. A full year after the last entry in the journal.

"Oh my God," Élodie said. "There's more. There was more."

Inès kept shading, slowly, carefully, revealing only fragments of other words—partial letters, a word that might have been "ask," another that looked like "his"—but the indentation was too shallow on the rest of the page. Only the address had pressed through completely.

"He wrote about this place," Inès said, her voice barely above a whisper. "After everything in the journal ends. He wrote something about this address, and then someone cut those pages out and kept writing on this final page so it looked like the book continued to its natural end."

Camille took the journal gently, as if it were made of glass. She studied the revealed address, the dates, and then looked up at her sisters. "Whoever cut those pages out knew we would find this. They knew we would read it. And they didn't want us to have this."

"Mère," Élodie said quietly. "It must have been Mère. She was the last one to have the journal. Or—" She stopped, a thought forming. "Or Lefèvre."

"Lefèvre never had the journal," Camille said. "He told us yesterday that Papa gave it to Mère. And Mère kept it hidden in the wall all these years. If she cut those pages out, she did it for a reason. And if Lefèvre cut them out, he did it to hide something he didn't want us to find."

Inès shook her head. "Whoever did it, they missed the indentation. They thought cutting the pages would be enough."

For a long moment, no one spoke. The coffee cooled in their cups. The journal sat open on the table, a grey-shaded address rising from the paper like a secret determined to be told.

Then Élodie said, "He was alive when he wrote this. A year after the last entry, he was alive and he was writing about this address in Le Havre. That's not an accident. That's a destination."

Camille set the journal down and pulled out her phone again. "Then that's where we're going. Not to the maritime archives, not to the port records. To number twelve, rue de la Paix."

"What if it's nothing?" Inès asked, though even as she said it, she didn't believe it. "An old café, a friend's apartment, a parking lot by now. It's been thirty years."

"It's not nothing," Camille said firmly. "He left it in a book he hid in a cliff. He wanted someone to find it. He wrote it down so it wouldn't be lost. Whatever it is, it's something."

Élodie was already moving toward the stairs. "I'll pack. We can take the noon train if we leave in the next hour."

Inès remained at the table, her fingers still resting on the journal's final page. She thought about her father, whom she had never known and never expected to meet. She thought about the way his handwriting had appeared beneath her pencil, as if he were reaching through the years to make contact with them. And she thought about the woman in the locket, the scarred man who had been part of the smuggling operation, and the question that had haunted her since reading the journal aloud: what had her father been searching for when he vanished?

"He was scared," Inès said suddenly.

Her sisters stopped and turned.

"He wrote this a year after Lefèvre says he left for America," Inès continued. "But he was still writing about Le Havre. About an address, a specific address, like a location someone told him to remember or that he needed to find. He wasn't running away from something. He was running toward something."

Camille opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked at the journal, at the grey lines of graphite that had emerged from the page, and for the first time since they had begun this search, she seemed uncertain.

"Then we find out what," she said finally. "We go to Le Havre and we find out what our father was running toward."

She moved toward the stairs, then paused, looking back at Inès. "Bring the journal. And bring the pencil."

Inès smiled, a small, tired thing. "I wasn't planning to leave without them."

The packing took less than an hour. They moved through the old manor with quiet efficiency, each of them gathering what they needed while their thoughts churned in parallel. Camille packed a legal brief she'd brought from Paris, though she hadn't opened it since arriving. Élodie packed a photograph of their mother, taken on the cliffs years ago. Inès packed the locket and the journal, wrapped in the old sweater she'd slept in the night before.

At the front door, the three of them paused, looking back at the house that had held their secrets for so long. The light had shifted to a hard, bright autumn gold, and the wind was picking up from the sea.

"What if we don't come back?" Élodie asked, and it was not entirely a question about the trip.

Camille took her hand, and then Inès's, forming a fragile chain between them. The way their mother had done when they were small, crossing the dangerous rocks at low tide.

"Then we don't come back," Camille said. "But we go together."

She closed the door behind them, and the old house settled into silence, waiting to see what its daughters would find.