Read Chapter 14: A Separate Peace

The cold slipped under the estate’s ancient stone walls, and Camille pulled her grandmother’s wool shawl tighter as she watched the sky pale over Bellevue’s eastern slope. Frost. The kind that left a silver rime on the young shoots, turning them to glass that shattered at a touch. It was April, too early for this.

She had not slept. Not since her father's voice had thundered across the dining room two nights ago: *You will not see that Laroche boy again. I have made that clear.* And she had nodded, had agreed, had said the words he wanted to hear—*Oui, Papa*—while her phone buzzed in her pocket with Étienne's message: *Dawn. La Maison Blanche. The cellar stairs.*

She had not gone.

Instead, she had walked the rows of her own new graftings, the organic Mourvèdre they had planted together under a false moon, their hands brushing in the soil, pretending it was only about the wine. And now the frost had come for them anyway.

Her phone vibrated. Étienne. She stepped behind the tractor shed, out of sight of the kitchen windows.

"Where were you?" His voice was rough, not with anger but with the same sleepless edge she felt. "I waited two hours."

"The frost. I couldn't—" She looked at the vines, the delicate tips curling in the cold like fingers. "We're going to lose everything. The new blocks, both of them. And if the unsprayed acreage takes damage, my father will blame your equipment, your water, your*contamination*—"

"Camille." He said her name like a hand on her shoulder. "Look at the sky. Look at what's coming."

She looked. The east was a deep bruised blue, but above the valley stretched a band of clearer cold air, the kind that meant killing frost until sunrise. She could hear the irrigation pumps struggling to life across both properties, desperate, insufficient.

"Meet me," he said. "Not at La Maison Blanche. At the old chapel on the ridge. It overlooks both vineyards."

"My father has men watching the gates."

"Then don't use the gates. There's a path behind the third row of the northern parcel. The deer use it. No one else will be awake now."

She should say no. She should stay, pump water, light the smudge pots, fight for her vines and her family's legacy the way she always had. But the frost was not just Bellevue's problem. It was his, too. It was*theirs*, this fragile, secret, illegal thing they had built together.

The path was overgrown, brambles catching her jacket, and by the time she reached the chapel she was shivering. He was already there, a thermos in his hand, his collar turned up against the cold. He did not speak. He simply handed her the cup.

The coffee was strong, bitter, perfect. She drank it standing in the crumbling doorway, watching the two estates fan out below like a patchwork quilt stitched in darkness.

"The frost line is worse on Bellevue's slope," he said quietly. "Your south-facing rows will take the worst of it. Ours are protected by the tree line. If we'd been allowed to use the shared irrigation, the way we planned—"

"One frost is not worth an eighteen-million-euro secret." She said it like a promise, but her voice cracked on the last word.

"Or is it worth eighteen million to watch it burn?" He gestured at the slopes. "This wine we made together. It was good, Camille. It was*right*. And we both know we could have saved it. If we hadn't hidden."

"We had no choice."

"We always have a choice." He looked at her then, and she saw something she had never seen in Étienne Laroche: not arrogance, not rivalry, but a quiet, stubborn grief. "We chose each other. Now we have to choose what that costs."

The sun broke over the ridge, weak and pale, and the frost sparkled on the vines like a billion tiny sockets. Camille watched the light catch the hoarfrost and thought of her mother, the way she had once said, *Your father was not always like this. Neither was Paul. Something broke between them, something older than you.*

"I found something," Camille said. "In the cellar rubble. A torn piece of paper. The same stationery as the anonymous letter."

Étienne turned to her sharply. "You hid it."

"I hid it." She looked down at her hands. "It matches the paper my father uses. The private stock, in his study."

He was silent for a long moment. "Your father wrote the letter pointing us toward the cellar stairs. Toward Claire's secret. Toward Antoine Moreau."

"And if he did? If he wrote it, it means he *wanted* us to find it. But he couldn't say it aloud. He can't admit—" She stopped. The word was too large for the space between them.

"He can't admit he helped drive a man out of his life. Or that he helped ruin yours." Étienne's voice was gentle. "And you can't admit your family might not be the victim."

"It doesn't change what we do."

"No. But it changes what we're afraid of." He pushed off the wall and stood close, the frost clinging to his hair like candlelight. "I'm afraid every day. I'm afraid of my father, of the board, of what happens if they find out we've been digging in the dark. But I'm not afraid of you. Not anymore. And I think we both have to decide if we're going to live in fear of everyone else, or if we're going to live in truth with each other."

The chapel was small, drafty, older than both their families. Somewhere beneath the floor, generations of their ancestors had fought and married and buried their dead, and now here they stood, two descendants of a war neither understood, watching the frost kill what they had dared to create together.

"I can't lose the new vines," she whispered. "They're all I have left of the dream."

"Then let me save them with you." His voice was barely audible. "The frost won't break before noon. We have hours. I can reroute the irrigation pump from the north parcel. It's off the grid, no meters, no records. If we act now, we can save the graftings on both slopes. No one has to know until the wine is bottled."

"You'd risk that for me?"

"I'd risk everything for you." He stepped closer, and she read the frost on his eyelashes like the first coat of varnish on a painted canvas. "I've spent my entire life hating your name. And then I watched you plant grapevines with your bare hands to save my family's land. I don't know how to hate you anymore."

The cold was in her lungs, but the heat was rising elsewhere, in her chest, in her throat. The space between them closed like a fermentation lock, inevitable, silent, and then his lips were on hers, and the frost outside could have swallowed the world whole.

The kiss was not gentle. It was morning-starved and desperate, the taste of coffee and cold air and a decade of enmity dissolving into something softer, something with roots. He pulled back just enough to touch his forehead to hers, breathing hard.

"We're going to lose this harvest," he murmured. "If we stay hidden. If we don't tell them."

"We can't tell them."

"Then we hide it." She looked at him. "But we do it together. From now on, no more secrets. No more hiding paper fragments. You and me, Camille, until we find out what really happened in 1961."

The sun rose higher, and the frost held its grip on the valley. But beneath her ribs, something else was blooming—immature, fragile, and utterly illegal.

"We should start the pumps," she said.

He took her hand. "Together."

They slipped back into the cold, down the deer path, toward the frozen vines that might yet live. Behind them, the chapel walls held the warmth of their breath like a secret pressed into stone.