Read Chapter 2: The Houseboat

The storm had scrubbed the sky clean. Camille stood on the harbour wall at six in the morning, coffee from the shop that opened before the bakers, watching the light come up over the water in shades of pearl and ash. The wind had died to a whisper. Everything was still.

Her father's boat sat at the end of the third pontoon, low in the water, ropes taut. *Mari Morgan*, painted in faded green along the hull. A Breton name she'd never asked him about. She finished the coffee in three swallows and walked.

The deck was slick with salt. She stepped aboard and the boat accepted her weight with a near-silent groan, like it was holding its breath. The cabin door was still locked from the day before, and she'd brought the key this time—a heavy brass thing from a bundle of her father's possessions his lawyer had couriered to Paris three weeks after the funeral. She'd nearly thrown the whole bundle in the bin. Instead she'd let it sit in a shoebox in her coat closet, unopened, until regret or guilt forced her hand.

The key turned without resistance.

The cabin smelled of mildew and pipe tobacco and something else, something sweet and chemical—varnish, maybe. She stood in the doorway and let her eyes adjust. The bunks. The little stove. The table folded against the wall. A yellowed chart of the bay pinned above the navigation station, marked with pencil circles and dates in her father's cramped hand.

She stepped inside.

Everything was neat. Painfully neat. The man who'd let his living room in Quimper fill with newspapers and unanswered mail had kept this boat like a temple. The kettle was polished. The cushions plumped. The life jackets hung in a row, graded by size.

He'd been here recently before he died. That much was obvious. There was a half-drunk bottle of Breton cider on the counter, a clean glass beside it, and his reading glasses folded on the chart table. She picked them up.

The lenses were smudged.

She put them down and opened the drawer beneath the chart table. A box of pencils, all sharpened to the same point. A coil of rigging twine. A tin of lozenges. A rubber band. And a blue envelope, creased from sitting under everything else.

No stamp. No address. The name on the front was written in her father's unsteady hand—the handwriting she recognized from the last years of his life, when the tremors had started.

*Marianne.*

The flap was open. She slid out the letter, two sheets of thin paper covered in the same sloping script. The date at the top was three weeks before his death.

*Marianne,*

*I've been trying to write this for a month. Everything I think about saying sounds like an excuse, and you deserve better than that. But the boat needs new rigging before the winter sets in, and I keep putting it off because every time I look at the mast I see you climbing it, laughing, telling me the halyard was shot when I bought her. You were right. You were always right about this boat.*

She stopped reading there. Her chest was tight. She flipped to the second sheet, scanned it quickly, but the rest was domestic detail—weather, a doctor's appointment, a question about a tide table. The letter ended mid-sentence. *I'll be at the mooring on Tuesday if you want to—*

That was it. The pencil line stopped, as if he'd been interrupted or lost the thought.

She folded the letter, put it back in the envelope, and slid it into her jacket pocket. She would deal with it later. Or she would not.

The sound came again.

The same sound as yesterday—from deep below, a hollow scrape and knock, rhythmic, like something trying to get out. She went very still. It had come from the cabin sole, she realized. Beneath her feet. Three knocks, a pause, then another.

She knelt and pressed her ear to the floorboards. The wood was cold against her cheek. Nothing. Just the water slapping the hull.

Then another scrape. Definitely below the cabin sole. Not inside the boat at all—outside it, against the hull itself, where the mooring line chafed against the bow. She let out a breath that was half laughter, half relief. The storm had loosened something. The line was probably dragging against the hull, abrading it. She'd seen enough boats in her childhood to know that sound: the slow, patient grinding of rope against fibreglass.

She stood, brushed the dust from her knees, and was about to step out to check the line when she heard, clear as a gull's cry, a voice from the deck.

"Camille?"

She spun around. A shadow filled the doorway.

Yann Le Bris stood on the dock, one hand on the gunwale, wearing a faded yellow oilskin jacket over a wetsuit top, the collar open. His hair was darker than she remembered, cropped short, damp. His face had changed—older, more lined, with a small scar through his left eyebrow that hadn't been there at eighteen. He held a coil of new rope over one shoulder.

"Matin," he said.

She didn't answer. The memory of the last time she'd seen him was too close, and she felt her own expression snap shut like a hatch.

"I saw the boat rocking out here and came over," he said. "The storm loosened the mooring cleat on the pontoon. I've been checking all the boats on this row."

"I'm fine," she said.

"Your line's frayed." He nodded toward the bow, where the rope had been worn nearly through to the core. "It'll break in the next good wind. I've got a splice kit in the research boat, or I can rig temporary dock lines now."

"I said I'm fine."

He held her gaze for a moment. His eyes were the same colour as the water on a grey day—grey-green, unreadable.

"You're Camille Le Goff," he said quietly. "I thought it was your father's boat. But you didn't answer when I knocked, so I got worried."

"You knew the boat."

"I know every boat on this mooring." He paused. "I'm sorry about your father, Camille. He was a good man. I didn't find out until I got back from fieldwork last month."

She said nothing to that. Maybe she should have said thank you. She said nothing.

"I didn't come to pry," he said. "I came because we're doing a survey of the mooring area for the project, and we need access to the water column under your slip. And because your line's frayed."

"What project?"

He shifted the rope on his shoulder. "The algal bloom monitoring. You probably saw the poster at the bar."

She had seen it. She'd stared at it for an hour last night—his face, the sea behind him, the words about a dying bay. She'd imagined he was in a laboratory in Brest or teaching at some university, far away from Saint-Briac. Not here. Not in her father's doorway.

"I'm not staying long," she said. "I'm here to sell the boat."

He took that in. "The weekend," he said.

"What?"

"The woman at the bar said you'd be here for the weekend. Selling the boat by the end of it."

"That's right."

Something flickered across his face, too fast to read. "I was hoping—" He stopped and started again. "The mooring survey. It's part of the conservation plan for the green tides. I need to measure the current under the boat, the sediment, the algae presence. The whole mooring field. This one included."

"Now?"

"I can do it now, if it's not an inconvenience. I won't go inside the cabin. Just the hull below the waterline."

He was being careful with her. She hated that she could see him being careful.

She stepped out onto the deck, closing the cabin door behind her. "You know this boat has a name," she said.

"Mari Morgan. She knows it too." A half-smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.

"My father wrote an unfinished letter to someone called Marianne. Is that—"

But she didn't finish the sentence, because he was already shaking his head. "Marianne Bréhat. She runs the diving shop on the quay." He paused. "She knew your father well. They were partners in a training programme, years ago. Diving safety courses for the local fishing co-op."

Partners. The word hung in the air. Camille wondered if there was more to it.

"She's been waiting to see who'd come for the boat," Yann said. "You should talk to her."

"I didn't come here to talk. I came to sell."

He looked at her for a long moment. She was acutely aware of her own lie burning in her mouth—weekend only, sell and go, no time for old guilt, no time to remember why she'd left this town in the first place, or why she'd never come back, not once, in sixteen years even for funerals—but she was good at lies. Paris had refined her.

Yann shrugged. "Fair enough. You've got a buyer?"

"Not yet."

"Let me know when you do." He turned, started walking along the pontoon. Then he stopped and looked back. "Two days ago, before the storm, I was taking water samples at the new monitoring station. I saw your father's boat from the buoys. There was someone standing on the deck. I thought it was him—before I remembered."

She didn't have a response to that.

He pointed at the bow. "Your line will break tonight if the wind picks up. I can fix it. Just knock on the window of the research station if you change your mind. It's in the old crab shed on the west quay. You'll find me there." He walked away without waiting for her answer.

She watched him go. A tall figure in yellow, moving easily down the pontoon, stepping aboard a small motorboat with the emblems of the marine institute stencilled across the hull. He didn't look back.

She turned toward the cabin door. Her father's glasses were still on the chart table. The letter was in her pocket. And somewhere beneath the floorboards, she thought she heard, faintly, the scrape of something against the hull—but she'd already dispatched that explanation. The line was frayed. Everything could be explained.

She went inside and picked up her father's glasses again, holding the worn temples in her fingers. He'd touched these. Every day he'd been here. And then he'd stopped.

Marianne Bréhat. The diving shop. Partners.

She put the glasses back down on the table and checked her phone. No buyer yet. No appointments. A whole twenty-two hours before she could plausibly claim she'd done everything she needed to do in this town and flee back to Paris.

Wait, she thought. He said she'd been standing on the deck?

She stepped out onto the boat again, squinting toward the storm-washed horizon. Yann's motorboat was already a white speck rounding the breakwater.

But he hadn't meant her. He'd said it himself—he thought it was her father, before he remembered.

She stood on the deck for a long time, her hand resting on the worn wood of the mast, staring at the point where the white speck disappeared into the glare of the morning sun.