Read Chapter 33: The Photo

The morning light came through the cottage windows, pale and watery after the storm. Camille sat at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee gone cold between her hands, watching Yann sleep on the sofa. He had not woken in the night, not once, though she had checked on him every hour, her fingers finding his pulse in the dark, reassuring herself that he was still there.

The storm had passed. The sea outside was flat and gray, as if it had never raged at all.

Yann stirred, groaned, and sat up slowly. His hand went to his ribs, where the bruises were already blooming, purple and black beneath the edge of his t-shirt. He looked at her, and the memory of the night before moved across his face—the boat, the water, her hand closing around his arm in the dark.

“You saved my life,” he said. His voice was rough.

“You almost died.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I was going to lose the houseboat, and I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That I could get something back. Some part of it.”

Camille set the mug down. “You told me you always dreamed of owning it.”

“I did. It was my place. When things were bad at home, I’d row out there and just sit. The old man—your father—he never chased me off. He’d make me tea, or we’d just sit in silence and watch the tide. It was the only place I ever felt safe.” He looked down at his hands. “You don’t let go of that easily.”

She wanted to be angry at him still. She had rehearsed the anger all night, feeding it with the image of the journalist’s smug face and the word *married* hanging in the air between them. But sitting across from him now, his hair still wet from the sea, his bruises fresh, the anger would not come.

“You told me she was gone. Marie.”

“She is gone. She left me.” He moved to the edge of the sofa, wincing as he leaned forward. “Eight months ago, she came home from a work trip and told me she’d been seeing someone in Brest for a year. Her colleague. She had already moved most of her things out while I was at sea. I came home and the flat was half empty, and she was standing there holding a suitcase, telling me it was over.”

The words hung between them. Camille watched his face—the flattening of his mouth, the way he did not quite meet her eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I was ashamed.” He said it simply, without drama. “A man whose wife leaves him for another man. You want to know the stupidest part? Everyone in town thought the opposite. They thought I was the one who’d done something wrong—that I was too married to my work, too distant. And maybe they were right. I was gone a lot. I was focused on the bay, on the project, on anything that wasn’t my marriage. I told myself she understood. But she wanted a life, and I wanted a bay.”

Camille stood and walked to the window. The islet was visible in the distance, a dark smudge against the silver water.

“Then why didn’t you tell me the paperwork was done?” she said. “Why let me think you were still married?”

“Because I didn’t want you to think I was broken,” he said. “I didn’t want to be the man whose wife left him. I wanted to be the man who brought you back.”

She turned. “Back?”

“To the bay. To yourself.” He met her eyes then. “You came here with all your Paris armor on, and I watched you shed it, piece by piece. The houseboat. The project. The town. You were becoming yourself again. I didn’t want to remind you that I was still stuck in my own wreckage.”

Camille sat down across from him again, slowly. The confession sat between them like a stone.

“I lied to myself too,” she said. “I told myself I was burned out. That Paris was the problem. That if I could just sell the boat and get back to my life, everything would be fine.” She laughed, a short, hollow sound. “But I didn’t have a life to get back to. My flat was empty. My friendships were work lunches. I was drowning in an agency job I didn’t even want, and I convinced myself it was a career.”

“It’s hard to see yourself clearly when you’re in the middle of it,” Yann said.

“And easier to blame the weather. The sea. A dead father’s houseboat.” She shook her head. “I told myself my whole crisis was about the boat. But I think I was looking for a reason to leave. To feel something real.”

The silence stretched between them, but it was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people who had stopped performing.

“I filed the papers a month ago,” Yann said quietly. “It’s done. It will be final by the end of the month. Marie signed everything. She wanted a clean break. I told you she was gone because I thought that was the honest part. She is gone. The marriage is just paper that’s taking too long to burn.”

“You should have told me.”

“I should have. I was ashamed, and I didn’t want to lose you before I had you.” He looked at his hands. “I’m not asking you to forgive me right now. I’m asking you to read these.”

He reached into his jacket, crumpled on the floor beside the sofa, and pulled out a folded set of documents. He handed them to her. She opened them—the divorce petition, dated four weeks prior, stamped by the court in Brest. Marie’s signature on the final page. The grounds listed as irreconcilable differences.

“I kept them,” he said. “I was going to show you the morning after the picnic. And then everything—the arrest, the box, the journalist—it all got in the way.”

Camille read the papers slowly. The date. The signatures. The cold bureaucratic language of a marriage ending.

She thought of all the nights she had spent in Paris, staring at her phone as another message came in from Étienne, another empty invitation to dinner, another performance of a relationship that had never been real. She had ended it in the same way—a conversation over dinner, an agreement to part. She had told everyone, *I’m fine*. She had told herself the same lie, so many times that she had started to believe it.

“I think we’ve both been telling ourselves stories to survive,” she said. She set the papers down on the table between them. “And I think I’ve been telling mine for so long I forgot which parts were true.”

Yann leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “What parts do you know are true?”

She looked at him.

“I don’t want to go back to Paris,” she said. “I have a job offer in my inbox. They’re offering me three times what I was making before. A bigger title. A bigger team. Everything I thought I wanted.”

“And?”

“And I keep opening it. I keep reading it. And I keep closing it without answering.” She looked down at the table. “I don’t know where I belong anymore. I thought I knew. I spent my whole life knowing—Beirut, then Paris, then more cities, always running toward the next thing. But I don’t feel like I’m running anymore. And I don’t know what that means.”

Yann reached across the table, his fingers brushing hers.

“You don’t have to know right now,” he said. “The bay isn’t going anywhere. And I’m not going anywhere.”

Her phone buzzed on the table. She looked at the screen.

It was a message from Thomas:

*They found something at the wreck. You need to see it. Bring Yann. Now.*

The tide was going out. The sea, so calm from the cottage window, had given back what the storm had taken.