Read Chapter 14: Blizzard Aftermath

The snow had stopped sometime before dawn, leaving the world muffled and white. Camille stood at the kitchen window with her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, watching the light crawl over the drifts. The storm had sculpted everything into smooth, impossible curves—the woodpile was a white mound, the path to the shed was gone, and the line of the horizon had dissolved into an unbroken expanse.

Behind her, Antoine's boots thudded against the floorboards. He moved past her without a word, shrugging into his heavy coat. The silence between them had taken on a texture since the night before—thick, careful, like walking on ice you weren't sure would hold.

"The tracks," he said, pulling on his gloves. "I'm going to check them before the wind finishes the job."

Camille set her mug down. "I'm coming with you."

He looked at her, and something flickered in his expression—not resistance, exactly, but a question he didn't ask out loud. She understood. After the accusation, after the long candlelit hours in his room, after the footprints that had appeared in the snow like a signature from some unseen hand, there was no easy way to be near each other anymore. And yet there was no way to be apart.

They stepped outside together. The cold hit her like a wall, sharp and clean, stealing her breath for a moment before she remembered how to breathe in it. She had learned something in the past weeks—how to tuck her chin into her scarf, how to keep her weight low and centered, how to move through snow instead of fighting it. Antoine had shown her, his patience outlasting her pride.

He walked ahead now, his snowshoes leaving wide, Even tracks. She followed, her own smaller prints crossing his. The wind had picked up overnight, scouring the surface of the drifts into a fine, glittering powder. When they reached the spot where the footprints had been—where the stranger's tracks had led away from the house into the dark—there was nothing but smooth, unbroken white.

Antoine stopped. He stood there for a long moment, looking down at the blank expanse as if it might offer him something. Then he turned in a slow circle, scanning the tree line, the low hills, the pale sky.

"Gone," he said.

Camille came to stand beside him. She followed his gaze, but there was nothing to see. The forest had swallowed whatever evidence there had been. The tracks were gone, and with them any proof that the intruder had ever been there. Only she and Antoine knew. Only she and Antoine carried the weight of it.

She pulled her scarf down to speak. "They were there. I saw them."

"I know," he said quietly. "I believe you."

She looked at him sharply, but his face was open, tired. There was no accusation in it, no reminder of her earlier suspicion. Just a man standing in the snow, trying to make sense of a threat he couldn't see and a ghost he couldn't catch.

"Marcel said something." Antoine's voice came low, almost to himself. "Before the storm. He said he'd heard things weren't safe out here. I thought he was being an old man, worried about his money."

Camille remembered the grizzled neighbor, his warning about Luc's father and the logging rights. She thought about her locked door, her window, the locket that had vanished from her nightstand without a sound.

"Who would know how to get in?" she asked. "Without breaking anything?"

Antoine shook his head. "I don't know. The locks were good. They still are. I checked them last night, after you fell asleep."

Fell asleep. She almost corrected him—she hadn't fallen asleep, not really. She had lain in the chair beside his bed, wrapped in his spare blanket, her eyes half-open, listening to the wind and the creaking of the house. She had watched the shadows move across the walls until exhaustion had pulled her under. When she woke, it was light, and Antoine was already awake, already dressed, already planning to come out here.

"I'm sorry," she said.

The words came out smaller than she meant them to. She hadn't planned to say them, but they rose anyway, unbidden, like heat from the ground.

Antoine turned to face her. The wind had reddened his cheeks, caught his hair and pushed it back from his face. He looked younger in this light, less armored.

"For what?"

"For thinking it was you." She forced herself to hold his gaze. "You offered me a room. You didn't have to. You could have sent me away that first night, and you didn't. I know that."

He was quiet for a moment. A gust of wind swept between them, lifting a fine spray of snow off the surface of the drift.

"You were scared," he said finally. "People say things when they're scared."

"It doesn't make it right."

"No." He shook his head. "But I understand it."

They stood there in the white silence, and Camille felt something shift inside her chest. It wasn't forgiveness, exactly—not quite trust, not yet. But it was something. A loosening. A small thaw.

They walked back to the house in silence, their snowshoes tracking a fresh set of paths across the untouched surface. Inside, Antoine stamped his boots on the mat and hung his coat on its hook. He looked at the woodstove, the low fire still burning from the night before, then at Camille.

"There's another room," he said carefully. "On the same floor as mine. It's been closed up, but the bed is good. The window faces the yard, not the woods."

Camille understood what he was offering. Not just a room, but proximity. Safety in numbers. In the night, with the power out and the snow falling thick and the footsteps circling the house, he had been a wall between her and the dark. And she had lain there breathing in the smell of woodsmoke and canvas, feeling foolish and grateful and something she didn't want to name.

She nodded. "I'll move my things."

He didn't smile, but something in his posture eased. "I'll help you."

The move took less than an hour. Her belongings were few—a duffel of clothes, her translation notes spread across the desk, the old ceramic bowl she had found in the kitchen on her first day and adopted for no reason she could articulate. The record player stayed in the other room. She'd carried it in from the car that first night, wrapped in her coat, and now it sat on a low table in the upstairs hall, gathering dust. She looked at it as she passed, and felt the ghost of the chanson her grandmother used to sing curling through her, a melody she couldn't quite catch.

The new room was smaller than the first, with a single window that looked out over the yard. The bed was narrower, the furniture plainer. But the walls were warmer—the room shared a wall with Antoine's—and when she pressed her hand to the plaster, she could feel the faint heat of the stove rising from below.

She hung her few things in the wardrobe, set her notes on the desk, placed the locket's empty tray on the nightstand. The absence of the locket itself was a hollow she kept stepping around, a wound she kept accidentally pressing.

Antoine appeared in the doorway. He had a tray in his hands—two bowls, steam rising off them, a hunk of bread, a small pot of jam.

"You haven't eaten," he said.

Camille looked at her hands. She couldn't remember the last time she had been hungry. The feeling had left her somewhere between the storm and the missing locket and the footsteps in the snow.

"Come downstairs," Antoine said. "It's warm there."

The kitchen had been transformed while they were upstairs. The stove was going, the kettle was on, and the table had been set with the good ceramic plates she'd only seen in the cabinet. The candles from the night before had been put away, but a lantern still burned at the center of the table, throwing a low, golden light across the wood.

Antoine set the tray down and pulled out a chair for her. She sat, and he sat across from her, close enough that their elbows almost touched when they reached for the bread.

They ate in silence at first. The soup was thick with vegetables and barley—a recipe she had seen him assemble from memory, without a cookbook. It tasted like winter, like patience, like something made to last through long nights.

"Tomorrow," Antoine said eventually, setting down his spoon, "I'll try the radio again. See if the storm's done any damage to the lines. And I'll check the satellite signal."

Camille looked at him. The satellite phone sat in its charger near the door, lit by a small red light. She had not touched it since the night she'd picked it up and put it down again, unresolved.

"Your editor," Antoine went on. "She'll be waiting for word from you."

"She'll be waiting," Camille agreed. "She's good at that."

Antoine was quiet for a moment, his eyes on the table. "If you need to make a call. If it's important. You should use it."

Camille felt her jaw tighten. The old pride rose in her chest, familiar as a scar, and she almost said something sharp. But she looked at Antoine's face—open, sincere, without condescension—and the words died in her throat.

She thought about her editor's voice over the crackling line, demanding movement on the Laroche project. She thought about the pages piling up unread on her desk, the sentences that wouldn't align, the deadline that had already passed. And she thought about this house, this strange man, this winter that had taken everything from her and given her something she was still too afraid to name.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

He nodded, and they returned to their soup.

Afterward, Camille washed the bowls while Antoine fed the stove. The snow had begun to fall again, a soft, desultory drift, settling over their tracks like a blank page. When she finished the dishes, she dried her hands and stood at the window, watching the flakes fall and disappear into the white.

Antoine came up beside her. He didn't speak. They stood together in the warmth of the kitchen, watching the quiet world outside, and for a long time, neither of them moved.

The silence was not the one they had carried through the night before—heavy with suspicion, tight with fear. It was deeper. Kinder. It was the silence of two people who had decided, without saying so, to stay.

Camille looked at Antoine's reflection in the window glass. He was looking out at the snow, his face soft in the lantern light.

"I'll call her tomorrow," Camille said. "My editor. If you'll show me how the phone works."

Antoine turned to meet her eyes in the glass. "I'll show you."

She nodded. He nodded.

The snow fell.