Read Chapter 4: The Consultant's Arrival

The knock came not at the front door but at the kitchen entrance, where the gravel path curved up from the old press house. Camille had been elbow-deep in a sink of black-stained glasses, scrubbing the residue of a decade of neglect from her father’s cupboards, when the sound echoed through the stone corridor.

Jean-Marc was already at the window, his broad shoulders tense beneath his worn canvas jacket. “That’ll be him,” he said, not turning around.

“Him who?”

“The consultant. Fontaine.” Jean-Marc’s jaw worked. “I told him to come back when you were here.”

Camille dried her hands on a dishcloth and moved to the door. Through the rippled glass she could see a silhouette—tall, lean, carrying a leather satchel that looked expensively worn. She pulled the door open.

The man on the step was perhaps forty, with the deeply tanned face of someone who spent his working hours under open sky, and pale green eyes that assessed her with quick, professional interest. He smiled, extending a hand.

“Camille Delacroix. I’m Lucas Fontaine. Your father and I worked together.”

She did not take the hand. “Jean-Marc says my father never mentioned you.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” Lucas lowered his arm without a flicker of awkwardness. “Your father and I had an agreement of discretion. He was, as I’m sure you know, a very private man.” He reached into his satchel and produced a single sheet of paper, folded crisply. “This is the letter of intent we signed in March. I was to begin consulting on the vineyard’s recovery plan in September. When I heard your father had passed, I came anyway. I thought you’d want to know what he’d set in motion.”

Camille took the paper. The letterhead was her father’s own, the château’s crest embossed at the top. The signature was unmistakable—his broad, slanted hand, the tail of the D curling like a vine tendril. She knew it from a thousand childhood notes left on the kitchen table. The letter was dated March 14th, six months before his death. It stated, in spare legal language, that Lucas Fontaine was retained as an independent vineyard consultant with full access to estate records.

“Why did he hide it?” she asked. “Why wouldn’t he tell Jean-Marc?”

Lucas glanced past her to where Jean-Marc stood, arms crossed, face immovable. “Because your father wasn’t sure who he could trust,” Lucas said quietly. “And neither should you.”

Jean-Marc made a sound low in his throat but said nothing.

Camille studied the letter, then the man. He met her gaze without flinching. Everything about him was calm, unhurried, almost too practiced. But the letter was real. Her father’s signature was real.

“Show me what you were planning,” she said.

They walked the rows together—Lucas, Camille, Jean-Marc trailing a deliberate ten paces behind. Lucas pointed out the same failures Jean-Marc had identified, but he spoke of them with a different vocabulary. Phylloxera-resistant rootstock. Canopy management. Water stress markers in the leaf tissue. He had a tablet full of soil analyses, pH readings, satellite imagery of the property dating back five years. He had studied this vineyard. That much was undeniable.

“The 2022 vintage can still be saved,” he said, crouching to pinch a leaf between his fingers. “Barely. But the root systems are compromised. You’ll need to replant the eastern block entirely. I recommended that to your father in April.”

“With what money?” Camille asked flatly.

Lucas looked up at her, his green eyes unblinking. “Your father had a plan for that too. There’s a ledger. He kept it in the cellars—a private record of the estate’s true finances, separate from the books your uncles saw.” He stood, brushing dirt from his knees. “I can show you where he kept it, if you’ll let me.”

Camille was silent. The word *cellar* pulsed in her mind like a struck bell. Her mother’s note. The hidden thing by the third cask.

“I don’t have a key,” she said. “My uncle changed the lock.”

“I know,” Lucas said. “He made a point of telling me when I arrived. Made it clear I wasn’t welcome.” A thin smile crossed his face. “Your father and I had a fallback. There’s an old access—a maintenance tunnel that runs from the press house to the back of the cellar. He showed me once. The entrance is hidden behind the old barrel rack.”

Jean-Marc’s voice cut through the air. “And how do I know you didn’t learn that from someone else? Someone who wanted in badly enough to lie?”

Lucas turned to face him. “Because I can tell you what’s in that cellar that no one else would know.” He paused. “On the east wall, behind the third cask, there’s a pair of antique vine shears. Monogrammed. They were her mother’s.”

Camille’s breath caught. Jean-Marc’s face went pale.

They found the tunnel exactly as Lucas described—narrow, dark, smelling of earth and old stone. Camille went first, holding her phone’s light before her. The passage opened into the cellar’s shadowed rear, behind a towering rack of barrels that had stood undisturbed for years. Dust motes swam in the beam.

The third cask from the wall. Camille’s hand trembled as she pressed against the curved wood. It didn’t move. She slid her fingers along the floor, found the gap, and reached behind—

Her fingers brushed cold metal. She pulled it out.

The vine shears were antique, their blades curved like crescent moons, their handles of dark carved wood. And there, where the two blades crossed, a small brass plate gleamed in the light of her phone.

*E.D.*

Élise Delacroix. Her mother.

Camille stood in the dark of the cellar, the shears heavy in her palm, and heard her mother’s voice from twenty years ago—a whisper in her ear as she trimmed roses at the edge of the vineyard. *These belonged to my grandmother. They’ll be yours someday.*

“Where is she, Lucas?” Camille’s voice was rough. “What do you know?”

But Lucas was not looking at the shears. He was staring at the wall behind the cask, where the beam of his own light now traced a line of fresh mortar, pale and new against the ancient stone.

“She knew,” he murmured. “Your father knew someone was looking.” He turned to Camille, his face suddenly grave. “We need to open this wall. Now.”