Read Chapter 25: Aftermath of Betrayal

The silence in the car was thick enough to choke on. Camille's hands were still wrapped around the steering wheel, knuckles white, though they hadn't moved from the gravel lot of the cemetery. The engine idled with a low, patient hum, as if the Renault itself was waiting for one of them to speak first.

Élodie sat in the passenger seat, her face turned toward the window, but Camille could see her reflection—eyes red-rimmed, jaw set in that stubborn way she'd had since she was twelve. Inès was in the back, knees drawn up to her chest like a child, her expensive silk scarf twisted around her fingers until it was probably ruined.

"Say something," Élodie finally whispered, her breath fogging the glass. "Either of you. Because I'm about to lose my mind in here."

Camille had plenty of practice with courtroom silence. She knew how to let it stretch, how to make the other side crack first. But this wasn't a deposition. These were her sisters.

"She paid him." Camille's voice came out flat, clinical. She hated how it sounded. "She paid Lefèvre to lie to us for twenty years. That wasn't a smuggler's doing. That was Maman."

"We don't know that's what it means." Inès's voice was muffled from behind her knees. "Maybe Lefèvre was lying. He could be covering for himself. Maybe he embezzled the money and—"

"He showed us the documents."

"Documents can be forged."

"Twenty years, Inès." Camille turned in her seat to face her youngest sister. "Twenty years of that man's professional reputation, his license, his entire career—all on the line. He didn't produce those bank statements over a casual lie. And he didn't confess because he felt guilty. He confessed because he thought we'd already found out. And because..."

She trailed off. Because he'd told them their mother was the kind of woman who could threaten her own husband. Who could run an art smuggling ring out of their family home while baking madeleines and singing in the garden.

"He said she threatened him." Élodie's voice cracked on the last word. "Threatened Papa. Said she'd destroy him if he left her."

"And we believed him." Camille's laugh was hollow. "We just accepted it. Thirty minutes ago we were crying over Papa's grave, and now we're supposed to believe our mother was a criminal?"

"You were the one who said the documents—"

"I don't know what I'm saying, Élodie." Camille's hands slammed against the steering wheel, and her sisters flinched. She forced herself to breathe. "I'm sorry. I just... I need to think."

Inès lowered her knees slowly, her face pale. "There's something I haven't told you."

Camille and Élodie both turned. Inès's fingers twisted the scarf again. She wouldn't meet their eyes.

"When I was cleaning out Maman's apartment in Paris," she began, "before the funeral, I found a box in the back of her closet. Under the floorboards, actually. Hidden." She swallowed. "I didn't tell you because I thought it was just... old things. Keepsakes. But there was a journal. Not a diary, more like a record. Ledger pages, dates, amounts. Names."

"Names of what?" Élodie asked.

Inès shook her head. "I didn't understand it at the time. I thought she was just... tracking household expenses, maybe some investments. But now, with what Lefèvre said..." She finally looked up. "I think it was the smuggling accounts. Everything. What went in, what went out. Who she paid."

"How much?" Camille's lawyer brain was already working.

"I don't know. I didn't add it up. But there were transfers every month for years. Large ones. To accounts in Switzerland, in Luxembourg, even Hong Kong." Inès's voice dropped. "And one recurring payment, every single month, for seventeen years. To a name I didn't recognize at first. 'B. Maurier.'"

The name hung in the air. Camille's mind scrabbled for purchase, flipping through every Robert, every Bernard, every Bertrand she'd known in Pont-l'Évêque.

"The bakery." Élodie said it first, her voice barely audible. "Maurier. The bakery's surname is Maurier."

Robert Maurier. The man who'd given them warm baguettes and free croissants when they were kids. Who'd waved at their mother from across the square every Sunday after Mass. Who'd brought a casserole to the house after Maman died, patting Élodie's shoulder with flour-dusted hands and telling her his kitchen was her kitchen, always.

"Seventeen years," Camille repeated. "That's... that's almost as long as Papa's been gone."

"Blackmail," Inès whispered. "She was being blackmailed. That has to be it."

"Or he was a partner." Élodie's voice had an edge now. "Maybe he was part of it. The smuggling ring Lefèvre mentioned. Robert could have been her connection in town, helping move pieces, keeping an eye on things."

Camille shook her head slowly. "No. Lefèvre said she had connections in Paris, in Brussels. She wouldn't have needed a small-town baker for logistics." She paused, thinking it through. "But she would have needed a local witness. Someone who saw something she couldn't explain away. Someone who could destroy her reputation if they talked."

The three of them sat in silence as the pieces clicked into place.

"Maman's letter." Camille's voice was barely a whisper. She felt the weight of the other two sisters' stares. "The one she left for me. The one that told me about Papa's—about what she claimed he'd done, leaving us. I always assumed she was trying to protect us from the truth. That she was bitter, that she wanted us to hate him."

"And she wasn't?" Élodie asked.

"She was protecting herself." Camille's hands were shaking now. "She wrote that Papa had abandoned the family, that he'd been weak, that we should be grateful she'd kept us safe. She never said what she was keeping us safe from. I never asked." A bitter laugh escaped her. "I was so angry at him, so ready to believe the worst. And she knew that. She knew exactly how to write that letter so that I would never dig deeper."

Inès's tears had started again, silent streams down her cheeks. "So she lied to all of us. To protect herself. To keep us from finding out what she'd done."

"Or to protect us from Robert," Élodie countered. "If he was blackmailing her, if he'd threatened to expose her—or worse, threatened us—then maybe she was trying to keep us out of it. Keep us safe."

"Then she should have told us the truth after Papa died," Camille said. "She had years. She could have gone to the police, to the authorities. She chose not to."

"Maybe she was ashamed."

"Or maybe she was still paying him." Inès's voice was quiet. "The ledger. It went up to last year. A monthly payment, right up until she got sick."

The realization settled over them like the cold damp of a Norman evening. Their mother had been dying, and she'd still been paying Robert Maurier.

"I need to see that ledger." Camille's voice was firm again. "We need to know exactly what we're dealing with."

"It's in my apartment in Paris. I can have it couriered—"

"No. We go get it. Together." Camille's gaze swept over her sisters. "And before we do, we need to think very carefully about our next move."

"If Robert is blackmailing her estate—"

"He's not blackmailing the estate." Camille cut Élodie off. "He was blackmailing Maman. That's a different thing entirely. And if he was getting paid to keep quiet, then he knows everything. Everything about the smuggling, about Papa, about what happened."

"You think he was the one who threatened Papa?" Inès asked.

Camille considered it. "Maybe. Or maybe he just saw an opportunity and took it. Either way, he's the only lead we have left." She looked out the windshield at the cemetery gates, where the sea wind was beginning to pick up. "And if he threatened our mother for seventeen years, then he's not just a bystander. He's part of this. Whatever this is."

Élodie was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was different—harder, older. "Do you remember what he said at Maman's funeral? After the burial service, when we were standing in the rain, he came over and took my hand and said, 'Your mother was a remarkable woman. She knew how to keep a secret.'"

"At the funeral?" Inès's voice was aghast.

"I didn't understand it at the time. I thought he meant whatever she'd told him about Papa. That he knew she'd kept the truth from us, about the abandonment, and he was acknowledging her strength." Élodie shook her head. "But he meant something else. He meant that she'd kept his secret. That she'd paid him, and she'd never told anyone, and now that she was dead, that secret was going to be a problem."

"Unless someone else paid him." Camille's words came out carefully, deliberately.

Inès frowned. "What do you mean?"

"If Robert Maurier has been blackmailing our mother for seventeen years," Camille said. "And she never broke, never reported him, never told a soul. Then now that she's gone, he has nothing. The payments stop. His leverage is gone. Unless..." She paused. "Unless he has another angle."

"You think he'll come after us?"

Camille thought about the last time she'd seen Robert. At the bakery, just a few months ago, when she'd stopped in for a pain au chocolat before heading to a meeting at the Mairie. He'd been so warm, so familiar. He'd asked about her cases in Paris, about her sisters, about whether the old house on the cliff was treating her well.

And she'd told him everything. She'd told him she'd found some old letters of her mother's, that she was going through the estate, that she'd been talking to Lefèvre. She'd given him a complete map of everything she knew.

"Oh no." The color drained from her face. "I talked to him. After Maman's funeral. I told him about the estate."

"He knows we're closing in." Élodie's eyes went wide. "He'll have had time to prepare. To destroy evidence. To—"

"Or to make the first move." Inès's voice was shaking. "He could be planning his next payment right now. Coming after us, coming after what we inherited."

Camille's mind raced. "No. He hasn't come after us yet, which means he doesn't know what we know. He probably thought the whole thing died with Maman. That whatever records she had would go to the grave with her."

"But Inès found the ledger."

"Exactly. He doesn't know that." Camille turned the car on, the engine's hum filling the space between them. "And that's our advantage. He thinks he's safe. He thinks no one will ever connect him to what happened. He thinks the Marchand family secrets died with our mother."

"Then what do we do?"

Camille shifted the car into drive and pulled out of the cemetery lot, onto the narrow road that wound back toward Pont-l'Évêque. The sea was still visible in her rearview mirror, the grey Channel water rolling endlessly against the cliffs below the graves.

"We get the ledger. We go back to Nathalie. We find out exactly what Robert knew, what he threatened Maman with, and how deep this really goes." Her hands were steady on the wheel now. "And then we decide whether we pay him off, expose him, or bury him the way he's been burying us all these years."

The car was quiet, the three of them watching the Normandy countryside slide past—green fields, apple trees, the occasional half-timbered farmhouse.

"The mother we knew," Élodie finally said, softly, "the one who sang in the garden and made us breakfast every morning before school. That woman was real. She loved us. I have to believe that."

"She did," Inès whispered. "She must have."

Camille said nothing. She kept her eyes on the road ahead, on the winding path back to the house on the cliff, and tried to hold both truths at once: the mother she'd loved, and the woman she was only beginning to understand.