Read Chapter 30: The Documentary

The knock came at seven in the morning, and Camille opened the door with coffee in hand, still wearing yesterday's clothes from the Libourne trip that had yielded nothing but a locked vault and a dead end.

A woman with sharp cheekbones and a laminated press badge smiled at her from the doorstep. Behind her, a cameraman hoisted a shoulder-mounted rig, and a sound technician fiddled with a boom pole.

"Camille Delacroix?" The woman extended a hand. "Isabelle Moreau, France 3. We're doing a documentary series on Bordeaux's great estates and their revival. After the competition, you're the story everyone wants."

Camille squinted into the morning light. "You understand I have a harvest to manage and a debt to pay. I don't have time for—"

"It's about your mother."

The words landed like a stone in still water.

Isabelle's smile softened. "The fraud. The 1982 vintage. The lie that almost destroyed this house. We want to tell the whole story—yours, not the tabloids'. The real story."

Camille's fingers tightened around her mug. She could say no. She should say no. But she thought of her mother's journal, the one she'd read in the dark hours after her father's death, filled with pages about pressure and fear and a man who wouldn't stop calling.

"What kind of access would you need?"

---

The crew set up in the great hall, and Camille moved through her morning routine as if they weren't there. She checked the fermentation tanks in the cellar—the new wine, her wine, still young and fragile, now suddenly famous. The gold medal sat in her office drawer. She hadn't framed it. She wasn't sure she deserved to.

"Camille." Lucas appeared at the cellar door, his face drawn. "Can I talk to you?"

She followed him into the barrel room. The air smelled of oak and new wine, and her voice came out sharper than intended. "If this is about the documentary—"

"It's about what they're finding." He held up his phone. "I've been watching their preliminary footage. A colleague of mine at Sud Ouest tipped me off. They've been talking to Bernard."

Her stomach dropped. "Of course they have."

"And that's not all." Lucas zoomed in on a freeze frame from the video. "They have documents. Letters. About the fraud."

Camille stared at the image—a page she'd never seen, bearing handwriting she'd never encountered. "How did they get those?"

"That's what I'm asking." Lucas set the phone down. "Someone's feeding them fabricated evidence. Making it look like your mother knew more than she did—like she was the architect of the scheme, not a victim. The story they're building isn't a revisionist history. It's a hatchet job."

Her throat tightened. "Who told you this?"

"A source who owes me a favor in the prosecutor's office. He says the documents match a pattern—materials have been slipping out of the evidence room for weeks. Small pieces. Nothing that would trigger a full audit, but enough to build a picture."

Camille thought of Vasseur. His agent. The anonymous note from Café Ségur. And then her uncles, who had shown up at the château with their offer just hours after the helicopter crash.

"Bernard," she said. "He has access to the family archives. He could have found—"

"Or manufactured." Lucas's voice was grim. "Your uncles have lawyers on retainer. They know how to make documents look authentic."

The sound of the camera crew setting up in the hall drifted through the door. Camille pressed her palm against the cool stone wall. She had invited them in. She had seen it as an opportunity to tell her mother's side.

"What do I do?" she asked.

Lucas was quiet for a moment. "You tell your story first. Before they do. You get in front of this thing and you don't let them define the narrative."

---

The interview took place in the library, where late morning sun fell across the shelves and dust motes drifted in golden shafts. Camille sat in her father's leather chair. Isabelle sat opposite, notebook open, microphone clipped to her lapel.

"Let's start with the fraud," Isabelle said. "The 1982 vintage. Your mother was accused of passing off substandard wine as a château grand cru. What do you know about that?"

Camille looked past the camera, out the window. The vines stretched green and hopeful across the hillside. Her mother had walked those rows in the last weeks of her life. She had been asking forgiveness from a place she loved more than her own name.

"My mother was not a fraud," Camille said. "She was a survivor."

Isabelle leaned forward. "Explain that."

Camille told them about the pressure of the estate. About her father's illness, his slow retreat from the business. She told them about the letters she'd found in her mother's drawer, the ones from creditors threatening to take the château, the ones from Philippe Vasseur offering to buy the land at a fraction of its value and make all the threats disappear.

"What you have to understand," Camille said, "is that my mother loved this place more than anything. She lost her own family's vineyards in the frost of '85. She knew what it meant to lose everything. When my father couldn't fight anymore, she did what she had to do."

"You're saying the fraud was—"

"A desperate act in impossible circumstances. But the real crime—the one no one talks about—is the man who created those circumstances. The one who threatened to destroy her if she didn't sell. The one who kept pushing until she made a choice no one should have to make."

Isabelle's pen stilled. "Who was that?"

Camille opened her mouth to say Philippe Vasseur's name. And then she stopped.

Because Lucas's source had said fabricated documents were being fed to the crew. She had no way of knowing what angle Isabelle truly believed. She had no way of knowing whether the woman across from her was writing a story about redemption or a story about the granddaughter of a fraudster.

"His name will come out in time," Camille said carefully. "Right now, my focus is on saving this estate. On proving that my mother's legacy isn't the lie she told—it's the truth she built around it."

Isabelle nodded. "And the new wine? The gold medal?"

"Won under false pretenses." Camille's voice was steady. "I entered it under a pseudonym because I didn't want anyone to know who it came from. The judge's accusation—the similarity to the 1982 vintage—was wrong. The wine I've made is entirely different. And now that the truth is out about who I am, I want to be judged on what's in the bottle, not on my name."

"Do you believe this wine can save the estate?"

Camille paused. The debt loomed. The appeal loomed. The uncles and Vasseur loomed. But she thought of Jean-Marc's hands in the soil, of the hidden plot she'd found—the one with the daughter vine, the varietal no one knew existed.

"I believe the estate can save itself," she said. "If people give it a chance."

---

They wrapped the interview at noon. Camille walked the crew to the door, shaking Isabelle's hand, accepting her card, thanking her for the opportunity. And then she closed the heavy oak door and stood in the cool silence of the château.

Her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number.

*You told them the right story. They're still filming the other one. Check the château's east cellar storage room. Bring the brass key.*

Camille stared at the message. The brass key hung on a chain around her neck, a constant weight since she'd found it in her father's belongings.

She read the words again. *East cellar storage room.*

There was no east cellar storage room. There was only the wine cave, the barrel room, and the annex where the old equipment was kept.

Unless.

She moved fast, through the kitchen, down the stone stairs, into the deepest part of the château. Her father's father had built a false wall in the '30s, she remembered—for hiding wine during the occupation. No one had opened it in decades.

She found the wall by tapping. The hollow sound gave her a chill. The key turned easily in the lock, and the door swung inward.

Inside, the air was cold and dry, and the light from her phone illuminated a single desk. On it lay a folder, thick with papers, and a handwritten letter in her mother's unmistakable script.

Camille picked it up. The date was 1999.

*Mon amour*, it began. *If you're reading this, then we've made it through the worst of it. I have to go to Libourne one last time. The deed is there. So is the truth. Please forgive me for telling you so many lies. The only way to protect you was to make sure you never needed to know.*

Camille stopped. Her hand trembled.

*But there's one more thing you need to know. The money Philippe Vasseur gave me to pay the creditors? It was never a loan. It was payment for the land—the land he wanted to build a housing development on. And when I found out what he planned to do to the vineyard, I stopped the sale.*

*He never collected.*

*And the deed was signed over to me in full.*

*The debt was paid in 1999.*

Camille's world tilted. She stared at the letter, reading the words again. The debt was paid. It was paid decades ago.

She looked out the sliver of the door, toward the main house where her phone still buzzed with calls from her uncles' lawyers and demands from Vasseur's office.

They were bluffing.

And now she had proof.