Read Chapter 2: The Gathering

The sound of gravel crunching under tires reached Camille before the car did. She stood at the library window, watching a dusty blue Peugeot negotiate the long driveway, its engine straining against the ruts left by yesterday's rain.

"About time," Élodie muttered from the leather armchair where she'd been pretending to read a gardening magazine for the past hour. She hadn't turned a single page.

Camille didn't answer. She watched the car stop, watched the driver's door open, and felt something loosen in her chest she hadn't realized was tight. Inès unfolded herself from behind the wheel—taller than Camille remembered, or maybe it was just the way she carried herself now, with the slight stoop of someone who spent too much time hunched over archives and manuscripts.

Their youngest sister looked up at the house, and for a moment, her face was unguarded. Then she saw Camille in the window and smiled—a careful, measured smile that didn't reach her eyes.

Camille went to the front door.

Inès met her on the steps, and they embraced with the awkward stiffness of people who once knew each other's bodies intimately and no longer did. She smelled of train stations and old paper.

"You look well," Camille said.

"I look tired. You look like a lawyer." Inès's voice was dry, familiar. She picked up a battered leather satchel from the passenger seat and slung it over her shoulder. "Is she here?"

"Élodie? Yes. She's been here since yesterday."

Inès's eyebrows rose slightly. "She came early? That's new."

Camille didn't say that Élodie had arrived with barely concealed anger and a suitcase full of accusations. She just led her sister inside.

The manor swallowed them. It was a house built for voices and footsteps and the clatter of family life, and it resented the silence that had settled over it in the past week. Camille had noticed that—how the empty rooms seemed to press against her, how the floorboards complained beneath her weight as if to say *finally, someone to carry*.

Élodie hadn't moved from the armchair. When Inès entered the library, she set down the magazine with exaggerated care and stood.

"Élodie." Inès crossed the room and pulled her into an embrace that Élodie endured rather than returned.

"Bordeaux suits you," Élodie said when Inès stepped back. It wasn't a compliment.

"Actually, I've been in Lyon for the past three months. Archives." Inès's smile tightened. "The Revolutionary records. Perhaps you'd know that if you ever answered your phone."

"I've been busy."

"Of course you have."

The library fell into a silence thick enough to choke on. Camille moved between them, the habit of a lifetime.

"Maître Lefèvre will be back at four," she said. "He has some papers for us to sign. In the meantime, I've aired out the bedrooms—"

"I'm not staying," Élodie said.

"Inès just arrived—"

"Then she should have arrived sooner." Élodie's voice cracked like a dry branch. "Mother's been dead for ten days. We buried her yesterday. Inès couldn't be bothered to show up for either."

Inès went very still. "I was in Lyon. I didn't get the telegram until Tuesday. The funeral was Wednesday."

"You could have driven."

"It's eleven hours from Lyon to here. I made it in nine and a half." Inès set down her satchel, and Camille noticed how carefully she controlled the motion. "I got here as fast as I could. I'm here now. That's what matters."

"Nothing matters now." Élodie turned away, walking to the tall window that overlooked the garden. The last of the autumn roses were dying on their vines, blackened by frost. "She's gone. The house will be sold, and none of this will matter anymore."

"The house can't be sold."

Camille hadn't meant to say it. The words slipped out, and she bit her tongue too late.

Both sisters turned to look at her.

"What do you mean?" Inès asked.

Camille hesitated. She thought of the letter in her coat pocket—the one she'd hidden when she heard Inès's car on the gravel, the one that burned against her hip like a brand. *Your father didn't abandon you. He was murdered. Ask Élodie why she never came home.*

"The will," Camille said carefully. "Mère left the house to all three of us. Jointly. It can't be sold without unanimous consent."

Élodie's face was unreadable. "That's not what Maître Lefèvre said to me."

"He told me the same thing yesterday." Camille kept her voice level. "Why would he say something different to you?"

For a long moment, the three sisters stood frozen in a triangle of suspicion and grief. Then Élodie laughed—a hollow sound that bounced off the bookcases and died.

"Of course," she said. "Of course she'd do this. Still trying to force us together." She shook her head, and when she spoke again, her voice was quieter, older. "She never could accept that we're different people now. That we don't fit together anymore."

"We fit together fine," Inès said. "We just choose not to."

"You sound like her."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"Take it however you need to."

The library clock—a hideous brass monstrosity their father had bought at auction years ago—struck three. Camille felt it in her teeth.

"Maître Lefèvre will be here at four," she repeated. "We should start going through Mother's things. Decide what to keep, what to sell."

"Everything." Élodie crossed to the low table where her purse sat, the same worn leather bag she'd carried for as long as Camille could remember. "There's nothing here I want."

"Not even her jewelry?" Inès's voice was sharp. "Her letters? Your childhood drawings?"

"Especially not those."

"You're going to throw away everything—"

"I'm going to sell the house and split the money equally, like any rational person would do." Élodie's eyes were bright with something that might have been tears or might have been fury. The distinction had blurred long ago. "That's what she would have wanted. Clean. Practical. No loose ends."

"Mother wasn't clean or practical," Inès said quietly. "She was a hoarder of memories. She kept every letter, every photograph, every school report. She kept the crayon drawings we made when we were six. She kept—"

"Stop." Élodie's voice was barely a whisper.

"She kept Dad's coat."

The room went very quiet.

Camille felt the letter press against her hip. She remembered its words, the handwriting looping and unfamiliar. *Ask Élodie why she never came home.*

"His coat." Élodie repeated the words slowly. "That's what you want to talk about. Our father's coat."

"He was our father too." Inès's hands were shaking. "He's been gone for thirty years, and you act like he never existed. I want to know why."

"He existed." Élodie picked up her purse, slung it over her shoulder. "He existed, and then he left. That's the end of the story."

"That's not the end of the story." Camille heard her own voice as if from far away. The letter felt like it was on fire. "That's not the story at all."

Both sisters turned to look at her.

"What do you mean?" Inès asked.

Camille's mouth opened. Closed. The letter's words burned on her tongue. *Ask Élodie why she never came home.*

She couldn't. Not here. Not now. Not in front of Inès, who'd just arrived, who was already raw from the drive and the funeral she'd nearly missed.

"Nothing," Camille said. "I mean—nothing. I just... He might have left for reasons we don't know. That's all."

Élodie's eyes narrowed. For a moment, Camille thought she saw something flicker behind them—recognition? Fear?—but then it was gone.

"It doesn't matter why he left," Élodie said. "He left. We stayed. Mother stayed. And now she's gone too, and all we have left is this rotting house and its rotting memories."

"The house isn't rotting—"

"It is, Inès. Look at it." Élodie gestured broadly at the library, its dusty shelves and faded spines, the water stain in the corner her father claimed from the roof with Monsieur Aubert that had never quite been fixed before he disappeared. "It's a corpse. We're just arguing over the organs."

"Then why won't you let it go?"

The question hung in the air. Camille watched her sisters—Élodie rigid and defensive near the window, Inès trembling with barely suppressed emotion near the door—and felt the weight of a family's worth of secrets pressing down on her shoulders.

"I need air." Camille turned and walked out before either of them could respond.

The front door slammed behind her, and she was in a world of dying roses and cold wind. She stalked down the gravel path, past her rental car and Inès's blue Peugeot, down toward the gate that opened onto the narrow country lane.

Only then—when the manor was behind her, when the sounds of her sisters' voices had faded to nothing—did she stop.

She saw the woman at the lane's end.

She was standing in the shadow of a twisted oak that marked the boundary of the property, watching the house. She was too far to make out her face, but Camille saw the sharp cut of a dark coat, the pale oval of a face turned toward the manor, the still, patient posture of someone who had been there for a while.

Camille opened her mouth to call out.

The woman turned—deliberately, calmly—and began to walk away. Her footsteps were silent on the gravel, as if she'd been there before, as if she knew exactly where to put her feet to avoid making a sound.

Camille watched her disappear around the bend in the lane.

She thought of the letter in her pocket.

She thought of her father, who vanished when she was seven, whose coat still hung in the attic according to Inès, whose name was never spoken in her mother's house.

She thought of the woman who had been watching from the trees, watching them, patient and silent.

"She's asking about the coat," Camille whispered to the empty lane. "She's asking about him."

No one answered.

The wind rose, cold and tasting of salt from the sea beyond the cliffs. Camille turned and walked back toward the house, where Maître Lefèvre's car was just pulling into the drive.

Inside, she knew, her sisters were waiting.

The letter burned against her hip.

She kept walking.