Read Chapter 9: The Old Cellarmaster

The morning fog had barely lifted when Camille found the old woman kneeling among the lavender bordering the Delacroix property. Madame Perrin, eighty-three if she was a day, had worked the neighboring plot since before either château had electricity. Her gnarled hands moved with practiced rhythm, pulling weeds that had no business growing in October.

Camille hesitated at the stone wall that separated their lands. Étienne stood a few paces behind her, their agreed meeting point at dawn now long past. They'd spent two hours walking the pipe's path, tracing it through bramble and dead oak until it disappeared beneath a collapsed drainage ditch. Now they needed answers about the man who might have laid it.

"Madame Perrin," Camille called softly, not wanting to startle her.

The old woman looked up, squinting against the low sun. Recognition flickered across her weathered face. "Camille Delacroix. You look like your grandmother in that light." Her eyes shifted to Étienne, and something closed behind them. "And the Laroche boy."

Étienne stepped forward with the easy charm Camille had come to recognize—and distrust. "We were hoping you might remember someone who worked here years ago. Antoine Moreau?"

The name landed like a stone in still water. Madame Perrin's hands stilled on the lavender stems. For a long moment, she said nothing, and Camille felt the weight of decades pressing down on the silence.

"Moreau," the old woman repeated finally. "He was the Laroche cellar master. Good with his hands. Quiet. Too quiet, maybe." She pulled a weed with unnecessary force. "He left the autumn of '85. Just after the fire. Packed a single suitcase and walked to the train station at dawn. No goodbye to anyone."

"You remember that specifically?" Camille asked, keeping her voice neutral.

"I remember everything about that October." Madame Perrin's gaze drifted toward the distant rooftop of Château Laroche. "The fire changed things. Changed people. Your father stopped speaking to mine over a property line that hadn't moved in fifty years. Claire Laroche was never the same after." She paused, and something flickered in her eyes. "She was different before. Lighter. She and Moreau were close, you know. Very close."

Étienne's jaw tightened. "Close how?"

"I'm an old woman. I notice things." Madame Perrin returned to her weeding, a clear dismissal. "He wrote letters for a time. To Claire, I believe. She never wrote back. Or if she did, they stopped coming. He disappeared from everyone's life after that. Some said he went to Spain. Others said he drowned himself in the Garonne."

"Did he have family?" Camille pressed.

"An aunt in Burgundy, I think. No one else. He was a solitary man." Madame Perrin looked up sharply. "Why do you want to know about Antoine Moreau? That's old history. The kind best left buried."

Camille opened her mouth to craft a careful evasion, but Étienne spoke first. "We found something. A pipe running between our properties that shouldn't exist. And a valve from Bellevue that found its way into Laroche's cellar. We think Moreau might have known something about the fire that we don't."

The old woman studied them for a long moment, her eyes moving between their faces with an intensity that made Camille feel transparent. Then she laughed, a dry sound like rustling paper. "The children dig up their parents' graves." She shook her head. "You want my advice? The money died in that fire. The hatred is what survived. And the seed of that hatred was planted long before Moreau ever set foot in Bordeaux."

"What do you mean?" Camille asked.

But Madame Perrin was done. She pushed herself to her feet with a grunt, brushing dirt from her apron. "I mean that your grandfathers shared a harvest table once. Before the bureaucrats and the inheritance lawyers drove wedges between brothers." She fixed Étienne with a look. "Your grandfather. Henri Laroche. He and Camille's grandfather used to toast each other at the harvest festival every year. People forgot that. Convenient for them to forget."

"Brothers?" Étienne's voice cracked slightly. "They weren't brothers."

"No. But they might as well have been. Grew up together, learned the craft together, married cousins from the same village." Madame Perrin hoisted her basket of weeds. "The secret of this valley isn't in the soil, young man. It never was. It's in who wronged whom, and who agreed to let the story be written a certain way."

She walked away before either of them could respond, her figure disappearing into the treeline like a ghost retreating from the living.

---

Back at Château Bellevue, Camille's laptop glowed in the dim light of her office. Étienne stood behind her chair, close enough that she could smell cedar and crushed grapes on his jacket. They'd searched for an hour—every variation of Antoine Moreau's name, every wine trade archive, every public record database she could access.

Nothing.

"France has digitized cemetery records going back to the 1800s," Camille said, scrolling past another dead end. "If he'd died legally, there'd be something."

"Unless he never died," Étienne replied quietly. "Madame Perrin said Spain. Or the river."

"Or he changed his name." Camille closed the laptop with a frustrated snap. "The man was a cellar master. He trained at Château Margaux before joining Laroche. Someone in the industry would have heard of him."

"Someone who might have reason to stay silent." Étienne moved to the window, looking out at the vineyard rows catching the last of the afternoon light. "My mother knows something. I've seen it in her face every time the fire comes up."

"Your mother and my father are the only ones left who were there."

"Then we ask them."

Camille laughed bitterly. "My father barely speaks to me about anything beyond harvest yields. And when I mentioned the valve, he locked himself in his office for two hours."

"Then we go to the trade event tonight and play the role of the united wineries." Étienne turned to face her, and there was something new in his expression—hesitant, almost vulnerable. "I've been meaning to tell you. I invited some contacts. Business contacts. From London."

"London? Why would—"

"Because Laroche needs capital, and Bellevue needs to look stable while the auditors circle. Two estates working together are worth more than two estates bleeding separately." He paused. "I told them you're my partner."

The word hung between them. Partner. Legal, professional, transactional. And yet the way he said it made Camille's chest tighten.

"I didn't agree to that."

"You didn't disagree either." Étienne held her gaze. "Camille, the investors I know care about capacity and distribution. They don't care about a forty-year-old feud between our families. If I present you as the face of the joint operation, they'll take us seriously."

"And if they ask about the 1985 fire? The insurance questions? The vandalism your family allegedly perpetrated against mine?"

"They won't. They're interested in the future, not the past." He moved closer, and Camille's breath caught. "The only people still living in 1985 are the ones who wouldn't spend their money on us anyway."

She should argue. She should insist on maintaining distance, on keeping their arrangement as coldly professional as it had begun. But when she looked at him—at the wear lines around his eyes, at the earnest set of his jaw—she found she didn't want to.

"Partner," she repeated slowly.

"If that's what you'd like to call it." His mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Or we could call it something else."

The moment stretched. Camille became acutely aware of the space between them, of how easily she could close it, of how much she wanted to.

"Let's start with partner," she said, her voice steadier than she felt. "One word at a time."

---

The trade event was held in a converted warehouse on the Bordeaux waterfront, all exposed brick and Edison bulbs. Camille had worn black—sleek, professional, armor. But when Étienne introduced her to his London contacts as "the woman rebuilding Laroche alongside Bellevue," she felt the armor crack.

At the third introduction, a silver-haired investor named Fiona Blackwell leaned in with genuine curiosity. "Rumor has it your families have been at war since before I was born, and I'm not young. What changed?"

Étienne's hand found the small of Camille's back. Light. Brief. Terrifying.

"We found out we were fighting the wrong enemy," he said smoothly. "Now we're combining our resources. Bellevue brings a century of grape pedigree and the capacity to handling our yield. Laroche brings water access and a distribution network that reaches into markets neither of us could penetrate alone."

The banker nodded approvingly and moved on, leaving them alone in the crowd.

Camille turned to face him. "That was a good pitch."

"It was a true pitch." He met her eyes, and the noise of the room seemed to fade. "That's the thing, Camille. Nothing we're building is fake. The partnership is real. What we're finding together is real."

She thought about Madame Perrin's words—your grandfathers shared a harvest table—and about the pipe running beneath their vineyards like a secret vein connecting two hearts. She thought about her father's locked office, about Claire Laroche's guarded silence, about a man named Antoine Moreau who might still be alive, carrying the truth about a fire that had burned far longer than any flame.

"You're right," she said, surprising herself with the admission. "The partnership is real."

What she didn't say—what she couldn't say yet—was that something else was becoming real too. Something that had nothing to do with harvest yields or investor confidence.

Something that felt terrifyingly like trust.