Read Chapter 10: A Missing Bottle

The morning light slanted through the office blinds, catching the empty space on the shelf where the 1961 Bellevue should have been. Camille stood frozen, coffee cup halfway to her lips, staring at the faint ring of dust that marked the bottle's absence like a ghost.

She set the cup down slowly. Her hand moved to the shelf, fingertips brushing the bare wood as if the bottle might materialize at her touch. The 1961. The bottle that could save her—or destroy her—depending on who held it now.

She checked the drawers. The cabinet. The floor. She pulled the ledger from its hiding spot behind the loose baseboard, relieved to find it still there. But the bottle was gone, and only two people had known she'd brought it to the office. One was the lab tech who'd confirmed its provenance. The other was Étienne.

No. She shook the thought away before it could root. Étienne had been with her when she'd placed it on the shelf. He'd been the one to suggest she keep it somewhere less obvious. He had nothing to gain from theft, not when their fates were already twisted together like the vines on the boundary line.

The phone on her desk buzzed. A voicemail from a Bordeaux wine broker she'd spoken with months ago, before everything had unraveled.

"Camille, I've had an inquiry about the 1961 Bellevue. There's a collector in Singapore willing to pay handsomely for a confirmed bottle. Very handsomely. I'm talking the kind of money that would turn your entire season around. Call me back before he changes his mind."

The irony was a gut punch. The bottle that could have saved them was gone, and somewhere out there, a collector was about to pay a fortune for a bottle that Bellevue no longer possessed.

She was still standing there, anger curdling into something colder, when her assistant knocked.

"A letter for you," the young woman said, holding out a cream envelope with no return address. "Someone left it at the gate this morning. No postmark."

Camille took it, turning it over. The paper was thick, expensive. The kind used for formal correspondence, decades ago. She slid her finger under the seal and pulled out a single sheet of handwriting, elegant and faded, as if written long ago and kept in a drawer ever since.

*If you are reading this, you have begun to ask the right questions. The answers are not in your cellars or your ledgers. They live in a man who disappeared with the truth in his pocket. Antoine Moreau did not run. He was pushed, and the person who pushed him still walks the rows of Laroche with a smile and a shovel. Ask Claire about the cellar stairs. Ask her what she buried beneath them.*

No signature. No date. No clue who had delivered it, or why now.

Camille read it three times, the name *Antoine Moreau* burning into her mind. The missing cellarmaster. The man Madame Perrin had described as close to Claire Laroche, too close for propriety. The man who had vanished after the 1985 fire without a trace in any public record.

She folded the letter and slid it into her pocket, heart hammering against her ribs. Someone was watching. Someone knew what she and Étienne were uncovering.

The afternoon crawled by. Camille went through the motions—checking fermentation temperatures, approving a label proof, firing off emails to distributors—but her mind kept circling back to the empty shelf and the letter burning a hole in her pocket. Twice she picked up her phone to call Étienne, and twice she set it down. The bottle, the letter, the ledger, the hidden pipe. Each piece fit into a puzzle she still couldn't see the edges of.

By nightfall, she'd convinced herself the letter was either a trap or a gift, and she couldn't tell which. She poured a glass of the current vintage, a young wine with potential and no depth, and sat in the dark of her father's office, watching the shadows stretch across the desk where he'd once signed away whatever secrets had been worth hiding.

Her phone buzzed at 11:47.

Étienne's name lit up the screen. She answered without thinking.

"Camille." His voice was rough, urgent, stripped of the easy charm he wore like armor. "I need you to listen."

"What's wrong?"

"I found something. In the cellar, behind the old rack where my father used to keep the reserve stock." A pause, and she heard him exhale, the sound ragged. "A bottle. One of yours. A 1961 Bellevue."

"Impossible." The words came out before she could stop them. "That bottle was in my office this morning, and now it's gone. Someone stole it."

"The bottle I found has been here for years, Camille. It's covered in dust, and the label is faded, but I'd recognize it anywhere. My father must have hidden it. There's a note wrapped around the neck."

She gripped the phone tighter. "What does it say?"

Another pause. Longer this time. She heard the rustle of paper.

"It says, 'When this bottle surfaces, find the brother.' That's all. Just those words."

"The brother." The phrase echoed in her head, branching into a hundred different questions. "Whose brother? Your father's? Mine?"

"I don't know. But listen—there's something else. The handwriting. I've seen it before. My mother kept letters in a box, old ones from someone she never talked about. I went and looked after I found the bottle." His voice dropped lower, barely a whisper. "The note matches her handwriting."

Camille's mind raced. Étienne's mother. Claire Laroche. A bottle of Bellevue's legendary 1961 hidden in the Laroche cellar for decades, with a note written by Claire herself. A note that mentioned a *missing brother*.

"Camille." Étienne's voice cut through her spiraling thoughts. "Whatever our families have told us, whatever they want us to believe, it's not the full story. This bottle, your father's ledger, the fire, the pipe—it's all connected. And I think Antoine Moreau was in the middle of all of it."

"What do we do?"

"Meet me tomorrow. The bar in Libourne, the one near the old train station. Noon. Bring the letter you got today. I'll bring the bottle and the note. We're going to figure this out together, whatever it costs."

She hesitated, the old instinct to guard herself rising like a vine choking fresh growth. But the empty shelf, the letter, the note—they all pointed to something bigger than pride, bigger than the feud that had defined her life.

"Okay," she said. "Noon. I'll be there."

The call ended. Camille sat in the dark, the silence of the château pressing in around her, and for the first time in months, she felt something sharper than fear. She felt the thrill of a truth about to break open.

She checked the office door was locked, then slid the letter into the ledger, tucking both into her bag. Tomorrow, she would find out what her father had buried. Tomorrow, she would learn what Claire Laroche had written into the label of a stolen bottle.

Tomorrow, they would dig up the graves of 1985.