Read Chapter 17: The Genetic Test

The truck smelled of diesel and wet earth, a scent Camille had come to associate with hope and fear in equal measure. She drove one-handed, the other pressed flat against the cardboard box on the passenger seat, as if she could feel the vine cuttings through the cardboard, through the damp cloth she'd wrapped them in, through the layers of plastic.

"The lab in Bordeaux—you're sure they're trustworthy?" Lucas asked from the passenger side.

"No one's sure of anything anymore." She glanced at him. "But Mathilde was my mother's friend. She runs the oenology department now. If she can't keep a secret, no one can."

The morning light was thin and gray, the kind of light that made the vineyards look like an old photograph. The winter vines stood bare and patient, waiting for a season that seemed impossibly far away. Camille had been up since four, cutting the samples in the dark, using only her phone's flashlight so no one on the estate would see her moving toward the hidden plot.

She hadn't told Lucas about the lab message until they were already on the road, and he hadn't pressed her for details. There was a new understanding between them now, fragile and unspoken, built on the cold foundation of necessity.

"Five days," she said finally. "Whoever submitted those cuttings did it five days before I even knew the plot existed."

"Someone who knew before you did."

"My mother's diary says she found the plot in 1982. That's forty years of someone, maybe multiple people, knowing about it." She tapped the steering wheel. "My father knew. He kept the ledgers false to hide it. But someone else knew too—someone who wasn't afraid to put my name on a lab submission."

"You think they're setting you up."

"Or using me as a shield. If the vines turn out to be valuable, they can claim I did it, that I found them, and then force a partnership. If the vines turn out to be worthless, I'm the fool who wasted the estate's money on genetic testing during an audit."

Lucas was quiet for a long moment. "Your father's records, the ones in his office—they're meticulous. Almost obsessive. I've spent enough time with journalistic archives to know a man covering his tracks."

"Or a man preserving something."

"Both, maybe."

The lab was a low beige building on the outskirts of Pessac, tucked between a tire shop and a shuttered bakery. Mathilde met them at the loading door, a stout woman in her sixties with gray hair pulled back so tightly it pulled her eyebrows up with it. She wore the same brass necklace Camille remembered from childhood, a chain of tiny grape leaves.

"Camille." Mathilde's voice cracked on the name. "I'm so sorry about Henri. I should have come to the funeral."

"You sent flowers. That was enough."

"It wasn't." Mathilde embraced her, then pulled back to study Camille's face. "You look like your mother. More every year."

Something moved in Camille's chest—the familiar ache that never quite healed. "I need to ask you something, and I need you not to ask questions about why."

Mathilde's eyes flicked to Lucas, then back to Camille. "You've brought a stranger."

"A journalist."

The word hung in the air. Mathilde's expression didn't change, but her hand went to the necklace, touching it like a rosary.

"I need you to run a DNA analysis," Camille said. "I have cuttings from a grape variety I suspect predates phylloxera. Possibly extinct. Possibly something no one's seen in over a hundred years."

Mathilde's hand stopped moving. "Predates phylloxera is a strong claim."

"I know what I found."

"You know what you *think* you found." Mathilde stepped aside, gesturing for them to enter. "Let's see what the science says."

The lab was fluorescent-lit and clinical, a world away from the dark earth and twisted vines Camille had walked through at dawn. Mathilde led them to a small room in the back, where a microscope sat on a steel table beside a refrigerator labeled GENETIC MATERIALS.

"Let me see them."

Camille opened the box. The cuttings lay in damp newspaper, each one labeled with a number in her careful handwriting. She'd taken twelve samples from different vines, some with bark as thick as her wrist, the wood beneath it dark as old blood.

Mathilde studied them in silence. Then she took out a loupe and examined the bark more closely, turning one cutting over in her fingers. When she looked up, her eyes were bright.

"Where did you find these?"

"Somewhere on the estate. I can't tell you where yet."

"Camille—"

"I'll tell you everything when I know who submitted samples under my name five days ago."

Mathilde's hand went still on the cutting. "Someone submitted samples under your name?"

"A message from your lab confirmed receipt. I never sent anything."

"Wait here." Mathilde left the room, her footsteps echoing down the hallway. Lucas looked at Camille, one eyebrow raised.

"She's checking the records."

"At least one person in this world is still on your side."

The minutes stretched. Camille paced the small room, counting the tiles on the floor—twelve by fifteen, one hundred and eighty. Her mother's diary was in her bag, still unread beyond the entries she'd already gone through. There were more pages, more secrets tucked between the lines of her mother's careful handwriting.

Mathilde came back with a manila folder. Her face was pale beneath the fluorescent lights.

"This came in five days ago, under your name. Digital submission, cuttings mailed overnight from a post office in Libourne." She slid the folder across the table. "I pulled the shipping records. The box was dropped off at 3:47 PM. The post office's security camera shows a man in a dark coat. Too far away to see his face."

"Anything else?"

Mathilde hesitated. "The note attached to the sample said the vines were from the Ségur estate. Not the Château Delacroix. The Ségur estate."

Camille felt the floor shift beneath her. "Ségur."

"The family that sold the land to your grandfather in 1920." Mathilde's voice was careful. "The family your mother believed had a claim to the property. The family she spent years in court against before she—before she left."

Lucas stepped forward. "The family your mother was trying to expose."

"Her diary says she met with Alain Ségur in 1982. A month before she disappeared." Camille's throat was dry. "She wrote that he told her things about my father's family. Things that made her question whether the château was ever rightfully ours."

"And now someone from the Ségur family is submitting vine cuttings under your name." Mathilde closed the folder. "That's either an ally or an enemy, Camille. And I suspect you won't know which until it's too late."

Camille looked at the cuttings, wrapped in their damp newspaper like relics. "How long for the analysis?"

"Forty-eight hours if I rush it. Maybe seventy-two."

"I need it in twenty-four."

"I'm not a miracle worker."

"You're the only one I trust." Camille met her eyes. "Please."

Mathilde was silent for a long moment. Then she nodded slowly. "Twenty-four hours. I'll work through the night. But if anyone comes asking about this, I'll have to tell them I was contacted by Camille Delacroix. You're still legally the face of this estate, even if your uncles hold the operational keys."

"Good." Camille smiled grimly. "Let them wonder what I'm doing."

They left the lab at midday, the sun pale and low over the rooftops. Camille's phone buzzed as she started the truck. A message from Bernard.

*Where are you? The cellar foreman says you took the equipment truck this morning. There's a discrepancy in the inventory. We need to discuss it immediately.*

Lucas read the message over her shoulder. "He knows you're not at the château."

"He knows I'm somewhere." Camille put the phone in the cup holder. "Let him stew."

They were halfway back when her phone buzzed again. This time it was Marie, her father's former housekeeper, who had stayed on after the audit out of loyalty or guilt or both.

*Camille, your uncle Bernard is asking about a hidden vineyard plot. He's been out to the far edge of the property with a surveyor. I think he's looking for what you found.*

Camille's hands tightened on the wheel. The truck suddenly felt too slow, too exposed.

"He knows," she said. "I don't know how, but he knows."

The road ahead stretched empty and gray, and somewhere behind them, the hidden vines stood waiting for a salvation that might never come.