Read Chapter 3: Green Tides

The research station sat at the far end of the crab sheds, a low concrete building with a rusted corrugated roof that probably predated Camille's childhood. The smell hit her first—iodine, damp netting, and something sharp and chemical that burned the back of her throat. A drum of glyphosate stood by the door, half-empty.

She had told herself she was only coming to look. Curious. Bored. Anything but the real reason: Yann had asked, and she'd said yes before her brain caught up with her mouth. The morning had been spent avoiding the boat, avoiding her father's unfinished letter, avoiding the memory of that sound from the cabin. An hour with Yann Le Bris was easier than an hour with her own head.

Inside, the station was chaos organized by someone who cared. Maps covered every wall, layered in colored pins and grease-pencil marks. Jars of greenish water lined the windowsills, each labeled with dates and GPS coordinates. A long table held a microscope and a tangle of cables feeding a battered laptop. Yann stood at the far end, his back to her, talking to an older woman in chest waders who was gesturing at a screen.

"—and that's the third bloom this month," the woman was saying, "south of the point. The tide's bringing it in, but it's not going out."

"Because there's nothing left to push it. The current's dead." Yann saw Camille and straightened. For a moment, he looked almost embarrassed, caught in the middle of something he hadn't invited her to witness. Then he nodded. "You came."

"I said I would." She stepped inside, letting the door bang shut behind her. "What's dead?"

"The bay." Yann turned to the nearest map, a large-scale chart of the coastline that Camille recognized—she'd seen the same one in the tourist office, but this version was marked up beyond recognition. "Green tides. Ulva lactuca, if you want the Latin. It blooms when there's too much nitrogen in the water—farm runoff, mostly. The algae carpet the bottom, block the light, and when they die, they rot and release enough hydrogen sulfide to kill everything around them."

"Dad used to call it seaweed." Camille moved closer, eyeing the clusters of red dots spreading along the coast like measles.

"It's got fancier names now. Sargassum's the media darling, but this is our problem." Yann traced a cluster of dots just offshore from her father's mooring. "Your boat's sitting in the middle of one of the worst zones."

The word *your* landed somewhere in her chest. She hadn't agreed to that. Not yet. "The boat's for sale."

"Still yours while it's in the water." He wasn't pushing; he was just stating a fact. That was almost worse. "Saturday's storm broke up one bloom, but the nutrients are still there. Give it three weeks of sun, and it'll be back thicker."

The woman in waders pulled off a pair of rubber gloves. "I'm Claudine, by the way. Usually, it's just me and Yann and a volunteer or two. You're the one with the houseboat around the point?"

"The one everyone's been watching," Camille said. "Apparently, my father was a celebrity."

Claudine barked a laugh. "Around this harbour, we don't have much entertainment. A stranger showing up and arguing with Yann on a boat deck was better than any television."

Camille felt her neck heat. The harbour network had probably clocked their entire exchange within the hour.

Yann, mercifully, turned to the map. "We're trying to build a new survey. The official data from the province is patchy—they run a satellite pass every two weeks, but by the time it's processed, the blooms have shifted." He tapped a cluster of black stars. "What we need is ground truthing. People on the water, logging what they see, when they see it."

"You want me to report seaweed sightings."

"I want you to know what you're looking at. Most people think the green stuff and the brown stuff are the same. It matters."

Camille opened her mouth to refuse—politely, she'd give him that—when something on the wall caught her eye. A corkboard, buried under tide tables and old manifests, with a photo pinned near the center. Black and white, faded at the edges. Two figures in wetsuits standing on the deck of a small boat, holding what looked like a net of something gelatinous between them. The man was lean, dark-haired, grinning at the camera with the kind of unhidden joy Camille had only seen in old photos of him. Her father.

The woman next to him wore her wetsuit unzipped to the waist, a tangle of gray-streaked hair pulled back from a wide, sun-creased face. She was laughing mid-turn, as if someone had caught her in the middle of a joke. There was something familiar in the shape of her jaw, the set of her shoulders. Something that made Camille's stomach drop.

"That photo's from '08," Claudine said, noticing her look. "The big bloom year. Half the bay turned into a stinking green soup. Your dad helped us monitor the south cove for weeks."

"My dad did that?" The words came out smaller than she intended.

"Didn't he tell you?" Claudine's voice was careful now, the way people's voices got when they realized they'd stepped on something soft.

"He didn't talk much about—" Camille gestured vaguely at the water. At all of it. "He didn't talk much."

Yann had gone still, watching her with an expression she couldn't name. "He and Marianne were the first ones out there that spring. Before the tide turned."

Marianne. The name from the letter. Her father's unfinished note to a woman in a wetsuit, laughing mid-turn, holding a net of green sludge. Camille pulled the photo from the board without asking. She turned it over. On the back, in her father's neat, all-caps hand: *M. and me, south cove, first survey of the season.*

"How close were they?" She hated that she asked. Hated that she couldn't stop herself.

"She was just a volunteer from the university," Yann said. "She came every summer for the algae research. Your father helped her get samples from the moorings around the point."

"Just a volunteer." Camille put the photo back, aligning it carefully. "He left a letter for her. Unfinished."

Silence stretched in the concrete room. Claudine busied herself with a jar of green water. Yann didn't look away.

"He started writing it the week he died," Camille heard herself say. "I don't know what it was about."

"Marianne's up near Brest now," Yann offered. "I have her contact details from the old project files."

The implications stacked up. A letter her father never finished. A woman he'd gone out on the bay with, year after year, who Camille had never heard mentioned once in her life. The photo on the wall, displayed like a trophy.

"I should go." Camille was already moving toward the door. "Thanks for the tour. I'm sure you'll find someone to count your seaweed."

"Cammie." Yann's voice stopped her at the threshold. "The blooms are coming faster than the data can track. I could use someone who knows this coast, even if she doesn't want to."

She turned. "I don't know this coast. I haven't been here in fifteen years."

"You remember the currents. I saw you checking the tide tables back at the bar Sunday night. People who don't care don't check."

Camille had no answer for that. She left without saying goodbye.

---

The houseboat sat lower in the water than it had that morning, or maybe that was just her mood. Camille unlocked the cabin door and stood in the hatchway, listening. No thumps. No creaks from the sealed room. Just the lapping of water against the hull and the distant cry of gulls.

But she hadn't come for sounds. She couldn't stop thinking about the photo, her father's hand on the woman's shoulder, the ease between them. All those summers he'd told her he was just "keeping the boat in order." All that time she'd been in Paris, chasing ad awards and pretending she wasn't running from the fact that she'd never really known him.

She knelt on the floor of the main cabin. The planks were rough, worn by decades of feet. She ran her fingers along the seams, looking for what she didn't know until she found it—a plank slightly darker than the others, flush with the boards but not quite level. A hairline gap along its edge where something had been inserted and removed many times over the years.

Camille dug her fingers into the seam. The plank lifted easily, tipping on an invisible hinge. In the hidden space beneath, wrapped in oilcloth tied with twine, was a book.

The leather cover was cracked, the pages yellowed, held shut by a brass clasp that had rusted open. She pulled it out and settled back on her heels. The first page was dated April 2008—the year of the bloom, the year of the photo. Her father's handwriting filled the entries, dated irregularly, some weeks apart, some just days. Notes about tides, water temperature, and clusters of algae she'd never learned the names of.

But then she found it. Between two entries from that first summer, a looser sheet had been tucked in—a hand-drawn map of the coast, sketched in pencil, shading the shallows where green tides gathered. Her father's precise lettering labeled each bloom site. And in the corner, circled twice, a note in his hand:

*Doesn't come from the farms. Comes from somewhere else. Check the outflow at low tide.*

Camille stared at the words. Her father had been tracking something for years, mapping the bay's sickness in a hidden compartment under his floorboards, writing letters to a woman he never sent. And the letter in the drawer, never finished, lying on his desk when the storm took him.

She turned the page. Another date. Another observation. And at the bottom of the page, the same two words, underlined:

*Not the farms.*

The boat rocked gently beneath her. Somewhere outside, a motor cougored to life, heading out toward the point. Camille closed the logbook and held it against her chest, feeling the weight of it. She had meant to sell this boat. She had meant to be gone by the end of the week.

Now she had a map and a question. And the first answer she needed was to a woman she'd never met.