Read Chapter 11: The Break-In

The station smelled of salt and wet rubber. Fluorescent lights buzzed over a chaos of overturned filing cabinets, shattered glass crunching under Camille’s boots. Yann stood by the door, arms crossed, jaw tight as he surveyed the damage. His research assistant, a lanky kid named Erwan, was already on his knees collecting scattered papers.

“They didn’t take the laptops,” Erwan said, voice wavering. “Or the hydrophone rig. Just… papers. And the backup drives.”

Camille moved through the wreckage. A framed map of the coastline hung crooked on the wall, one corner torn. She righted it absently, her eyes scanning the floor for anything familiar. The station was modest—two desks, a corkboard of tide charts, a shelving unit holding years of laminated survey data. Most of the damage looked performative. Angry. Like someone wanted to send a message.

“What’s missing?” she asked.

Yann crouched beside Erwan, flipping through a soggy stack of papers. He stopped. His face went still in that way she was learning meant he was doing the math.

“The algae bloom map,” he said slowly. “The one with the overlapping discharge coordinates from the last ten years. It was in the blue binder. The one we showed you back at the houseboat.”

Camille’s stomach dropped. That binder contained the visual breadcrumb trail her father’s logbook had helped him assemble—the evidence that Keravel’s waste routes curved around the bloom zones like a signature. Without it, the connection was just a dead dolphin and her father’s cryptic notes.

But the logbook itself was still on her kitchen table, under an old baking tray, save for the drawer of her nightstand, where she’d slid it the night Perrot appeared at her door. The thought of him walking into her father’s houseboat uninvited made her skin prickle. She hadn’t slept well since. Hadn’t really slept at all.

“They didn’t take the map,” she said, half to herself.

Yann looked up. “What?”

“Keravel already knows where the discharge points are. They drew them.” She stepped over a chair, her pulse quickening. “They took it because they wanted to know what *you* know. How much of it overlaps with what my father documented.”

“The logbook.”

She nodded, a cold certainty settling in her chest. “It’s the only copy of the complete picture. Perrot’s deadline is tomorrow. I think he’s planning to do more than just file paperwork.”

Yann stood, brushing dust from his jeans. “Is it safe where you have it?”

Camille thought of the houseboat’s thin walls, the gap between her mattress and the hull where she’d initially hidden it, then moved it to the drawer. The locks on the boat were solid, but not fortress-grade. And Perrot had stood in her kitchen, an inch from her, with a smile that never reached his eyes.

“It’s not safe anywhere on that boat,” she said. “If they know I have it, they know where I sleep.”

“Then don’t sleep there.” Yann’s voice was firm, but not pushy. “Or don’t keep it there.”

Rain had started to streak the station’s windows, blurring the harbor lights outside. Camille chewed the inside of her cheek. She’d been back in Porspoder for less than two weeks. The houseboat had felt like a refuge, her father’s ghost-presence a strange comfort. Now it felt like a stage. Every window a pair of eyes.

On the walk back through the drizzle, Yann kept pace beside her, hands shoved in his jacket pockets. She knew he wanted to press her on the gulf between them—her past with Keravel’s job offer, the lie about the gossip that had made her go pale at dinner. The chasm had widened, but she’d chosen, for now, to fill it with logistics.

“What about a safe deposit box?” she asked.

“The bank in Le Conquet opens at nine. Perrot’s deadline is noon.” He shook his head. “Too tight. And they’d need two forms of ID and a signature match. It’s a government building. They could be watching.”

They turned down the lane that led to the harbor. The houseboat’s hull glowed amber against the dark water, reading lamps switched on from earlier. Camille could see the ceramic planter on the deck—the one with the dead geraniums her father had never bothered to replace. She’d almost thrown it out her first morning there.

She stopped walking.

“What if it’s not hidden where you’d look?”

Yann followed her gaze to the planter. “Inside that? Too obvious. Every thriller has the hero hide the evidence in a flowerpot.”

“Not inside. Underneath.” She was already moving. “My father built the deck box himself. He used a false bottom for his fishing gear—kept his spare keys there so he didn’t have to lock the door. The wood’s rotted along the seam now, but it still swings open.”

Yann caught up with her, his boots splashing through puddles. “You think they’ll search the boat.”

“I think they already have, when I wasn’t home. I swept the place this morning.” She hadn’t told him that. Hadn’t told anyone. But she’d noticed the drawer in her nightstand was off its track by millimeters, and the salt-crusted window latch in the bathroom, normally stiff with rust, was greased like someone had oiled it to close quietly. “They didn’t find what they were looking for. But they know it exists.”

On the deck, she knelt beside the planter, brushing dead leaves from the rim. The geranium’s brittle stalk snapped in her hand. She wedged her fingers under the box’s perimeter until she found the seam her father had cut into the planking underneath. The wood gave with a groan. She reached in, her arm disappearing into the hollow space between the false bottom and the hull.

The logbook’s oilcloth-wrapped bundle was cool in her hand. She tucked it into the empty planter cavity, arranging the soil and a few dried flower heads on top, then seated the whole thing back in its cradle of rotted deck boards. From a distance, it looked exactly like a sad, forgotten plant pot.

Yann watched her hands work, his face unreadable. “You’re good at this.”

“I’m good at selling lies.” She wiped dirt on her jeans. “Same skill.”

He opened his mouth as if to say something else, but a shout from the harbor cut him off. A neighbor, Mme Le Roux, was waving a damp newspaper from her porch, her voice carrying over the rain.

“Yann! Camille! Have you seen the *Télégramme* this morning?”

They walked over. Mme Le Roux thrust the paper into Camille’s hands, tapping a bold headline with one gnarled finger.

*KERAVEL MARITIME EXEC ACCUSES RESEARCH TEAM OF “ECOTERRORISM” IN BLOOM DISPUTE*

Camille read the byline. Perrot’s name sat under the headline in a large block quote: *“We welcome legitimate environmental oversight. But criminal acts—trespassing on company vessels, falsifying environmental data, and harassing our workers—have nothing to do with protecting the bay. This is vandalism disguised as science.”*

She looked up. Yann’s face had gone pale.

“He’s flipping the narrative,” she said. “He’s not denying the blooms. He’s painting you as the villain so that when the real evidence comes out, it’s already tainted.”

“The station break-in wasn’t about the map,” Yann said quietly. “It was about setting the story. They took the disk so we couldn’t prove the *reports* were real. And he’s going to make it look like we committed perjury, or worse.”

Mme Le Roux clucked. “He’s always been a snake, that Perrot. But who will believe two young people over a company that’s been feeding half the town for forty years?”

Camille handed the paper back. Her mind was already spinning, the advertiser’s instincts kicking in. She knew how to counter a narrative. She knew the levers of public trust. But there was a deeper tremor under the headline, one that made her skin crawl.

He knew about the logbook, but he didn’t know *what* was in it. She’d seen the way he’d looked at her, like he was testing her bluff. He wanted to force her hand. Make her bring it to him.

But if the logbook’s contents ever reached the press—untainted by a break-in or a stolen map—Perrot’s story would collapse on itself. Her father had spent months crossing the bay, logging every tag, every trace. M. Le Goff of the wrong sort of questions. The man who’d died owing money he shouldn’t have.

The man she hadn’t listened to, when he needed her most.

She looked back at the planter, indistinguishable from every other piece of neglected deck furniture. If she did this right, she could clear her father’s name and her debt in one move. But she needed proof of a different kind. A lever she could pull without leaving fingerprints on the story.

What she really needed was someone inside Keravel. Someone who had already braved the company’s wrath and lived to talk.

She pulled out her phone and stared at the blank screen for a moment. Then she began to type a message to an old Paris contact who owed her more than a few favors. A name from the past she hadn’t spoken to in years.

Marianne Bréhat.