Read Chapter 37: The Search

The morning light cut through the tall windows of the bistro, catching the dust motes suspended in the air like tiny planets. Camille stood at the pass, a cup of coffee cooling in her hands, watching Étienne move through the kitchen with the quiet efficiency of a man who had finally stopped fighting his own reflection.

The star had changed things. Not the cooking—that had always been there, buried under years of compromise and fear. It had changed the light in the room. The staff moved differently. The regulars smiled more. Even the croissants from the bakery across the street seemed to taste richer.

But Camille's phone buzzed with a notification that wiped the satisfaction from her face.

She read the message twice. Three times. The name at the top was one she hadn't seen in months—a contact from her early days in the investment game, a woman named Sophie who ran a small network of informants across the culinary world. Sophie sent short, cryptic messages. She never explained how she knew things. She just knew.

*Lucas Benali. Tagine house outside Marrakech. Working the line. Looks rough.*

Camille stared at the words until they burned into her retinas. Lucas. Their missing sous-chef. The man who'd vanished in the chaos of the fire, who'd been tied to the sabotage attempts until the mold discovery had shifted suspicion elsewhere. They'd assumed he'd fled the country, guilty of something. But what?

She found Étienne in the dry storage room, inventory clipboard in hand, his brow furrowed at a discrepancy in the olive oil count. He looked up when she entered, and his face softened in that way it had lately—the way that made her forget they were supposed to be professionals.

"What is it?" he asked, reading her expression before she could speak.

"Lucas. He's in Morocco."

Étienne's hand froze over the clipboard. "What?"

"A contact of mine spotted him working in a tagine house outside Marrakech. He's alive." She paused, the weight of the implication settling between them. "He might know who attacked us."

Étienne set the clipboard down slowly. "Or he might have been the one who did it."

"We don't know that."

"We know he disappeared the night of the fire. We know nobody's heard from him since. We know the police couldn't find him for questioning." Étienne's voice was tight, controlled. "That's not the behavior of an innocent man."

Camille stepped closer, lowering her voice even though no one else was in earshot. "The mold was planted. The pipe was scored. That took planning, access, intent. Someone who worked here, or knew the building intimately." She watched his face. "Lucas knew this building better than anyone but you. He knew the old owner too."

"So you think he was involved."

"I think he has answers." She pulled out her phone again, scrolling to Sophie's message. "If we find him, we find out who did this. We clear this up before Groupe Roussel or anyone else decides to use it against us."

Étienne was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the lunch rush was beginning—the clatter of plates, the murmur of customers, the sweet cacophony of a restaurant finding its feet again. The star had brought them a flood of reservations. The last thing they needed was to leave the kitchen.

"Marrakech," he said finally. "You want to fly to Marrakech to find a man who abandoned us."

"I want to find the man who might save us." She reached out, touching his arm. "Étienne, I know what you're thinking. This place can't survive without you for a week. But it can't survive another attack either. We got lucky with the mold. The next time someone decides to take us down, we might not catch it in time."

"The inspector just gave us a star. We have a month of proving we deserve it. We can't afford distractions."

"This isn't a distraction." She held his gaze. "This is closing a wound before it gets infected. Lucas was there. He knows something. And if he's in a bad way—" She stopped, hearing the weight in her own voice.

"You think he needs help," Étienne said flatly.

"I think he was a good sous-chef who made a bad choice. And I think we're sitting here with a second chance that he may not have gotten."

Étienne leaned against the shelf, rubbing the back of his neck. She could see the war playing out across his face—the pragmatist who wanted to stay and protect what they'd built, versus the cook who remembered training Lucas from a nervous commis into a confident second, who'd watched him learn the bistro's rhythms like a musician learning a song.

"Who runs the kitchen?" he asked finally.

"Marc can handle the line. You've been training him for months. And Geneviève owes me a favor—she's been wanting to see the restaurant in operation. I'll ask her to sit in on service."

"Your mother, running your restaurant."

"She'll love it. It gives her something to critique." A small smile tugged at her lips. "And it keeps her from critiquing me for a few days."

Étienne made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a groan. "This is insane. We just got the star. We should be celebrating, not chasing ghosts across North Africa."

"We can celebrate when we're safe." She stepped closer, close enough to feel the heat radiating off him. "Étienne, I don't want to spend the next year looking over my shoulder. I don't want to wonder if every bad review is the beginning of another attack. I want to know who did this to us. And I think Lucas can tell us."

He looked at her for a long time, his dark eyes searching hers. The kitchen hummed around them—the sound of a place alive, thriving, fragile.

"Two days," he said. "We fly out tomorrow morning, and we fly back in two days whether we find him or not."

"Agreed."

"And if he's the one who did this—if we find out he started that fire or planted that mold—we turn him over to the police. No mercy, no second chances."

She nodded slowly. "If he's guilty, we do what's right."

"And if he's not?" Étienne asked.

Camille thought about Lucas—young, eager, always the first to arrive and the last to leave. She remembered the way he'd laughed at Étienne's terrible jokes, the way he'd defended the bistro's honor to skeptical suppliers, the way he'd wept at the tasting menu they'd served the night before the fire.

"Then we bring him home," she said. "And we figure out who else wanted us to fail."

Étienne exhaled slowly. "You're impossible, you know that?"

"You keep saying that like it's a bad thing."

He shook his head, but there was warmth in it now. "I'll call Marc. You book the flights. And we tell the staff we're visiting a supplier in Portugal."

"Portugal?"

"Nobody questions a chef going to Portugal for fish."

She laughed, and for a moment the weight of everything lifted. The star. The month. The uncertainty. All of it dissolved into the simple, terrifying joy of being in partnership with someone who understood her.

"One more thing," she said as they walked back toward the dining room.

"What?"

She pulled on her jacket, already reaching for her phone. "We never mention the spoon."

Étienne paused, hand on the kitchen door. "The spoon?"

"The one your mentor gave you. The one you gave me that night." She met his eyes. "Whatever we find in Morocco, that stays between us."

He nodded slowly, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. "Between us," he repeated.

The word hung in the air like the promise it was.

---

They flew out at dawn. The plane was small, the kind that made Camille grip the armrest whenever it hit a pocket of turbulence. Étienne slept beside her, his head against the window, his face slack with an exhaustion he'd been hiding for weeks. She watched him breathe and tried not to think about what they were doing—abandoning their restaurant at the height of its triumph to chase a ghost across a continent.

The tagine house was exactly where Sophie had said it would be, tucked down a narrow alley in the medina, its facade faded and peeling. The smell of cumin and charcoal drifted through the open door. Inside, a few tourists sat at low tables, eating with their hands.

Camille approached the counter where a heavyset man was wiping glasses. "We're looking for someone who works here. Lucas Benali."

The man's eyes flicked toward the kitchen, then back to her. "No one here by that name."

Étienne stepped forward, his French tinged with the accent of a man who'd cooked his whole life. "The young one who does the tagines. Dark hair, scar on his hand. We're old colleagues."

The man's face hardened. "He's not here."

"Where is he?"

"Gone." The man set down the glass. "He worked for three weeks, then he drank away his wages and disappeared. If you find him, tell him he still owes me a hundred dirhams."

Outside, the morning sun blazed down on the white-washed walls. Camille turned to Étienne, her heart sinking.

"We just flew five hours to miss him."

Étienne was scanning the alley, his jaw tight. "He drank away his wages. That's not the Lucas I knew."

"People change."

"Not like that. Not this fast." He started walking, his stride purposeful.

"Where are you going?"

"To find the places where people go to drink in a city full of tea." He glanced back at her. "You coming?"

She followed him into the maze of the medina, past spice stalls and carpet shops and the scent of leather tanneries. And as they walked, she couldn't shake the feeling that they were being watched—that somewhere in the shadows of this unfamiliar city, someone knew exactly why they had come.

The search had only just begun.