Read Chapter 24: The Harvest Crisis

The first drop hit the window like a warning shot. Camille looked up from the ledger, where she’d been cross-referencing Jean-Marc’s notes with the court filings, and watched the second drop strike the same pane. Then the third. Then the sky opened.

“No,” she whispered.

She was out of the study before the rain reached a roar, boots slamming across the marble foyer toward the back terrace. The storm had come from the east—she’d been watching the western forecast, the one the weather service had promised would hold through the weekend. But Bordeaux had its own mind, and it had turned vicious.

From the terrace, the vineyard stretched out like a drowning sea. Rows upon rows of vines bent under the assault, leaves whipping flat, heavy clusters of late harvest grapes hammered by rain the size of marbles. This wasn’t a passing shower. This was a front that would sit and rot everything it touched.

Rose appeared at her side, rain already plastering grey hair to her scalp. “The trial plot is covered. The sections by the river are taking the worst of it.”

“The Merlot,” Camille said. Not a question.

Rose nodded. “Sixty percent of it. If the rain doesn’t stop by tomorrow, the grapes will split. We’ll lose them to rot before we can pick.”

Camille’s mind raced through options that didn’t exist. She had thirty thousand euros left. She had a harvesting crew booked for Thursday. She had grapes that needed forty-eight more hours of dry weather to reach optimal sugar levels—and a storm that was giving her none.

“A helicopter,” she said.

Rose blinked. “Camille—”

“A crop dryer. They can hover low enough to circulate air, dry the clusters before the mold sets in. It’s done in Burgundy. They do it for noble rot, but the principle—that’s the principle.”

“How much?”

Camille didn’t have to calculate. She’d priced it two weeks ago during a fever dream of contingency planning. “Thirty thousand for two days of continuous operation. Fuel and pilot included.”

Rose’s face went pale. “That’s everything you have left.”

“It’s everything I have anyway if the vines rot in the ground.” Camille was already pulling out her phone, fingers slick with rain as she scrolled for the number she’d saved. “Better to spend the money losing the grapes than to watch them die for free.”

She made the call from the terrace while the storm raged. The operator answered on the third ring—yes, they had a helicopter available, yes, they could mobilize within hours of the front passing, but the cost was non-negotiable. Thirty-two thousand, and they’d need half upfront.

Camille transferred the money from her phone. Her account balance blinked down to something that would barely cover groceries.

Jean-Marc appeared in the doorway, dripping, eyes wide. “I heard you talking. You can’t be serious. That’s your entire budget for pressing equipment. For the cellar repairs. For anything.”

“I won’t need any of that if I have no grapes.”

“And if the helicopter doesn’t work?”

“Then I’ll have come this far to lose everything anyway.” She looked at him, and something in her face must have silenced whatever argument he was forming, because he just nodded and turned back to the storm.

The front broke at dawn. By noon, the sun was out and the sky was a hard, hurtful blue, and the helicopter arrived with a sound like a giant’s pulse. Camille stood at the edge of the vineyard and watched it descend over the Merlot block, rotor wash flattening the grass in a wide circle, the downdraft shaking water from the leaves like tears.

It worked. The grapes were wet but not splitting, the mold hadn’t taken hold. The pilot, a weathered man named Fournier with a salt-and-pepper beard, gave her a thumbs-up from the cockpit and began his first pass over the rows.

For three hours, everything held. Camille supervised from the ground, directing Fournier by radio to the patches with the heaviest moisture. The sun took over where the rotors left off. She allowed herself to believe—twenty minutes of pure, unguarded hope—that this might work, that she might actually pull this harvest off the edge of catastrophe.

That was when the wind shifted.

It came from the river, sudden and violent, a gust that caught the helicopter mid-turn. Fournier corrected—she saw his hands move—but the aircraft wobbled, dipped lower than it should have, and she knew before the sound reached her what was going to happen.

The rotor clipped the corner of the east wing’s roof.

The impact was a shriek of metal and stone. The helicopter spun, cartwheeled into the slate tiles, and Camille screamed as the machine tore through the roofline and crashed into the wall below, crumpling like a paper lantern. The sound that followed was not an explosion—just a sickening, crushing slam, followed by silence.

“Fournier,” she said into the dead radio.

There was no answer.

Rose was already running toward the château, phone at her ear. “I’m calling emergency services. Camille—Camille, don’t look.”

But Camille was already moving, legs carrying her across the soaked grass, through the broken fence, toward the collapsed corner of the building where the helicopter lay buried in rubble. Smoke rose from the engine, thin and grey, and above it all the sky was impossibly, cruelly blue, as if it hadn’t just reached down and taken everything she had left.

She fell to her knees at the edge of the wreckage, the stones digging into her palms, and knew—before she saw his face, before the sirens came, before anything else—that the pilot was dead.

And with him, her last chance.