Read Chapter 15: The Missing Foreman

The knock came at dawn, soft but insistent enough to pull Élise from a shallow sleep. She had not truly slept since the gendarme’s call about the boy, since Julien’s hand had found the small of her back at the fête and the world had tilted in a way she could not afford.

She pulled her dressing gown tight and opened the door.

Pierre stood on the threshold, hollow-eyed and shivering despite the warm morning air. His clothes were dusted with the pale grit of the road, and he clutched a tin box to his chest like a child with a stolen pie.

“They let you go,” Élise said.

“They had no reason to keep me.” His voice cracked. “The wine was my father’s. I told them. They believed me because they found nothing else on me. But they kept the bottle.”

He swayed. Élise stepped aside and gestured him into the kitchen. She poured him water, watched him drink with both trembling hands.

“Why did you come here?” she asked.

Pierre set the cup down and looked at her with the raw, unguarded stare of a boy who has run out of lies. “My father told me, if anything ever happened to him, I was to see the woman in Paris.”

Élise stilled. “I am not in Paris anymore.”

“No.” Pierre reached into his coat and pulled out a folded slip of paper, creased and softened at the edges. “He wrote this before he went away. He told me to keep it safe.”

She took the note. The handwriting was cramped, hurried, a man’s hand pressed into words he did not want to write.

*Pierre—if anything happens to me, see the woman in Paris. Élise Delacroix. Do not go to the gendarmes. Do not trust the notary. Give her the box. She will know.*

Élise read it twice. Her name in a missing foreman’s hand. A man she had never met, directing his son to her like a letter to a fixed point.

“You knew him,” she said softly. “You knew André was your father.”

Pierre nodded. “He kept me at the cottage on the far edge of the property. No one knew—not Julien, not the village. He said it was safer. He said my mother was in Aix and that she’d given me to him when I was small, but I think he was lying about that too. I think he just wanted no one to know I was his.”

“Why?”

The boy’s jaw tightened. “Because someone was watching him. He said so, near the end. He said he’d found something in the cellar records, something that didn’t belong, and that whoever planted it would come looking for him.”

Élise’s breath caught. The fungus. The Portuguese fruit. The contamination that had poisoned last year’s vintage and driven André away.

“He was going to tell someone,” Pierre went on. “He said he had to be careful about who he told. Then one night he gave me this box and told me what I just said, and the next morning he was gone.”

He set the tin box on the table between them. It was ordinary—dented, rust-spotted at the corners, the kind of box that held nails or fishing tackle. But when Pierre pushed it toward her, his hands shook.

“I never opened it,” he said. “He told me not to. But he said you’d know what to do.”

Élise lifted the lid. The hinges complained. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, lay a set of papers folded flat and bound with a faded ribbon.

She unwrapped them with the care of a woman handling something fragile, something that could break her life apart if handled too roughly.

The first page was a deed.

Élise read it once, then again, the words refusing to settle. The property was described in precise legal language—the vineyard, the cottage, the outbuildings, the irrigation rights along the canal. She knew the boundaries by heart now, knew every stone and staked row.

But the names were wrong.

The deed was dated the year before Joséphine had died. It listed two owners.

Joséphine Delacroix—her aunt, her benefactor, the woman who had left her a vineyard she had never known existed.

And beneath it, a second name. A co-owner. A man called André Valencourt.

“This can’t be right,” Élise murmured.

“What is it?” Pierre leaned forward, reading upside down, his face pale with need.

“Your father and my aunt.” Élise looked up at him. “They owned this vineyard together. The deed says it was transferred to both of them jointly.” She turned the paper over. “Which means when Joséphine died, the ownership should have passed in full to your father. Not to me.”

The words hung in the air like smoke.

Pierre frowned. “But you inherited. You got the house, the land, everything. That’s what everyone says.”

“Yes.” Élise’s mind raced, pulling at threads. “Which means either someone hid this deed, or someone forged the documents that gave me the inheritance.”

She looked down at the signature at the bottom of the page. André’s name, penned in firm, deliberate strokes.

“Your father signed this,” she said. “And he disappeared. And then the vineyard was left to me—a woman he’d never met, a woman who lived in Paris.” She shook her head slowly. “He had no reason to leave it to me. Unless someone made that happen.”

Pierre’s eyes widened. “You think someone—” He stopped. “You think my father didn’t leave. You think someone took him.”

Élise looked out the window. The sun had risen fully now, spilling gold across the vineyard rows she had bled for, worked for, fought for alongside Julien.

A vineyard she might never have owned at all.

“I think,” she said slowly, “that this deed changes everything. I think someone wanted me here. Wanted me ignorant, holding a property with a debt I couldn’t pay, watching it fall apart while they waited in the wings.”

She turned back to Pierre. “Who was your father afraid of?”

“He never told me his name.” Pierre swallowed hard. “But he said it once—said there was a man with a fox’s face, a man who smiled like a knife. He said that man had come three times to the vineyard in the week before he left.”

Élise felt the hairs rise on her arms.

Across the courtyard, she heard the crunch of boots on gravel—Julien’s step, already familiar to her.

She slid the deed back into the oilcloth and closed the tin box. Pierre looked at her, waiting.

“You need to stay hidden,” she said quietly. “Do you have somewhere to go?”

“The cottage. No one else knows about it.”

“Then stay there. Tell no one you came to see me. Do you understand?”

Pierre nodded and slipped out the back door just as Julien’s knock fell on the front.

Élise pressed her hand flat against the tin box.

Julien would want to know about the boy. He would want to know about the note.

But she did not yet know whose side the truth was on.