Read Chapter 12: The Locket Goes Missing

She woke with the cold already in her bones, the kind of deep chill that had learned the house's corners and made itself at home. The window over the bed was a slab of black, the storm's silence pressing against the glass. Camille blinked once, twice, and reached for the nightstand.

Her fingers found the lamp base. The edge of the glass of water she'd set out. Nothing else.

She sat up fast, the quilt sliding off her shoulders, and patted the surface with both hands like a woman searching for a dropped key in the dark. Her locket. The small silver oval with her grandmother's face pressed inside, smoothed by decades of thumbs. She'd put it there before sleep, the chain coiled beside it like a question she wasn't ready to answer.

It was gone.

"No," she said, to no one. She flipped the lamp on. The bulb cast a weak orange pool, and the nightstand was brutally bare. She threw back the covers, ran her hands across the mattress, checked the floor, the pillow, the crease where the sheet folded. Nothing.

Panic bloomed in her chest, a hot tightness that made the cold irrelevant. Her grandmother had worn that locket when she sang, when she stirred soup, when she pressed Camille's face between her hands and told her that a woman's memory was her armor. The records in the cabinet below had been her grandmother's too—that was why Camille had come down to the living room that night, why she'd put on the old chanson, why she'd let Antoine hear her cry.

She pulled on the heavy sweater from the end of the bed and went out into the hallway. Her feet were bare, the wooden floor like ice.

"Antoine?" Her voice cracked on the second syllable. "Antoine!"

His bedroom door opened before she reached it. He was already dressed in his flannel shirt, though his hair was sleep-flattened on one side. His eyes narrowed at her tone.

"What is it?"

"My locket. It's gone." She held up her empty hand as if that proved the theft. "I put it on the nightstand before I went to sleep. It's not there anymore."

He stood in his doorway, arms crossed, watching her face. She searched his expression for guilt, found only confusion.

"Are you sure you didn't—"

"I'm sure." The words came out hard. "I checked. The room, the floor, the bed. It was there. Now it's not."

Antoine's jaw tightened. He was not a man who liked being accused, and the accusation shimmered under her words even if she hadn't said it directly. She saw him register it, a flicker of something—hurt, anger, she couldn't tell—before he moved past her toward the stairs.

"Then we search."

He went through the cabin like a man methodically dismantling a broken engine. Living room first, the coffee table, the couch cushions, the shelves by the woodstove, even the grate in front of the fire they'd let go cold during the night. Camille followed him, her eyes everywhere, noting each surface she'd touched the night before, each place she might have set the locket down while distracted.

"Did you move it?" she asked again, her voice smaller.

"No." He didn't look at her. "I stayed in my room after the music stopped. I didn't come back down."

"You heard the music?"

He paused, hand on the mantelpiece. "Yes."

"From where?"

A long silence. He turned to face her, his expression guarded. "I was at the top of the stairs."

Camille's stomach dropped. He had been listening. Of course he had been listening—the house was small, the walls thin. He had stood at the top of the stairs while she played her grandmother's song, while his own mother's absence filtered through the notes. And now the locket was gone.

"Then you know where I was," she said carefully. "You know I was in the living room. You might have gone into my room after."

Antoine's face went hard. "I didn't."

"Then who did?"

They tore the rest of the house apart. He moved a heavy bookshelf away from the wall, she checked the bathroom shelves, the hall cupboard, the pantry. They went through the pockets of her coat hanging by the door, the gloves, the bag she'd carried from town. Nothing. The locket had simply evaporated.

He came last to his room, the one room she hadn't entered, and he opened it without ceremony, pulling the door wide so she could see the neat bed, the camera on the desk, the single shelf of books. "Look," he said. "Look everywhere."

She stepped inside, hating that he made her do it. The room smelled like him—woodsmoke and something cleaner, soap or laundry, and she hated that she noticed it at a moment like this. She checked the nightstand, the drawer, the floor. She pulled back his pillow. She opened the armoire and looked at his folded sweaters.

Nothing.

She stood in the middle of his room, her bare feet cold on the floor, and felt tears threaten her eyes. She would not cry. Not again, not in front of him.

"Antoine, someone was in this house."

"The storm ended before midnight," he said slowly. "I checked the doors before I went to bed. Everything was locked."

"Then someone was here before you locked them."

He shook his head. "I would have seen their tracks. Snow was falling until four in the morning. No one walked up to this door without leaving a trail."

"Unless they were already here."

The words hung between them. She saw his face change—not toward anger, but toward something colder. He understood what she was implying, and something in him closed like a door.

"You don't believe me," he said.

"I don't know what to believe." Camille wrapped her arms around herself. "You told me you suspected someone in the village. Your father's snowmobile was taken. Luc disappeared. Someone broke my snowshoe. And now—the only thing I have left of my grandmother is gone, from a locked house, from a nightstand I know I put it on."

"And I'm your only suspect."

"You were the only person here."

Antoine's jaw worked. He walked past her, down the stairs, and she followed because there was nowhere else to go. He stopped in the kitchen, by the door to the woodshed, and stood looking out the small window over the sink at the dark.

"My mother took her things when she left," he said, quietly, to the glass. "She didn't take mine. I kept everything she gave me. I was twelve years old, and I kept every single thing, like holding them was the only way to prove she'd existed."

Camille felt her anger falter. She hadn't meant to wound him. But the accusation was out, and it was true that she didn't know him, not really—not the way the last few days had made her feel she did.

"Antoine—"

"Your locket was worth nothing to me." His voice was flat. "I'm not the one you need to be afraid of."

He turned from the window. His face was unreadable, but his hands, knotted at his sides, betrayed him.

"The satellite phone is still on the table," he said. "If you want to tell the police about your locket, call them. I'll drive you anywhere you want to go when the storm clears, and you can be gone from here by afternoon."

The words landed like a physical blow. He would give her up, she realized. He would hand her the phone, the road, the exit—because her distrust had already made him a stranger again, and perhaps Antoine Rivard preferred strangers. They expected nothing.

She looked at the satellite phone on the table. Three weeks until her deadline. A broken pair of glasses. A missing locket. An editor who wanted movement, progress, a finished translation of a novel she'd been paid to complete.

Camille walked to the table and picked up the phone.

She didn't dial.

She stood with it in her hands, her fingers curling around the cold plastic, and looked at Antoine in the dim light of the kitchen.

"I'm not leaving," she said. "But if you know anything—anything—about what happened to that locket, you tell me now, or I will spend every other night in this house watching you."

"Then watch me," he said. And he turned away, into the dark.

The phone weighed in her hand. Somewhere in the walls, the house settled with a groan. She held her grandmother's memory against her palm like the locket was still there, and for the first time since she'd arrived, she missed France with a violence that made her knees weak.

She didn't believe Antoine had taken it. That was the terrible part. If he hadn't, then someone had been in this house—and that meant the threat she'd been pretending was only a broken snowshoe, a careless accident, was real. It was in the walls. It had walked past her bed while she slept.

She set the satellite phone down on the table without making a call.

She'd done worse with less, her grandmother's voice reminded her. She just couldn't remember when.