Read Chapter 28: A Lie Unraveled

The summons arrived at eight in the morning, when the Loire sunlight was still thin and grey through the hotel curtains. Elodie was bent over Marguerite's treatise, a pen in one hand, red wine from the night before still drying in the glass at her elbow. James was asleep in the armchair, his glasses crooked on his face.

Her phone vibrated. An email from Professor Wainwright, the deputy dean of medieval studies at Oxford.

*Dr. Marchand, Dr. Ashworth—an inquiry has been opened regarding the provenance of materials recently discussed in your correspondence. Please make yourselves available for a faculty call at 10:00 AM GMT. The matter concerns a complaint filed by Dr. Aldous Finch.*

Elodie read it twice, then a third time, her heart doing something slow and cold in her chest.

"James." She said his name quietly, then louder. "James."

He woke with a start, blinked at her, and was immediately alert. "What is it?"

She handed him the phone. He read, his jaw tightening. When he looked up, his eyes were hard. "A complaint. He filed a complaint."

"About what? We haven't filed anything. We haven't even told the faculty we found anything."

"I know." He stood, rubbing his face. "But Finch knows we were in the archives in Paris. And he knows about the train. If he's spun a story—"

"About what?"

James was already pulling his laptop from his bag. "Let me check my inbox. He's been copying people on odd things for months. Small accusations. Nothing that ever stuck." He typed quickly, then cursed. "There. He sent a letter to the dean's office yesterday. Subject: *Unauthorized Removal of Manuscript Material, Sorbonne Archives.* He's claiming we took pages from a manuscript during our last visit to Paris."

"We didn't take anything from the Sorbonne."

"I know that. You know that. But he's named us, and the dean has to respond to a formal complaint. There's going to be a call, and they'll want to know where we are, what we're doing, and why we're in France together."

Elodie stood, wrapping her arms around herself. The morning light felt harsher now. "We need to tell them about Marguerite's treatise. It's proof of everything we've done. It changes the fellowship entirely."

"And we will. But if we bring it up now, on the back of Finch's accusation, it looks like a distraction. They'll want to verify it. Days, weeks. In the meantime, the fellowship committee meets in five days."

"Then what do we do?"

James was already scrolling through old emails. "He didn't just make this up. He had to have planted something. A trail. Something that makes us look guilty." He stopped. "Wait. Look at this."

He turned the laptop toward her. An email from Finch to a dealer in Lyon, dated three weeks earlier. The subject line read: *Request: Vexed Folio leaves, early copies, provenance unverified.*

The body was short, almost curt. *I have reason to believe the Marchand reading is fabricated. If the material does not exist, I need a document that supports a counter-narrative. A letter. Marguerite de Vernay, last decade of her life, referencing doubt in her own work. I will pay your rate. Delivery within a fortnight.*

Elodie read it once, then again. She felt the breath leave her.

"He tried to forge it," she said slowly. "He tried to have a manuscript *forged* to discredit my reading."

"Yes." James's voice was tight. "But that's his plan, not his execution. The question is whether he actually got anything. Did the dealer deliver?"

"He emailed a dealer. That's planning, not proof of intent to defraud the university. We need the delivery—or his attempt to get one."

She looked at the timestamp. "Three weeks ago. That's a week before he opened the complaint about Rosenwald's damaged pages."

"Which means he started building this case before we even left Oxford. He was planning this." James ran a hand through his hair, a gesture she was beginning to recognize—agitation born of calculation. "We have to go to the dean's call prepared. With this email. With the transcript of the letter. But we have to do it right."

The call was at ten. They had ninety minutes.

---

They found a quiet café with corner tables and WiFi that actually worked. Elodie ordered coffee she didn't drink. James kept his hands on the keyboard, refreshing the thread as messages came in. The inquiry would have three faculty members on it: Wainwright, a paleographer named Chen, and the head of the fellowship committee, a man named Hartley who had voted against Elodie's candidacy twice.

"Chen is fair," James said, as if reading her thoughts. "Hartley is the problem."

"How do you know Chen?"

"I've published with her. She's rigorous. She'll want to see the material before she believes anyone." He paused. "The trick is to make her want to see our material, not Finch's."

"By presenting the treatise."

"By presenting a *suggestion* of the treatise. Enough to make them curious, not enough to hand over before we have finals." He looked at her. "We also need to deal with the question of why we're together, in the Loire, at a hotel."

Elodie felt heat rise to her cheeks. "We'll say it was joint scholarship."

"Joint scholarship," James repeated, a faint smile crossing his face. "Technically true."

The call connected at 9:58. Wainwright's face appeared first, then Chen's, serious and attentive. Hartley's camera remained off, but his voice came through thin and clipped.

"Dr. Marchand. Dr. Ashworth. Thank you for joining. I trust you've read Dr. Finch's complaint."

"We have," James said. "And we'd like to respond directly."

"Directly is preferred," Wainwright said. "Before we discuss, we'd like to know: are you both currently in France?"

"Yes," Elodie said. "We are. We came to consult on a manuscript—"

"What manuscript?" Hartley cut in.

Elodie took a breath. "An unpublished theological treatise by a woman identified as Marguerite de Vernay, a fifteenth-century devotional writer. We believe it bears directly on the Vexed Folio."

There was silence on the line. James's foot was bouncing under the table.

"Finch's complaint alleges you removed pages from a Sorbonne manuscript during a recent visit," Chen said carefully. "Can you account for your movements during that period?"

"Easily," James said. "We were together for most of it, under the supervision of the archive's head archivist, Claire Beaumont. She can verify our movements. We never left with anything but our own notes."

"We can provide her contact," Elodie added. "But we'd also like to present evidence that the complaint itself is unfounded—and premeditated."

Hartley's voice sharpened. "Premeditated how?"

James brought up the email, screen-shared it. The thread went quiet as the three faculty members read.

"Finch contacted a manuscript dealer in Lyon three weeks ago," James said. "Before our trip, before any complaint was filed. He asked for a forged letter, attributed to Marguerite, suggesting doubt in her own scholarship—specifically, doubt about the Vexed Folio material."

"That's—" Chen stopped.

"Accusatory," Hartley said. "That's a serious thing to claim about a colleague."

"It's a serious thing to do," Elodie said, her voice steady. "He attempted to plant evidence that would discredit my reading of the Folio. He tried to manufacture doubt where none existed."

"We have the email," James added. "From Finch's official university account. Timestamp and metadata intact. And we have a witness—the dealer in Lyon—if the committee wishes to confirm his receipt of the request."

The silence stretched. Elodie watched Wainwright's face; it had gone from careful neutrality to something harder.

"We'll need to see all of this," Wainwright said. "Formally. You'll share your documentation with Deputy Chen by the end of the week."

"We will," James said.

"And Dr. Finch will be asked to account for his correspondence," Hartley said, a reluctant admission. "But this matter remains under inquiry. Your position—both of you—remains provisional until the committee decides."

"We understand," Elodie said. "Thank you for your time."

The call ended. The screen went black.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. James closed the laptop, slow, careful. Elodie's hands were trembling slightly, though she didn't know if it was adrenaline or relief.

"He's done," James said quietly. "That email—the committee won't move past it. He tried to buy a forgery to destroy a colleague's career. That's not forgivable."

Elodie looked at him. His anger was quiet, contained, and utterly certain. In that moment, she saw a version of James she hadn't fully seen before: not the rival, not the competitor, but someone who had made a choice—a choice that had cost him the comfortable victory of the fellowship and bound him to a collaboration he hadn't asked for.

She reached across the table and touched his hand.

"Thank you."

He looked at their hands, then at her. "I couldn't let him do that to you."

The words sat strangely in the air. There was a weight to them that the email, the inquiry, the charges—none of it—had carried.

And then her phone buzzed again. A new email. Subject: *Immediate.* From the dean's office.

*Due to the ongoing nature of the inquiry, the fellowship committee has decided to postpone the decision until the end of the month. You will both be expected to submit a joint written defense of the material within ten days.*

A joint written defense. Ten days. Co-authorship forced by committee decree—the very collaboration they had circled around all summer, now mandated by institutional demand. There was no way around it. They would have to write together—really write together, not just alongside each other.

James read the email over her shoulder and said nothing for a long moment.

"Defense against what?" Elodie asked, but she already knew. Finch had not been their only obstacle. There was now a shadow over their work, over the discovery itself, that only their joint testimony could lift.

She looked at James, at the line of his jaw and the steadiness in his eyes. They were no longer two rivals. They were something else. She just didn't yet know what.