Read Chapter 7: The Vineyard's Secret

The morning mist clung to the vines like a second skin, and Camille could already feel the heat building beneath it. Harvest day. The kind of day that made or broke a vintage. And here she was, sharing it with a Laroche.

Étienne moved down the row ahead of her, his shears snipping with practiced rhythm. He worked fast, almost too fast, as if he wanted to prove something. Beside him, his mother Claire moved with slower, more deliberate grace, her silver hair pulled back beneath a wide-brimmed hat. She was the only Laroche Camille had ever liked, and even that liking was complicated.

“The cabernet on this slope is coming in beautifully,” Claire said, turning to Camille with a small smile. “Your grandfather planted these rows, didn’t he?”

Camille nodded, surprised by the woman’s knowledge. “The east block, yes. He always said the best fruit faces the sunrise, not the river.”

“He was right.” Claire’s eyes drifted toward the distant treeline, and something shifted in her expression. A shadow. “He and Henri were so alike in that way. Always arguing about the direction of the sun, the slope of the land. Right up until the accident.”

The word hung in the air like a bad note. Camille’s shears paused mid-snip. She felt Étienne stop too, two rows over.

“The accident,” Camille said carefully, turning to face Claire. “You mean the fire.”

Claire’s smile tightened. She plucked a grape from the vine and rolled it between her fingers. “I mean the accident at the château, yes. It was a long time ago. Water under the bridge.”

“My father never talks about it,” Étienne said, stepping closer. His voice was measured, but Camille could hear the edge beneath it. “Whenever I ask, he changes the subject. You’re the same, aren’t you, Maman?”

Claire’s jaw tensed. “Some things are better left buried.”

“Is that what you believe?” Camille asked, surprising herself with the directness of the question. “That burying the past keeps it from hurting anyone?”

Claire looked at her for a long moment. The morning light caught the lines around her eyes, and for the first time Camille saw how tired she looked. Old. “Sometimes, child, digging up the past only gives the dead a chance to hurt you again. Now come. The grapes won’t pick themselves.”

She turned and moved down the row, and neither Camille nor Étienne followed. They stood in the gap between the vines, the silence of the Low Country pressing in around them.

“She knows something,” Étienne said quietly.

Camille nodded, her eyes following Claire’s retreating figure. “They all do.”

---

They broke for lunch at midday, the sun high and merciless. The workers retreated to the shade of the barn, but Camille and Étienne found themselves walking the line where the two properties met—the boundary that had separated their families for a hundred years.

It was Étienne who noticed the ground first.

He stopped, crouched, and pressed his hand flat against the dry earth. “There’s water here.”

Camille frowned. “There shouldn’t be. The soil’s been dry for weeks.”

She knelt beside him and touched the ground. It was damp. More than damp—the earth was soft and yielding, the kind of moisture that shouldn’t exist this far from the irrigation lines. At least, the irrigation lines they knew about.

Étienne pulled out his pocket knife and began to dig. The earth yielded easily, and within moments the blade scraped against something hard. Metal. He worked faster, widening the hole, and then Camille saw it.

A pipe. Old, corroded iron, running diagonally beneath the boundary line.

“That’s not on any of our maps,” she said.

“Ours either.” Étienne’s face was unreadable as he traced the pipe with his fingers. “It runs from your property toward ours. Or maybe the other way. I can’t tell the direction from this angle.”

Camille’s mind raced. A shared irrigation system. That meant their families had cooperated once, long ago, on a level neither side had ever mentioned. She thought of the ledger in her father’s office, the payment for oak delivered to Laroche before the fire. The pieces didn’t fit together—not yet—but they were there, scattered on the table.

“How old do you think it is?” she asked.

Étienne examined the joints, the rust pattern. “Fifty years, maybe more. It’s been here a while. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure it stayed hidden.”

“Or someone just forgot about it.”

“No.” He shook his head. “This was deliberate. Look at the way it curves—it’s avoiding the main property lines. Whoever installed this didn’t want anyone to know it existed.”

They were both quiet for a moment. The heat pressed down, and Camille could smell the crushed grapes on her hands, the sweetness of the harvest clinging to her skin.

“Do you ever wonder,” she said slowly, “what our grandfathers were really thinking? What they were really doing when they built all these walls between us?”

Étienne looked up at her. His eyes were dark, impossible to read. “Every day since the fire. I look at my father and I see a man haunted by something he won’t name. I always assumed it was the blaze—the destruction of everything his father built. But now…”

His voice trailed off. He didn’t finish the sentence, and Camille didn’t press. The truth was, she understood. Her father had the same look in his eyes. The same haunted quality. The same refusal to talk about 1985.

She sat down in the dirt, heedless of her clothes, and Étienne did the same. They sat side by side in the shadow of the hidden pipe, the boundary line running invisible between them.

“What do you dream about?” Camille asked. “When you think about Laroche’s future, I mean. Not the business. Just… the place.”

Étienne was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was softer than she’d ever heard it. “I want to see the vineyard as it was meant to be. Before the fire, before the walls, before everything fell apart. My grandfather kept a map of the original estate—the one he showed me once, when I was a boy. There were fields of lavender where the fallow land is now. An orchard. A pond with fish in it, can you imagine? All gone now. All sold off or buried under progress.”

“And you want to bring it back.”

“Some of it. The parts that still have roots.” He turned to her. “What about you? What do you see when you dream of Bellevue?”

Camille looked out across the rows of vines, the green and gold of the harvest stretching toward the horizon. “I see my grandfather’s table. The long one, in the old hall. It was never just our family—it was the whole village. Workers, neighbors, the priest, the mailman. Everyone ate together at harvest’s end. There was no talk of rivalry in those days, or so I’m told. Just wine and good food and the feeling that you belonged to something bigger than yourself.”

“Do you think that’s still possible?” Étienne asked. “To belong to something bigger?”

Camille met his gaze. She felt something shift between them, subtle as the heat shimmer on the vines. “I don’t know. But I’d like to find out.”

The moment stretched between them, fragile and charged. Then Étienne stood and offered her his hand. She took it, and he pulled her up with more strength than she expected. They stood close, his hand still clasping hers.

“The pipe runs from your grandfather’s old plots,” he said, releasing her slowly. “The ones that were sold off after 1985. I’d bet my next vintage there’s more of this system hidden on both properties.”

“And I’d bet my father’s ledger that whoever built it had a reason to keep it secret.”

Étienne nodded. “Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll trace it. Find where it leads.”

“And if we find what your mother doesn’t want us to?”

He looked toward the barn where Claire was helping pack up the empty crates. His expression hardened. “Then we dig it up.”

---

By evening, the harvest was in, and the first load of grapes was pressed in the shared cellar. The workers were gone, the lights were low, and Camille stood alone by the vat, the taste of the mustweet on her lips.

Her phone buzzed. A message from Étienne.

*Tomorrow, dawn. Meet me at the boundary line. Bring something you can dig with.*

She thumbed her reply.

*And bring the truth.*

She looked at the message for a long moment, then pocketed the phone. Behind her, the hidden pipe waited beneath the earth, patient as a secret. Tomorrow, they would follow it into the past.

Whatever was buried there, Camille knew, would change everything.