Read Chapter 10: First Light

The first pale line of dawn was still struggling over the horizon when Camille found him. She’d woken to an empty houseboat, the bunk beside her cold, and a text from Yann that read only: *Cove north of the point. Counting terns. Come if you want.*

She’d pulled on the thick wool sweater she’d found in her father’s locker—a relic that smelled of salt and pipe tobacco and something indefinably *him*—and walked the rocky path in the half-dark.

Now she stood at the edge of a small, crescent-shaped cove, watching Yann crouched low behind a cluster of granite boulders, binoculars pressed to his eyes. He wore a faded navy parka, hood down. The wind moved his dark hair in slow, lazy brushes. Beyond him, a line of black-and-white terns sat motionless on a sandbar, their bodies silhouetted against the deepening orange of the sky.

“They’re back,” he said without turning. His voice was quiet, almost reverent. “The roseate terns. Three years since they nested here.”

Camille stepped closer, careful where she placed her feet. The sand was wet and cold beneath her boots. “You knew I’d come?”

“I hoped.” He lowered the binoculars and finally looked at her. His eyes were tired, ringed with shadow, but soft. “Camille, about yesterday. I was an ass. You were doing what you thought was right, and I made it about me.”

“You had every right to be angry.” She sat down on a flat rock beside him, pulling her knees to her chest. “I lied to you. I built a whole fake person to get information. That’s a violation of everything you stand for.”

“It’s a violation of *trust*,” he said. “But not because you did it. Because you didn’t tell me.” He paused, turning the binoculars over in his hands. “I’ve spent a decade thinking about your father. Why he saved me and never said a word. Why he disappeared from my life after. And then you show up with his logbook, and suddenly I’m eighteen again, desperate for answers.”

“I know the feeling.” She stared out at the water, now streaked with gold. “I keep hoping the logbook will explain him. But every entry just makes him more of a stranger.”

“He was a man who carried things alone,” Yann said quietly. “I think he was afraid of letting anyone close enough to help.”

The words landed in her chest like a stone. She opened her mouth, and something broke loose. “My mother died when I was eighteen.”

Yann went still.

“I was in Paris,” she continued, her voice flat. “It was my first year at the advertising school. My big escape. I’d been gone exactly three months, and I got the call—” She stopped, breathed. “She had an aneurysm. It was sudden. Painless, they said. And I flew back for the funeral, stayed for a week, and then I went back to Paris because I had a deadline. A project I couldn’t miss. My father didn’t argue. He just said, *‘Go. I’ll hold the fort.’*”

“Camille.”

“He held it for sixteen years.” She finally looked at him, and her eyes were wet. “I never came back. I told myself it was work, but it was guilt. I couldn’t face the fact that I’d left her, and I couldn’t face him because he reminded me of everything I’d run from.” She laughed, a hollow sound. “And now he’s gone, and I’ll never get to ask him if he forgave me.”

Yann was quiet for a long moment. The terns lifted in a sudden white cloud, wheeling over the water, and then settled back down.

“He did,” he said finally. “I know he did.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

He shifted to face her fully. “Because he kept every article about your work. I found them in his house when I helped clear it out. Ads you’d created, features about your campaigns. He had them in a box under his bed. Not displayed, not talked about. But he kept them.” He touched her hand, light and tentative. “He was proud of you, Camille. Proud and quiet and terrible at saying it. But he forgave you the moment you left, because he knew you were building something. He just didn’t know how to tell you that you didn’t have to build it so far away.”

The sun broke over the water, a flood of liquid gold that turned the cove into fire. Camille felt something crack inside her chest—a seam she’d been holding shut for years, letting warmth pour through.

“I should have been here,” she whispered. “When he got sick. I should have been here.”

“You’re here now,” Yann said. “That counts for something.”

She looked at him—this man she’d known as a boy, who’d grown into someone who watched birds at dawn and carried the weight of her father’s quiet legacy. He was close enough that she could see the flecks of gray in his stubble, the sun lines at the corners of his eyes. His gaze dropped to her mouth, and then back up.

“Camille,” he breathed.

The phone shattered the moment. A harsh, insistent buzz from Yann’s pocket. He flinched, pulled back, and grabbed it—his face going pale as he read the screen.

“It’s the station,” he said. “Joséphine. She’s been trying to reach me for twenty minutes.”

He answered. Camille watched his expression shift from confusion to alarm to something hard and cold.

“Say that again,” he said. “Slowly.”

A crackling voice on the other end. Camille caught fragments: *“—window, side door, all forced—”* and *“—can’t find the backup drive—”*

Yann stood abruptly, scattering sand. “We’re coming. Don’t touch anything. Call the gendarmerie.”

He hung up and turned to Camille, his face a mask of controlled fury.

“Someone broke into the research station last night. Joséphine found the door open at first light.” He was already moving, striding up the beach toward the path. “They went straight for my lab. The computers are untouched, the sample freezers are intact.” He stopped, jaw tight. “But the algae map data is gone. The entire archive. All of it.”

Camille’s blood went cold. She ran to catch up with him, grabbing his arm. “Yann—that data. It was the evidence you were building against Keravel. The bloom patterns, tracked over years.”

“I know what it was.” His voice was raw.

“They’re not just threatening us anymore,” she said slowly, the pieces clicking into place. “They’re destroying proof. First my logbook, now your data. They’re trying to erase the whole investigation.”

Yann looked at her, and something shifted in his eyes. “Camille. Where’s the logbook right now?”

Her stomach dropped. “On the houseboat. Under the floorboard.”

He grabbed her hand. “Then we need to move. Now.”

They broke into a run together, the golden sunrise turning harsh and urgent behind them, the terns scattering into the sky like a warning.