Read Chapter 12: Turn of the Tide

The text from Malo Le Goff arrived at 9:47. Camille was scrubbing algae off the hull when her phone buzzed against the deck boards.

*Camille—you there? I’m in the area. Want to grab a coffee? It’s about a job. A big one. — MLG*

Malo. She hadn’t spoken to him since she’d quit Ogilvy Paris in a haze of sleeping pills and unpaid invoices. He was a fixer—the kind of account director who could sell sand to a desert. She typed back before she could think.

*The houseboat. Come over.*

He arrived in a rental car two hours later, wearing a linen blazer that cost more than her father’s boat was worth. He stepped onto the deck like he owned it, scanning the peeling paint and the dead geranium—the one with the logbook tucked inside its planter—with polite amusement.

“Nice place.” He meant the opposite.

“What do you want, Malo?”

He settled onto the bench opposite her, folding his hands. “Remember when we pitched the Oceanic Foundation account? The one that went to Grey, and you said they’d gut it into a hashtag campaign?”

She remembered. She’d been right. Oceanic’s “Clean Seas” campaign had become a drone-shot logo drop at Cannes Lions, and the foundation had quietly dissolved two years later.

“There’s a client who wants that kind of firepower. Real budget. Real mandate.” He leaned in. “They’re facing PR headwinds over environmental claims. They want to reframe their narrative before regulators start sniffing around.”

Her stomach tightened. “Who’s the client?”

“You’ll sign an NDA first.”

“Malo.”

He spread his hands. “A major coastal operation. They need a sustainability pivot. Full creative control, a team you can build yourself, and a signing bonus that makes the last decade of work-for-scraps look like a joke.”

The smell of diesel drifted across the water. Somewhere up the coast, a trawler was coming in. She thought about the debt collector’s email—€28,500. The lawyer’s letter she’d hidden under the mattress. The way the Paris apartment now felt like a prison cell her salary had built.

“Keravel,” she said.

Malo’s smile didn’t flicker. “They’re serious. They want the best.”

She should have thrown him off the boat. Instead she heard herself say, “How much?”

He named a figure. It was obscene. Enough to clear her father’s debt, disappear back to Paris, and never think about dead dolphins or algae blooms or Yann’s disappointed eyes again.

“They’d want you to start next week,” Malo said. “Mercy campaign, first phase. I’m staying at the hotel in Saint-Malo tonight. You can give me your answer by morning.”

He left before she could respond. She sat on the deck for a long time, staring at the murky water, rehearsing how she’d tell Yann about the job offer without mentioning the client’s name.

She didn’t get the chance.

The knock came at the houseboat’s door at dusk. Yann, breathless, his sleeves rolled above his elbows and his jaw set. He was carrying a laptop.

“You need to see this,” he said, stepping past her without an invitation. He set the laptop on the galley table and opened a video file.

“The break-in. I pulled the security feed from the research station’s exterior camera.”

“I thought they disabled it.”

“They took the server room. They didn’t count on the backup at the weather buoy mast.” He pointed at the screen. “Watch the edge of the frame. Four in the morning.”

The footage was grainy, shot from above at an angle. Two figures approached the station’s side door. One pried the lock with a crowbar. The other stood watch, scanning the shoreline.

Camille leaned closer, her breath catching. The second figure was small, slight. He moved with a curious limp, favoring his left leg. He wore a battered fisherman’s cap and a dark jacket with a collar turned up.

He turned, just for a second, toward the camera. The streetlight behind the station caught his profile.

Camille’s hands went cold.

She knew that face. She knew the slope of the nose, the way the jaw didn’t sit quite square. She knew because she’d seen it in every photograph her mother had kept hidden, every memory she’d buried so deep she’d stopped pretending it didn’t hurt.

“That’s not one of Keravel’s people,” Yann said slowly, watching her. “You recognize him, don’t you?”

She couldn’t answer. The breath was gone from her chest. The man on the screen was Thomas Le Goff. Her father. The man she had told Yann and every person in this town had died three years ago—when in truth, he had simply vanished one morning, leaving a note that said *stay clear of the bay* and nothing else.

She’d spent years deciding whether to hate him or mourn him.

And he was here.

“Camille? Who is this?”

She snapped the laptop shut. “I have to go.”

“What? Where—”

“I can’t explain right now.” She was already moving, grabbing her jacket. “Not yet.”

Yann stepped into her path. “You know who broke into my station. You know who the logbook is about. And you’re telling me you can’t explain?”

“Yann, please.”

“I helped you, Camille. I put my research, my team, my reputation on the line.” His voice was tight. “At least tell me what I’m protecting you from. Who is that man?”

She looked at him—the storm in his eyes, the new wariness that had crept in after the fake profile incident. She could see him trying to rebuild trust in her, and she was about to break it again.

“He’s my father,” she said, and the words felt like swallowing glass. “And he’s not dead. I don’t know why he’s here. I don’t know anything.”

She ran past him, off the deck, toward the path that climbed toward the headland above the bay. Every step she took was fueled by thirteen years of silence.

There was only one place her father would go. The lighthouse, at the point. Where he’d taken her as a girl to watch the gulls dive for the fish churned up by the tide.

The lighthouse, silhouetted against the dying sky. A light was on in the lamp room.