Read Chapter 21: The Drone's Eye

The idea came to her at two in the morning, which was precisely when she'd had her best ideas in advertising. The difference was that this one mattered.

Camille sat at the small table in the houseboat's cabin, her father's logbook open beside her laptop, the old pollution data—phosphates, nitrates, heavy metals, years of readings taken by her mother and Marianne—arranged in spreadsheets that traced a poisoned river delta feeding directly into the bay. The municipal council had dismissed the map as a curiosity, the data as an outsider's hobby. Fine. She'd been dismissed by clients before, and she knew what to do about it.

She'd tell the story louder.

The NGO was called Océan Vivant, one of the largest marine conservation organizations in Europe. They had eleven million followers across platforms. They ran campaigns that moved stock prices and toppled executives. And they had a public submissions portal for "citizen science" projects, which Camille had bookmarked two hours ago and had been staring at ever since.

She'd spent ten years convincing people to buy yogurt, insurance, and luxury watches by crafting narratives that made them feel something. She could do this in her sleep.

By four a.m., she had the post written. Not a data dump—no one read data. A story. A daughter who found her mother's hidden research in her father's logbook. A marine biologist who died too young, whose findings were buried for decades. A river that had been treated as a landfill while the water turned brown at the edges. A map drawn by hand, of a cove that didn't exist on any government chart.

*What else is hidden off the coast of Brittany?*

She tagged Océan Vivant. She tagged two investigative journalists she'd worked with on a greenwashing campaign for a client that had gone badly, publicly, in her favor. She included three of the most damning data points as a downloadable file, hosted on a free server that left no trace back to her IP.

She posted it from a café's public Wi-Fi an hour later, because she wasn't an amateur.

Then she drove back to the harbor, parked the rental car, and walked down the dock toward the houseboat as dawn cracked the sky open over the sea. The water was the color of steel and rose, and the gulls were already screaming.

She didn't see the rope until she stepped aboard.

The boat lurched beneath her—not a gentle swell, but a sickening sideways tilt. Camille's foot slid on the dew-slick deck, her arms pinwheeling as the world tipped. The mooring lines at the bow hung slack, sliced clean through, the frayed ends white as bone. The stern line groaned, taking the full weight of the boat as it swung hard against the current.

Then the stern line parted with a sound like a rifle shot.

The houseboat began to drift, stern-first, into the channel.

"Camille!"

Yann's voice came from the dock behind her, sharp with alarm. She heard his boots on the planks, and then he was leaping across the widening gap, catching the railing, hauling himself aboard as the boat picked up speed toward the channel mouth.

"Grab the wheel!" he shouted.

But the boat swung again, a hard yaw to port, and Camille lost her footing. She went over the rail—not cleanly, her hip catching the gunwale, her body tilting into the green-black water below. For a second she hung there, one hand gripping a cleat, her legs dangling over the water, her shoulder screaming.

Then Yann's hand closed around her wrist.

He pulled her back over the rail with a strength that surprised her, both of them collapsing onto the deck in a tangle of wet hair and cold skin and heaving breath. The boat continued to drift, slower now, caught by the incoming tide that pushed it gently back toward the dock.

Yann was on his feet first, reaching for the boat hook, snagging a bollard as the houseboat slid past. He secured a line with quick, practiced turns, his hands efficient despite the adrenaline.

Camille lay on the deck, staring at the sky, her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her teeth.

"Someone cut the lines," she said.

Yann crouched beside her. His face was close, his eyes scanning hers for injury. "Are you hurt?"

"No." She sat up, wincing. "I'm not hurt."

But her hands were shaking. She looked at them, these hands that had built presentations and won awards and sold things no one needed. They were shaking like she was twenty-two again, standing in her first creative review, terrified of being found out.

Yann followed her gaze. "Camille."

"Not now. I need to check the engine—"

"Camille." His voice was gentle, and she hated that it was gentle. She hated that he could see her like this, wet and terrified and unraveling.

"I'm fine."

"You nearly went overboard." He sat back on his heels. "You've been up all night, haven't you?"

"How do you know that?"

"Because I was coming to see you." He paused. "I stayed up, worried about the midnight meeting. I saw you leave for the café at five. I was waiting for you to come back."

She stared at him. "You were watching my boat?"

"I was watching the dock." A hint of a smile. "I've been doing that a lot lately. Given the circumstances."

The sun was fully up now, light spilling across the deck, catching the frayed ends of the severed ropes. The cuts were clean. Deliberate. A message.

They went to Yann's cabin because the houseboat's lines were shot and the boat needed re-securing before she could trust it again. His cabin was warm, small, smelled of coffee and salt and the particular Yann-smell that she'd been trying not to think about for weeks. He made her sit on his bunk while he found a blanket, and she took it without argument because her teeth were chattering and she couldn't seem to make them stop.

"The campaign," she said. "I posted it. The pollution data. I tagged Océan Vivant."

Yann handed her a mug of coffee. "When?"

"Hours ago."

He sat on the narrow bench across from her. "And?"

"I don't know yet. I haven't checked my phone."

She dug it from her jacket pocket. The screen was crowded with notifications—hundreds of them. The post was gaining traction. People were sharing it; the NGO's account had retweeted it with a single word: *Investigating.*

"Oh," she said.

People were *angry,* and they had numbers and dates and a dead woman's name to attach to it. The thread was spreading beyond her own followers now, into environmental circles, into newsrooms.

She looked up at Yann. "Perrot is going to lose his mind."

"Good." Yann's voice was flat. "He already tried to drown you."

Camille laughed, a sharp, startled sound. "Is that what this was? A threat?"

"It was a message. You're not safe here alone." He paused, and something shifted in his face, something she couldn't read. "You haven't been safe since you came back."

"I don't know if I've been safe for years." The words came out before she could stop them, flat and heavy. She stared at the coffee in her hands. "I came back to Brittany because I was falling apart, Yann. I was in my office in Paris, crying at my desk for no reason, and I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't stop working, and I thought if I just kept going—" She broke off, swallowing. "I thought I could outrun it. So I came here to sell the boat, to have a clean, simple transaction, and then Perrot happened, and you happened, and my father happened, and everything I thought I knew—"

She stopped. Her hands were shaking again.

"Oh," she said, in a small voice she barely recognized.

Yann didn't say anything. He crossed the small space and sat on the bunk beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through the blanket. He didn't touch her, just sat there, present, steady, a harbor in the storm she'd been sailing through for months.

"You're not falling apart," he said quietly. "You're doing the bravest thing I've ever seen."

A sound escaped her, something between a laugh and a sob. "I posted a spreadsheet."

"You posted the truth. While people who want you silenced are watching your every move."

The boat rocked gently in the morning swell. Somewhere out on the water, a motor started up—the fishing fleet heading out for the day, ordinary and unchanged. And in her pocket, her phone buzzed again. And again. And again.

Camille set the coffee aside and turned to look at him—really looked, for the first time since she'd come back to this place she'd never wanted to call home.

"I don't want to be alone tonight," she said.

Yann's eyes held hers, something careful and unguarded in them. "You don't have to be."