Read Chapter 18: The Mailbox

The morning light came thin and grey through the kitchen window, the kind of light that made the snow outside look like old porcelain. Camille had just poured herself a second coffee when Antoine came down the stairs wearing his heavy parka, his camera bag slung across his chest.

“I need to check the mailbox,” he said, already pulling on his mitts. “The plow should have cleared the lane by now.”

She hadn’t thought about the mailbox. It felt like a relic of another world, a thin metal link to everything beyond these frozen fields. Three weeks in, and she’d stopped expecting the outside world to reach her. The satellite phone had become her only tether, and even that felt fragile.

“Wait,” she said, setting down her mug. “I’ll come with you.”

Antoine paused, his hand on the door. He didn’t object, just gave a short nod and waited for her to grab her coat.

The lane stretched before them, walls of snow rising chest-high on either side. The plow had carved a narrow canyon through the drifts, and their boots crunched in the packed track. Camille’s breath fogged in front of her face, and she tucked her chin deeper into her scarf.

“How far?” she asked.

“Just past the bend.”

They walked in silence. The cold had a way of stripping away the need for conversation, reducing everything to the simple rhythm of movement. Camille found herself watching the way Antoine moved, economical and sure, his feet finding the easiest path without hesitation. He knew this land the way she knew the rhythm of a sentence, instinctively.

The mailbox stood at the end of the lane where it met the main road, a faded red box on a wooden post. Its door hung open, and a thin sleeve of ice clung to the hinge. Antoine reached inside and pulled out a small bundle—flyers, a utility bill, and one envelope that made him stop.

Camille saw the change in his body before she saw his face. The easy stride tightened, his shoulders drawing up as if bracing for impact. He stared at the envelope for a long moment.

“What is it?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. His mittened hand closed around the envelope, crumpling it into a tight ball. Then he shoved it into his coat pocket without ever breaking the seal.

“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s go back.”

But it wasn’t nothing. She’d seen the return address before he’d crushed it—a law firm in Montréal. Legault, Bouchard & Associés. The kind of name printed on serious letterhead, the kind of envelope that carried weight.

They walked back to the chalet without speaking. Camille’s mind turned the question over, but she knew better than to push. Whatever that envelope contained, Antoine had closed himself around it like a door slamming shut.

Inside, he hung his coat with more force than necessary, then stood in the kitchen doorway, staring at nothing. The crumpled envelope remained in his pocket.

“Antoine,” she said softly.

He flinched, as if he’d forgotten she was there. Then he pulled the envelope out, uncrumpled it roughly, and looked at it again.

“It’s from my father’s estate,” he said. “The lawyers. They’ve been sending letters for two years now.”

“What do they want?”

He laughed, a hollow sound. “That’s the thing. I don’t know. I’ve never opened one.”

Camille took a step toward him, not quite closing the distance. “Why not?”

Antoine looked down at the envelope in his hand, his thumb tracing the crease where he’d crumpled it. “Because my father—” He stopped. Started again. “When he died, there was a mess. Financial, legal. He wasn’t the kind of man who kept his affairs tidy. He was better at other things.”

He turned the envelope over, studying the back as if the answer might be written there.

“I thought if I ignored it, it would go away. The estate would dissolve, the lawyers would give up, and I could just… move on. But they don’t give up. They send another letter every few months. Each one feels like him reaching out from the grave, reminding me of all the things I didn’t fix.”

“What things?” Camille asked.

Antoine shook his head. “The house has a second mortgage. My father took it out years ago, when my mother left, to pay her half of the equity. He never told me. I found out when the bank called a month after the funeral.” He paused. “The payments eat everything I make. I can’t afford repairs, can’t afford to leave, can’t afford anything except to stay exactly where I am, holding onto a house that’s slowly bleeding dry.”

Camille absorbed this. The chalet that had seemed so solid, so permanent, suddenly felt different—less like a home and more like a weight Antoine carried every day.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

“Tell you what?” He met her eyes, and there was something raw in his gaze. “That I’m not the caretaker of some picturesque retreat? That I’m one bad season away from losing everything my father built?”

“I didn’t ask because I expected perfect,” she said. “I asked because we’ve been living together for weeks now. I thought we’d passed the point of secrets.”

Antoine’s jaw tightened. For a moment, she thought he would shut down again, retreat into the silence he wore like armor. But then his shoulders sagged slightly, and he set the envelope on the kitchen counter.

“The lawyers,” he said slowly, “they’re probably writing to tell me the debt has been sold. Or that they’re moving to seize the property. I don’t know which is worse.”

“Would it help if you knew?”

He looked at her, and something flickered in his expression—surprise, maybe, or gratitude that she hadn’t tried to fix it, just asked a question.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve spent so long being afraid of what’s in those letters that I stopped wondering if the truth might be easier than the not-knowing.”

Camille crossed to the counter and stood beside him. She didn’t touch him, but she didn’t move away either.

“When I was waiting for the news about my—” she stopped, swallowed. “When I was waiting to hear from the hospital about my parents, I was terrified. I thought if I didn’t know, if the phone didn’t ring, then somehow it wouldn’t be real. But it was already real. The waiting was just my way of pretending otherwise.”

Antoine looked at her, really looked, and she saw something shift behind his eyes. He reached for the envelope, picked it up again. Held it between them.

“What if it’s bad?” he asked.

“Then you’ll know,” she said. “And I’ll be here when you do.”

A long moment passed. Then Antoine slid his finger under the seal and tore the envelope open.

The letter inside was brief, a single page of formal legal language. Antoine read it twice, his forehead creasing. When he looked up, his expression was confused more than anything.

“It’s not the bank,” he said slowly. “It’s the estate executor. There’s something in my father’s safety deposit box that they need me to collect.”

“What is it?”

Antoine shook his head, reading the letter again. “It doesn’t say. Just that it requires my presence in Montréal to retrieve it.” He looked at the storm-dark sky through the window. “They mention it’s time-sensitive. They’ve been trying to reach me for months on another matter entirely—the executor is retiring and needs to close out the estate.”

On the horizon, the clouds were gathering again, heavy and grey.

“Time-sensitive,” Camille repeated. “But the roads are closing.”

“They reopen,” Antoine said, but his voice had lost its certainty. “They always reopen.”

“And if this storm is worse than the others?”

Antoine looked down at the letter in his hand, then at the window, then back at her. The envelope lay torn on the counter, between them like a question that had finally found its voice.