Read Chapter 4: A Debt Unforgiven

The numbers didn’t lie, but Camille stared at them as if they might rearrange themselves into something less damning. Two hundred and twelve thousand euros. The figure sat in the auditor’s neat column like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples through everything she thought she knew about Château Bellevue.

“There has to be an error.” She pushed the ledger back across her father’s desk. “We’ve had bad years before, but nothing like this.”

The auditor, a thin man with wire-rimmed glasses who’d introduced himself as Monsieur Petit, pressed his lips into a sympathetic line. He didn’t look sympathetic. He looked like a man who’d delivered this kind of news before and knew better than to soften it.

“The debt is current, Mademoiselle Delacroix. It spans several creditors, but the bulk of it traces to a single source.” He flipped through his paperwork. “A capital infusion loan taken against the château’s equity approximately nine years ago. The interest has compounded.”

Nine years. Camille’s mind raced backward, sifting through harvests and vintages, trying to place what had happened at Château Bellevue nine years ago. Her mother had still been alive then. Her father had been making plans.

“What was the loan for?” she asked, though she already suspected she wouldn’t like the answer.

Petit consulted his notes. “Agricultural equipment. New fermentation tanks, I believe. The initial disbursement was two hundred thousand francs—“

“Euros,” Henri said from the doorway. He’d been hovering outside, she realized, too ashamed to sit through the presentation of his own failures. “Two hundred thousand euros, Camille. I converted the debt when the currency changed. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

The auditor looked between them, clearly uncomfortable with the family drama unfolding around his spreadsheets. “The loan was to purchase new equipment after the collapse of the old cellar during the fire. Insurance covered only a portion. Your father made the decision to modernize rather than rebuild conservatively.”

The fire. Of course. The same fire that had destroyed the original joint winery and, according to Étienne, had nearly claimed the 1961 bottle now hidden in Camille’s coat pocket. She hadn’t shown it to her father yet. Hadn’t been sure she wanted to.

“The new tanks were meant to increase production capacity,” Henri said quietly. “I thought if we could out-produce the Laroches, we could finally establish dominance. Pull ahead. It was a gamble.”

Camille closed her eyes. “And the gamble failed.”

“The market shifted. Bordeaux prices softened. And then the drought years came, and we couldn’t fill the tanks anyway. The debt kept growing.”

Petit cleared his throat. “I’m afraid that’s not entirely accurate. The equipment was purchased from a supplier in Lyon who went bankrupt two years later. The loan was sold to a secondary lender who has been less... flexible with repayment terms.”

“Who?” Camille asked, though the question was reflexive. It didn’t matter who held the debt, only that it existed.

“A holding company. Multiple layers. But the effective creditor is a private investment group based in Switzerland.”

So not a bank. Not something she could negotiate with directly. Camille felt the walls closing in, the neat order of her world—meticulous records, precise harvests, controlled processes—giving way to chaos.

She thanked Petit, sent him on his way with promises of a follow-up meeting, and turned on her father the moment the door clicked shut.

“You should have told me.”

“I was ashamed.” Henri lowered himself into the chair behind his desk, suddenly looking every year of his age. “You built your reputation on precision, Camille. On running this estate flawlessly. How could I admit that the foundation was rotten?”

“Because it’s my legacy too!” The words came out sharper than she intended, but she didn’t take them back. “I’ve spent the last ten years building Bellevue’s reputation, making alliances, courting critics. And it’s all built on a lie.”

“Not a lie. A debt. There’s a difference.”

“Not to the creditors. Not to the bank.” She picked up the ledger again, flipping to the first page. “Two hundred thousand euros. We’ll lose the harvest sale before it even begins if word of this gets out.”

Henri’s jaw tightened. “Which is why I pushed for the truce with the Laroches. A unified front suggests stability. Suggests we’re not struggling.”

Camille almost laughed. “Étienne Laroche is the last person who will help us hide our failures. He’d love to see Bellevue collapse.”

“He offered to fix our irrigation pump.”

“For reasons of his own. Not out of charity.”

She thought about Étienne’s knowing glances, the way he’d seemed to understand her pump’s failure before she explained it. He had intelligence on Château Bellevue—information he shouldn’t have. If he knew about her father’s debt, the balance of power between them shifted even more dangerously.

“I need to see the bank records,” she said. “Original documents. Loan agreements. Anything that shows where the money actually went.”

Henri nodded slowly. “The bank on Rue de la République. Madame Fournier handles our account. She may have kept copies of the original correspondence.”

Camille was already heading for the door. “Don’t tell anyone about this. Not the staff, not the neighbors. Especially not the Laroches.”

“And the harvest? With the damage from the storm, we need more hands than we have.”

That stopped her cold. “What do you mean?”

“I spoke with Étienne yesterday. He proposed a joint harvest—combining our crews, sharing equipment and processing space. Reduce costs for both operations.”

The word *no* was already forming on her lips when the math intervened. Two hundred thousand euros in debt. Damaged grapes. A workforce she’d had to reduce the previous year. Étienne’s proposal made financial sense, and that was precisely what made it so dangerous.

“You already agreed,” Camille said flatly.

“I agreed to discuss it with you. He’s waiting at the sorting table. Says he has projections to share.”

*Projections.* Étienne always had projections. He’d come to their café meeting with spreadsheets and weather models, ready to negotiate with data instead of emotion. It was infuriating precisely because it was effective.

She left her father in the office and walked to the sorting area, where Étienne stood examining the hail-damaged clusters with the practiced eye of someone who’d seen exactly this kind of devastation before. He didn’t look up when she approached, but she saw his shoulders tense.

“Your father told you about the debt,” he said.

Camille stopped short. “How do you know about that?”

Étienne finally turned to face her. In the harsh afternoon light, she noticed new lines around his eyes—stress, or worry, or something else she couldn’t identify. “Because I read the *Sud-Ouest* economic reports, and I know what happens when an estate takes out loans against projected yields during drought years. I also know that your father’s plan to modernize was the talk of the region when it happened. Everyone assumed Bellevue was about to leap ahead.”

“And you assumed we had.”

“We assumed you’d made a bet, and we'd find out soon enough if it paid off.” He gestured at the damaged vines. “This is what our bet got us. Shared misery.”

Camille wanted to argue, but the truth was too heavy. She stood beside him, looking at the bruised grapes and trying to calculate what they might still salvage. “You proposed a joint harvest.”

“I did.”

“Is this another of your conditional arrangements? What do you want this time?”

Étienne was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was lower, almost gentle. “Nothing. This time, I’m not asking for anything. The storm doesn’t discriminate, Camille. It hit both our properties. If we try to manage separately, we’ll both lose a significant portion of what survived.”

She searched his face for the catch, the hidden agenda. She found nothing but exhaustion.

“Fine,” she said. “A joint harvest. But I’ll pull my weight and expect you to do the same.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

They shook hands, and Camille felt something shift in the air between them—not trust, not yet, but a recognition that they were both fighting the same battle now, on different fronts.

Later that afternoon, she drove to the bank on Rue de la République. Madame Fournier, a gray-haired woman who had known Camille since childhood, greeted her with concern and led her to a private office.

“Your father’s accounts have been complicated for some time,” Fournier admitted. “I’ve done what I could to protect his confidentiality, but the original loan documents are not held here. They were transferred to the secondary lender upon the supplier’s bankruptcy.”

“Can you tell me who transferred them? Who arranged the sale?”

Fournier hesitated, then pulled a thick file from her drawer. “This is what I have. Copies of the transfer agreements, the signatures. Your father’s is there, but there’s a secondary signature as well—someone from the supplier’s side. I don’t recognize the name, but perhaps you will.”

She slid a document across the desk. Camille read it once, then again, the words failing to make sense the second time just as they had the first.

The signature was crisp, unmistakable. Étienne Laroche.