Read Chapter 2: The Locket's Glint

The coffee was bitter enough to make her wince, which at least woke her up properly.

Camille wrapped both hands around the ceramic mug, letting the heat bleed into her palms. Outside, the world had turned to white noise—snow drifted past the window in a relentless diagonal, erasing the jagged silhouette of the pines she'd glimpsed the night before. Somewhere under all of that sat her rental car, buried like a bad decision.

Antoine stood at the counter with his back to her, slicing bread with a methodical steadiness. He moved like a man used to being alone: no wasted gestures, no attempt to fill the silence. The repaired camera sat on the table between them like a third guest, its lens catching pale morning light.

"You drink it black," he said. Not a question.

"In Paris, we say *noir*." She took another sip. "It sounds less severe."

That almost earned a smile. Almost. He set the bread on a wooden board with a wedge of pale cheese that smelled of barns and grass. Quebec was showing off, she thought. Even its food had an accent.

"I could make eggs," he offered.

"Your French is better than my cooking. I'll watch."

He didn't argue, which she found both disappointing and refreshing. Her ex would have made a performance of refusing her help. Antoine simply cracked three eggs into a cast-iron pan, added a knob of butter, and let the kitchen fill with the sound of them hitting hot metal.

Camille pulled her phone from her pocket again, though she'd stopped pretending to check for service. The screen glowed blank. No bars. No signal. No timeline of her life streaming past in updates and photographs. In Paris, that would have felt like suffocation. Here, buried under snow in the home of a man who hadn't once asked her name, it felt almost like a gift. Almost.

From her bag, she retrieved her wallet. The leather was worn soft from years of the same gesture—flipping to the plastic sleeve where the photograph lived, aged and slightly creased along the fold. Rue Cler, seen through the arch of the Eiffel Tower, taken on a morning when the street market was just setting up and the baker had waved at her grandmother.

"Thirteen years ago," Camille said, setting the wallet flat on the table. "My grandmother took me there every summer. We'd buy cheese and argue about which bread was best."

Antoine glanced over his shoulder, spatula mid-air. He looked at the photo, then at her, as if deciding whether to commit to curiosity. He committed. He crossed the room and leaned down, close enough for her to catch the cedar scent of his sweater.

"Cler," he said. "Old Paris."

"You know it."

"I've seen photographs." He straightened, but didn't step away. His gaze had snagged on something. She followed it down to her chest, where the chain had slipped free of her collar, and the locket—her grandmother's silver locket, the one with the faint engraving of a bird mid-flight—caught the grey light in a gleam that seemed almost theatrical.

He said nothing.

But Camille read silence better than most texts. She'd spent a decade translating meaning from between words, finding the weight of what wasn't said. There was weight here, pressing down like the snow on the rooftop.

"You know what it is?" she asked.

He shook his head slowly. "Just—" He stopped. Started again. "It's bright." He turned back to the stove, and the eggs hissed as if scolding him for his evasion.

Camille tucked the locket back beneath her sweater. The silver was cool against her skin. Her grandmother had pressed it into her palm on the last visit, before the cancer took her—*Pour une femme qui traduit le monde, tu devrais aussi savoir te traduire toi-même.* For a woman who translates the world, you should learn to translate yourself. She'd never fully understood that line. She'd spent the years since collecting languages, collecting phrases, collecting other people's stories. Her own she kept locked tight, silver against sternum.

"Is there a road out?" she asked, grateful for the change in topic.

The eggs went onto two plates, runny in the center, perfect at the edges. Antoine slid one across the table toward her. "The plow will hit the main road by tomorrow. Your car, though—" He chewed. "It's in the ditch past the second turn. Even if you freed it, you'd need new tires for the rest of the season."

"New tires for the rest of the season." She echoed the words like she was testing their translation. "That sounds like I'm staying past the end of the week."

"You're staying past the end of the week." He said it flat, without malice. "The forecast shows another system Tuesday. Then another Thursday. Saint-Antoine-de-l'Isle gets four months of weather that makes people forget why they moved here. You'll learn to love it or you'll learn to leave. You can't just—pass through."

"I'm not passing through." She traced the rim of her mug. "I was supposed to be in Quebec City for six weeks. A literary festival. They wanted me to translate a poet, live, onstage. Two weeks of preparation left."

"So you're needed."

"*You* need me," she said. "The poet needs me. The festival needs me. None of it moves until I'm there."

"And yet."

And yet. The phrase hung in the steam rising from her eggs. And yet she was here. And yet the world would spin on without her intervention. And yet—the terrifying thought—perhaps it always had.

Camille ate in silence, and the cheese softened something in her chest that she hadn't realized was rigid. The bread was dense and dark, nothing like the airy baguettes from Rue Cler. But it filled a space. She went back for a second slice without asking.

---

By mid-morning, the snow had eased to a listless drift, and Camille had made her decision.

"A week," she announced from the kitchen doorway. Antoine was bent over the camera at the table, a jeweler's loupe held to one eye. He didn't flinch.

"The snow won't clear in a week."

"The main road will clear. I can get a tow, find a room in town, work from there until my car's fixed."

"Town's eighteen kilometers that way." He gestured vaguely with a screwdriver. "One motel. Two rooms. The other is rented by a hunter who smells like his kill. You'll be sharing a wall with a man who guts deer in the parking lot."

She crossed her arms. "And here I'm sharing a roof with a man who hasn't asked my name."

"Antoine Bergeron."

"Camille Moreau." She matched his flat tone. "Now we're introduced."

He nodded, and for a moment there was something like approval in his eyes. Then he went back to the camera. But his mouth had relaxed, a fraction, and Camille counted it as a win.

"I'll stay," she said, though he'd already turned away. "A week. When the road clears, I'll get my car sorted, and I'll pay you for the room and the food."

"No charge."

"I insist."

"No charge, *Camille*." He said her name carefully, like a word from a language he was still learning. "You're not a guest. You're a consequence of weather. Neither of us chose it. But I won't take money for the snow."

She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. She chose her battles; one glance at his jaw told her this was bedrock.

"Then I'll cook," she said. "My grandmother didn't teach me bread, but she taught me a beef bourguignon that would make your plow driver weep."

Something moved in his expression, too quick to name, then smoothed over. "Deal."

---

The corner of the living room was warm, tucked against the wood stove that Antoine fed with a lazy rhythm throughout the afternoon. He'd cleared a small desk for her, dusted it with the sleeve of his flannel, set up a chair he'd dragged from the bedroom. The gesture was so simple, so practical, that it took her a moment to register its meaning: he was making space for her.

She unpacked her laptop, the draft of the poet's manuscript, and her copy of the original—the poet's own hand, annotated and hopeful. In Paris, she worked from her apartment with a view of chimney pots and the sounds of traffic. Here, the only sounds were the shifting of snow on the roof and the occasional crank of the stove, and Antoine moving quietly in the kitchen, making tea he'd set beside her without asking if she wanted it.

She didn't know how to feel about that. She felt it anyway.

Around three, the light changed. The grey brightened to gold—a break in the cloud cover—and the snowfield outside turned luminous, almost molten. Camille looked up from the page, and there it was: the landscape, unveiled. Black trees, white ground, a sky the color of old pewter and new hope.

She watched it for a long moment.

The locket swung free of her collar again, and she caught it in her palm, pressing the cool silver to her lips without thinking. Through the window, she saw her reflection—a Frenchwoman in a borrowed sweater, sitting in a stranger's house, with nowhere to be until the world remembered her.

The poet's words on the page blurred. Then cleared.

*Winter light doesn't polish the world,* she'd written. *It reveals what was always there, waiting for enough shadow to make it visible.*

Camille looked up. Antoine was at the window, watching the same light, his expression unguarded in a way she didn't think he'd allow if he knew she was looking. The camera sat on the table, still in pieces.

She thought about the locket. About the way he'd paused. About the questions he wasn't asking.

She started translating again.