Read Chapter 6: The Festival

The pardon festival had transformed the quay into a ribbon of white and gold. Breton flags snapped in the sea breeze above stalls selling crêpes and cider, while a brass band butchered a folk hymn near the church steps. Camille had come for the spectacle—something mindless, something that didn't involve algae maps or unfinished letters or the weight of her father's secrets pressing against her ribs.

She bought a glass of kir and let herself drift through the crowd, past women in lace coiffes and children chasing each other between the legs of tourists. For a moment, she was twelve again, her mother tugging her by the hand toward the procession, her father already disappeared somewhere near the water.

"Camille Le Goff?"

The voice came from her left. An older woman in a navy blue dress, her grey hair pinned back with a tortoiseshell comb. It took Camille a half-second too long to place her. Soizic Berthou. Her mother's oldest friend in Saint-Briac, the one who had knitted Camille a blanket for every birthday until she'd turned eighteen and stopped coming home for summers.

"Soizic." Camille leaned in for the double cheek kiss, inhaling lavender soap and something faintly medicinal. "You look wonderful."

Soizic's eyes crinkled, but there was a sharpness there, an appraisal that made Camille feel like a schoolgirl caught skipping class. "I heard you were back. Marvellous boots, by the way. Very Parisian." She tilted her head toward the harbor, where the masts of fishing boats swayed like bare trees. "Your father's boat. I saw you out there this morning."

Camille nodded, uncertain where this was going. "I'm just sorting through things. Getting ready to sell."

Soizic made a small sound—not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. "Your mother would have hated that."

"She would have hated a lot of things about dad," Camille said, surprising herself with the edge in her voice. "She didn't even tell me when he died."

Soizic was quiet for a long moment. Then she took Camille's elbow and steered her gently toward an empty bench near the tide pools, away from the swell of the crowd. Her grip was firmer than it looked.

"You want to know something about your father that your mother never told you?" Soizic sat down, arranging her skirt with deliberate care. "He was looking for something. Before he died, I mean. Not fish. Not seaweed. Something he called a secret."

Camille felt the words settle like stones in her stomach. "A secret about what?"

"The coast. The bay. He never told me the specifics, only that he'd found something strange in his logs, something that didn't match what the companies were saying." Soizic's eyes flicked toward the harbor, toward the distant shape of the research station. "He got obsessed with it. Especially in the last year. Asked me to lend him money, once."

"Loans," Camille said slowly. "He needed money?"

"Not for the boat. For fuel, he said. He kept taking it out, going further than he should have." Soizic's hand found Camille's and squeezed. "He was in debt to the De Launay Maritime company. Did you know that?"

Camille felt the kir turn sour in her mouth. De Launay Maritime was the region's largest fisheries operation—a sleek corporate headquarters on the other side of the bay, all glass and chrome, and family money that went back generations. She'd seen their trucks in Saint-Briac since she was a child. Her father had always called them "the bosses of the bay," and never kindly.

"How do you know about the debt?"

Soizic's mouth tightened. "Their office called here, asking about him. After he died. Asking about what he owed." She released Camille's hand and smoothed her skirt again. "Your father was a proud man, Camille. He wouldn't have asked just anyone. But he was afraid."

"Of what?"

"Of what he found," Soizic said simply. "Whatever it was, it made him stop talking about it to me. And your father never stopped talking."

The brass band struck up a new hymn, and the crowd around them swelled, blocking the view of the water. Camille's mind raced—the logbook, the map, the circled note about the outflow at Trézien. Her father had found something. He'd gone into debt chasing it, and he'd been afraid.

And someone had been standing on his boat, two days before his death.

She opened her mouth to ask Soizic more, but a distant hum drowned her out. A small drone buzzed overhead, its rotors loud against the festival music. Camille squinted up at it, watching it arc across the bay with unnerving precision.

"Since when do they fly drones at the pardon?" she asked.

Soizic followed her gaze, her expression souring. "De Launay bought a fleet of them last spring. Survey drones, they say. For water quality." She watched it bank toward the open ocean. "Funny thing is, they only ever fly them when the research station's boats are out. Not sure what they're surveying."

Camille watched the drone shrink to a speck against the pale afternoon sky, its path curving northwest, past the island of Île Vierge. Something about that trajectory felt deliberate. Targeted.

"Thank you, Soizic." She stood abruptly, leaving a half-empty glass of kir on the bench. "I should—I have to go."

"Camille." Soizic caught her wrist, gentle this time. "Your father loved you. Whatever he found, whatever happened—he always said you were the one who understood the sea."

Camille's throat tightened. "He never told me anything."

"He was protecting you," Soizic said. "Some people think silence is kindness."

Camille didn't answer. She pulled her arm free and walked, her boots sinking slightly into the grass between the cobblestones. She needed light. Space. A clear view of the bay.

She rounded the chapel and cut down a narrow lane toward the cliffs, leaving the festival noise behind her. The wind picked up, salt and seaweed and the low groan of gulls. At the cliff's edge, she stopped, scanning the water.

The drone was gone. But something else caught her eye.

A fisheries vessel—grey hull, De Launay Maritime logo on the stern—was anchored near the far side of Île Vierge, close to a rocky outcrop protected from the open water. Even from this distance, Camille could see the tilt of its stern, the faint sheen spreading across the surface. Not water clarity. Something thicker.

She pulled out her phone, zooming in as far as it would go. The sheen glistened, catching the afternoon light in ribbons of purple and green. Waste. The kind that never showed up in official reports because no one was ever looking at the island side of things.

The drone wasn't surveying water quality. It was watching for witnesses.

Camille lowered her phone, heart hammering. She watched the vessel sit there, four hundred meters out, while the sheen drifted slowly toward the open sea. Toward the research station's sampling sites. Toward the survey that Yann had invited her to join.

Her father's logbook hadn't claimed the algae came from the farms. It had claimed it came from somewhere else.

She had just found somewhere else.

The vessel's engines cougued to life. It swung around, picking up speed, heading back toward the De Launay headquarters on the far side of the bay. By the time Camille thought to photograph its registration number, it was already a grey smudge against the horizon.

She stood on the cliff for a long time, the wind pulling at her hair. Then she turned away from the bay and walked back toward the houseboat, her phone clutched so tightly her knuckles had gone white.

Yann was at the research station. The survey boat was still stranded at Trézien until dusk.

But she knew what she had to do.