Read Chapter 17: Festival of Lies

The festival square blazed with striped awnings and the smell of roasting duck, but Camille barely registered any of it. Her eyes moved constantly—checking the crowd for her father’s grey coat, scanning for Étienne’s tall silhouette near the wine tents.

She found him at a stall selling ancient corkscrews, pretending to examine a brass handled one. His jaw was tight beneath a forced smile.

“Anything?” she murmured, stepping close enough that the vendor couldn’t hear.

“Old Monsieur Roux over there remembers a Moreau.” Étienne tilted his head toward a bench where a stooped man in a beret sat nursing a glass of red. “But he clammed up when I mentioned the name. Said he had nothing to say about secrets that were best buried.”

Camille’s stomach tightened. “Buried. That’s exactly what this feels like.”

“Let’s try the women’s auxiliary tent. They’ve lived here their whole lives. They talk more than the men.”

They wandered past a display of local honey and jars of confit, weaving through clusters of tourists who had no idea they were standing in the middle of a sixty-year-old war zone. A group of children ran past waving paper flags, and for a moment Camille let herself imagine a different life—one where she and Étienne could walk through the crowd holding hands, announced, unashamed.

The auxiliary tent was shaded by climbing roses, and inside, three elderly women sat at a table folding napkins into swan shapes. Their hands were spotted and quick, their eyes sharper than the scissors beside them.

Étienne flashed his most charming smile. “Ladies. Might we borrow a moment of your time?”

The eldest woman—a wisp of a thing with silver hair pinned like a crown—squinted at him. “You’re the Laroche boy. I’d recognize that chin anywhere.”

“Yes, ma’am. And this is Camille Delacroix.”

The women exchanged glances. Camille braced herself for hostile recognition, but instead the crown-haired woman’s expression softened.

“You have your grandmother’s eyes,” she said. “Isabelle. We used to do the flower arrangements together at Saint-Jean.”

Camille’s breath caught. “You knew my grandmother?”

“Everyone knew Isabelle. Goodness, the way she could coax a vineyard back from the brink…” The woman set down her napkin and studied Camille with newfound interest. “What are you two asking about? Because it’s not the weather.”

Étienne leaned in, lowering his voice. “We’re looking for information about a man named Antoine Moreau. He worked at both our families’ wineries. Around 1961.”

The silence that fell over the tent was sudden and absolute. The second woman—round-faced, with bifocals perched on her nose—dropped her swan mid-fold.

Crown-hair recovered first. “Antoine.” She said the name like it was a bruise she’d forgotten to tend. “Now there’s a name that hasn’t been spoken aloud in this square for a long, long time.”

“Do you remember him?” Camille asked, her heart hammering.

“I remember his hands,” the round-faced woman said quietly. “He could graft a vine faster than any man I ever saw. And he was handsome—” She caught herself, cheeks flushing pink. “But that was a long time ago.”

“There was trouble,” crown-hair said, folding her own napkin with deliberate care. “You have to understand, this village was smaller then. Everyone knew everyone’s business. And Antoine was in the middle of a storm that was never really his.”

“What kind of storm?” Étienne pressed.

The women looked at each other. Then crown-hair set down her napkin entirely and motioned for them to sit. Camille and Étienne perched on the folding chairs opposite her as if summoned to judgment.

“It was love,” crown-hair said. “Plain and simple. Antoine was sweet on one of the girls from the big houses. And the fathers—your great-grandfathers, or maybe your grandfathers, I don’t remember which—they wouldn’t have it. Not on their land. Not with their family name.”

Camille’s blood went cold. “Which girl?”

Crown-hair shook her head slowly. “That, I never knew for certain. It was whispered, but never confirmed. Isabelle and Marguerite were always together in those days—thick as thieves, those two. And Antoine was close with both of them. We always suspected he was in love with one, and the other… well.” She spread her hands, a gesture of infinite ambiguity.

“The other what?” Étienne asked, his voice tight.

The third woman, who had been silent until now, finally spoke. Her voice was cracked and low. “The other one loved him back. And the men who ran the two houses couldn’t bear that a common laborer might take one of their women. So they drove him out. And they drove a wedge between the families that’s never healed.”

Camille’s mind raced. That’s it. That’s the broken promise from the journal. Not a business deal gone wrong. A man who got in the way.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

The third woman shrugged one thin shoulder. “He left. Just packed up and vanished one autumn. Some said he went to Paris. Others said he went to California, where they were starting new vineyards and needed experienced hands. But he never wrote back. Not one letter.”

“And the girl?” Étienne’s voice was barely a whisper. “What happened to her?”

Crown-hair pressed her lips into a thin line. “She married someone else. The family saw to that.”

Camille couldn’t breathe. The woman—Isabelle or Marguerite—had married into one of the houses. That meant Antoine’s lost love had become either her grandmother or Étienne’s. She was direct lineage from a secret that had shaped everything.

“Thank you,” she managed, standing on unsteady legs. “You’ve been very kind.”

They stepped out of the tent into the bright afternoon sun, and the contrast was jarring. Laughter. Music. The clink of glasses. The world continued as though the ground beneath them hadn’t just cracked open.

“We need to find him,” Étienne said, his voice low and urgent. “If Antoine is still alive, he’s the only one who can tell us what really happened.”

“He’s not in his apartment,” Camille reminded him. “The trail goes cold.”

“Not necessarily.” Étienne pulled out his wallet and produced a business card. “There’s a vendor here who restores old documents. I asked him if he’d ever come across anything with Moreau’s name on it. He said he had something and pointed me to a stall near the church.”

They crossed the square, weaving through a knot of tourists photographing a stone fountain. At the stall, a man with ink-stained fingers was flattening a sheet of yellowed paper beneath a sheet of glass.

“Monsieur Laroche.” He nodded. “You came back.”

“You said you had something?”

The vendor lifted the glass and carefully slid out the paper. It was a shipping label—worn, the ink faded to a faint brown—with the name A. Moreau scrawled across the top. Below it, an address had been partially smeared by what looked like old water damage.

“I found this in a box of correspondence I purchased at an estate sale outside Saint-Émilion last year,” the vendor said. “I couldn’t make sense of it at the time, but when you mentioned the name, I remembered it.”

Étienne studied the address with narrowed eyes. “Most of it is too blurred to read. But I can make out a street name. Rue des Vignes.” He looked up. “That’s in the old quarter of Bordeaux.”

Camille’s heart lurched. “Did you know that’s also where Vanderhoeven has temporary offices?”

The vendor’s eyebrows rose. “The Belgian investor? Interesting. He came by earlier today asking about old property records. Seemed particularly interested in plots that used to belong to small independent vineyards.”

Étienne’s jaw tightened. “What did you tell him?”

“Not much. I’m a document restorer, not a historian. But I directed him to the municipal archive.” The vendor shrugged. “He thanked me and left. Said he was looking for a missing piece of a larger puzzle.”

Camille exchanged a look with Étienne. Vanderhoeven wasn’t just circling their properties. He was closing in on the same secret they were hunting. And the third parcel of land the map in the journal had hinted at—the old forgotten boundaries that fractured both estates—might be the very key that unlocked everything.

She looked back at the vendor. “Do you sell old maps?”

He smiled for the first time. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

Ten minutes later, walking away with a rolled map tucked under her arm that showed property lines from 1961, Camille pushed open the wooden door of the story and stepped into the uncertainty of the square. She caught Étienne’s eye, and they both knew what they had to do next.

Find the Rue des Vignes.

Before Vanderhoeven did.