Read Chapter 16: The Missing Piece

The municipal archives smelled of dust and cold stone, the kind of cold that seeped through the floorboards and settled into your bones no matter the season. Camille pulled her coat tighter as Étienne slid another leather-bound register across the scarred oak table between them.

"Nineteen sixty-one through sixty-three," he said, dropping his voice to a whisper that carried anyway in the silent room. "Personnel records for the winegrowers' association. If Antoine worked for either estate, he'd have been registered here."

Camille opened the heavy cover, the pages crackling with age. Her fingers moved down columns of faded ink—names, dates, addresses. It felt like digging through sediment, layer by patient layer, hoping for a fossil.

They'd been at it for three hours. The archivist, a woman with spectacles and a suspicious eye who clearly knew both their families on sight, had stationed herself within earshot. Camille and Étienne had come separately, arrived at different times, pretended not to know each other until they'd converged in the back corner under the pretense of separate research. The lie sat uncomfortably against the promise she'd made him at dawn, wrapped in frost and the warmth of his mouth on hers.

*No more secrets.*

Except she was still keeping one. The torn paper fragment, hidden in the false bottom of her jewelry box, its ink matching the anonymous letter's threat. She hadn't told him. Every time she thought about it, the words caught in her throat like a cork jammed too deep.

"Cami." Étienne's hand closed over hers, startling her from the spiral. "Look."

His finger traced a line halfway down the page. *Moreau, Antoine. Cellar hand. Château Bellevue & Château Montclerc, 1958–1961.*

Camille leaned closer, her breath fogging the glass of the display case beside them. "He worked for both?"

"Listed under both. That's unusual—workers usually stayed with one house. But look at the dates." Étienne's voice tightened with barely suppressed excitement. "He left the same year your grandmother's journal stopped."

1961. The year of Isabelle's broken promise. The year the feuding began.

"There's an address notation." Camille traced the faint pencil marks at the margin. "Saint-Émilion, rue des Tanneries. Number seven."

Étienne pulled out his phone, snapping a photograph. "Let's go."

The narrow street in Saint-Émilion twisted between buildings that had stood for four centuries, their limestone facades weathered to a warm honey color. Number seven was a shopfront now, a wine seller with a faded awning advertising the current vintage. The apartment above was dark, its shutters closed tight.

Camille pressed the buzzer. Nothing. She tried again, holding it longer. Dust motes danced in the afternoon light. From the shop below, a woman emerged, wiping her hands on an apron stained purple.

"Looking for someone?"

"Monsieur Moreau?" Étienne asked, and Camille watched the woman's face shutter.

"He's gone. Years ago. I've been here eleven years, and the upstairs has been empty since before I arrived. The owner lives in Paris—inherited it from an uncle, I think." She squinted at them. "The uncle—he died in Nice, I heard. No one here knew him. Kept to himself, apparently."

"Do you know if he had any family? Anyone who might know where he went after he left here?"

The woman shook her head. "You're the second person to ask."

Camille's pulse jumped. "Second? When was the first?"

"A few days ago. A man, older, well-dressed. Belgian accent, I think. Said he was doing genealogy research on the old wine families of the region."

Belgian. Alarm bells rang so loudly in Camille's head she nearly missed Étienne's hand finding her arm, steadying her.

"Thank you," he said smoothly, guiding her away before the woman could ask more questions.

Three streets over, Camille stopped walking. "Vanderhoeven," she said, the name tasting bitter. "He's been here. He's investigating the same thing."

"He's been trying to buy Bellevue for eighteen million euros and you rejected him. He's circling, trying to find leverage."

"Or trying to find something he can use against both our families." Camille's mind raced, connections firing. "What if Antoine isn't just a mystery from the past? What if he's connected to the buyout offer somehow?"

Étienne pulled out his phone again, scrolling through his photographs of the journal pages. "Your grandmother's wedding photo. Look at the handwriting on the back."

Camille knew the image by heart now—Isabelle and her grandfather, stiff and formal beside a cake that could have fed their entire harvest crew. But behind them, half-cropped at the edge of frame, stood the young man from the earlier photograph. Same sharp cheekbones, same intense gaze. The unidentified winemaker.

"He's in three separate photos across twelve years," Étienne said. "Marguerite's albums, your grandmother's journal. He was important to them. That kind of consistency doesn't happen by accident."

"We need someone who remembers him." Camille looked back toward the main square of Saint-Émilion, where vendors were setting up for the afternoon market. "Someone old enough to have been around in the sixties."

The question of how to find such a person answered itself as they rounded the corner. A cluster of municipal workers was hanging banners across the town square, their subject emblazoned in gold lettering against deep burgundy: *Fête du Terroir – Célébration du Patrimoine.*

Of course. The heritage festival.

Étienne followed her gaze. "Your mayor's invitation came through too?"

"Sébastien left three messages on my father's phone. He wants Bellevue and Montclerc both to participate—booths, tastings, a showcase of 'cooperation between rival terroirs.'" She made a face. "The tourism board's words, not mine."

"Your father's answer?"

"He told Sébastien he'd consult with Montclerc's management." Camille paused, raising an eyebrow at Étienne. "Which is strange in itself. They usually can't stand to be in the same room. But when it comes to telling us we can't see each other, they seem to have no trouble coordinating at all."

Étienne's jaw tightened. He'd noticed it too—the way their fathers seemed to know about their meetings, the timing of their separate prohibitions nearly simultaneous. As if they shared an information network neither son nor daughter had access to.

"So what do we say when the mayor comes calling?"

Camille watched a vendor hang strings of dried chilies on a stall frame. "We say yes. We participate. We appear in every photograph, taste every sample, speak to every villager over seventy who's ever held a glass of Bordeaux." She turned to face him. "It's the perfect cover. The whole town will be watching us hold up our families' flags and play nice for the cameras. No one will notice that every question we ask circles around one name."

"Antoine Moreau."

"Antoine Moreau." She felt the shape of the name in her mouth, round as a grape, heavy with possibility. "And when we find out why he left, why our grandmothers fell apart, why this feud started—"

"We'll know why our fathers are so desperate to keep us apart." Étienne reached for her hand, his fingers lacing through hers despite the crowd around them. "People forget things they want hidden. But in a town like this, someone remembers. All we have to do is find them."

A cry went up from the square—the mayor's voice, amplified through a speaker, welcoming festival participants to a briefing in the town hall. Camille watched Sébastien gesture enthusiastically at a cluster of winemakers, his round face flushed with civic pride.

"He wants Bellevue and Montclerc to host a joint tasting," she said, watching the mayor spot her and wave with manic enthusiasm. "A 'bridge across old divides,' he called it in his message."

"Your father will refuse."

"Then we'll be volunteers." Camille smiled as Sébastien made his way toward them, his hand extended before he was even within earshot. "Community-minded citizens, eager to support local heritage. We'll pour each other's wines at each other's booths, laugh at each other's jokes, and ask about the old days until someone tells us something useful."

Étienne's grip on her hand tightened. "And if our fathers show up?"

"Then we smile like everything is fine, and we keep our questions where they can't hear them." She looked at him, a flicker of defiance sparking in her chest. "They built this wall between us. But every wall has gaps, Étienne. We just have to find where it leaks."

Sébastien arrived, breathless, already launching into a speech about tradition and unity and the economic potential of the coming weekend. Camille nodded at the appropriate intervals, her mind elsewhere.

*Belgian investor asking questions in Saint-Émilion for days.*

*An empty apartment on rue des Tanneries.*

*A name carved in a wine cellar wall like a message, or a threat.*

But why Antoine had left, what he'd taken with him, and whether he was still alive—those questions hung over them like the frost on last week's dawn, sharp-edged and dangerous. The old woman at the wine shop had said someone else was asking questions. That meant Vanderhoeven was ahead of them. Or behind them. Or waiting for them to stumble on something he couldn't find himself.

Camille pulled out her phone as Sébastien droned on, and typed a message to Étienne beneath the edge of the tasting table, where no one could see.

*We're not just looking for Antoine anymore. We're racing someone who also wants him. And I have a feeling he'll kill to find him first.*

Étienne's reply came seconds later: *Then we live longer. That's all.*

But as the mayor finally shook their hands and hurried off to greet another winemaker, Camille couldn't shake the feeling that time was running out like sand through an hourglass tipped sideways—not by design, but by desperation. And somewhere out there, hiding in the shadows of a past everyone wanted forgotten, Antoine Moreau held a truth that might break them all.