Read Chapter 20: Une Nuit Blanche

The clock on the nightstand glowed 2:47 AM when Camille gave up. She had been staring at the ceiling, translating the same sentence from the manuscript over and over in her head, each version worse than the last. Her grandmother's photograph lay face-down on the dresser, a weight she could not bear to look at in the dark.

She pulled on Antoine's borrowed wool cardigan—she had stopped asking, and he had stopped offering—and padded down the stairs. The house was still, but a thin seam of light bled from beneath the living room door. She hesitated. Then pushed it open.

Antoine stood with his back to her, bent over a tray of chemicals, the red safelight casting his silhouette in shades of crimson. The sharp tang of developer hit her nose, acrid and strangely alive. Photographs hung from a clothesline strung between two bookshelves, dripping gently.

"Can't sleep?" she asked.

He didn't startle. "Haven't tried."

She stepped closer, careful not to touch the drying prints. The images emerging in the tray resolved slowly—snowdrifts against a fence, the frozen river, a single raven perched on a bare maple branch. But at the bottom of the line, one print hung differently. Warmer.

Her.

She caught her breath. It was the window shot from three nights ago, when she had been reading by the lamplight, unaware. In black and white, her profile looked softer, younger. Less guarded.

"You took this without asking."

"Does that bother you?"

She considered the question more honestly than he probably expected. "I don't know yet."

He laughed low, a sound she had grown to recognize—rare and genuine. "That's the most honest thing you've said to me."

"It's three in the morning. My defenses are down."

He turned back to the tray, fishing a print out with tongs and sliding it into the stop bath. "Sit down, Camille. You look like you've been wrestling ghosts."

She sank onto the worn armchair across from his workspace. The red light made everything intimate, conspiratorial. "How do you develop without seeing the colors? I mean, you can't see the image fully until—"

"Until it's too late to change anything." He lifted a soaked print, studied it, hung it on the line. "It's like any act of faith. You commit, then you wait."

She watched him move through the ritual—precise, unhurried, his hands steady. Such a contrast to the man who scattered letters and ignored mail and wanted to destroy his father's portrait. Here, in his darkroom, he was competent in a way that surprised her.

"Tell me about your mother," she said. "Not the leaving. The before."

His hands paused. For a moment she thought she had overstepped, pushed too hard into territory he had only just admitted existed. But then he continued his work, his voice careful.

"She sang. Not professionally—in the kitchen, in the garden. Old Quebec songs, the ones they still teach in schools." He smiled at nothing. "I thought every mother sounded like that, like she was telling you a story with her voice. My father would come home from site visits and she'd sing louder, just to make him smile."

"What happened?"

"She stopped." He dropped a new negative into the enlarger. "The year I was twelve. She stopped singing, and then one morning she told my father she couldn't stay in a house that took his soul first. And she left."

The red light made the silence between them feel like a held breath.

"Do you know where she went?"

He shrugged. "I heard she remarried, moved to Vancouver. She sends a card at Christmas. I have a half-sister I've never met." The shutter clicked. "I could have kept in touch. I chose not to."

"Why?"

He turned to face her, his face halved by shadow. "Because my father never stopped looking for her in me. Every time I said crochet instead of droite, he'd go quiet, like he heard her accent in my voice. I thought if I stopped being anything like her, he'd stop looking."

"Did it work?"

"No. He just learned to hide it better." He returned to the enlarger. "What about you? Your parents were—what did you say—on a honeymoon?"

"Yes."

"How long were they married?"

"Thirty-one years." She pulled her knees to her chest in the chair. "They met when my mother was nineteen. She was an au pair in Lyon, he was a baker's apprentice. She told me he burned a hundred croissants the first week he knew her because he kept staring at her through the window instead of watching the oven."

Antoine laughed. "That's good. That's very good."

"They saved their money for ten years to afford that trip to Corsica. Their first proper honeymoon." She felt the familiar pressure behind her eyes and blinked it back. "I was supposed to be working on the anniversary edition of Les Misérables. Every time I think about it, I think—I could have been there. I could have starved myself to finish early and joined them."

"And what? Died on a mountain with them?"

The bluntness startled her. "That's a horrible thing to say."

"No. It's the only thing to say." He hung another print, his voice softer now. "Your parents didn't die because you weren't there. They died because a mountain shook. You carry guilt like it's a penance, but you didn't sin."

She wanted to argue. But the truth of it sat against her ribcage, heavy and undeniable. She had spent so long rehearsing her grief, shaping it into something she could apologize for, that she had forgotten it wasn't hers to deserve.

"How did you learn to think like that?" she asked.

"Grief counseling. Ironic, since I refuse to finish a portrait of my father." His mouth twisted. "I'm a walking contradiction. I tell you to forgive yourself but I can't forgive a canvas."

"Maybe forgiveness isn't the end of the story. Maybe it's just a step."

He looked at her then, and in the red light his expression shifted. Something unhurried, examining. The way he studied his negatives before committing them to paper.

"You sound like him tonight," Antoine said quietly. "Like you're building something quiet and essential. Like you don't need applause."

She flushed. It was the warmest thing he had ever said to her.

"You make me sound heroic. I'm just a translator with a deadline and a fear of being average."

"Being average—truly average, not the fear of it—that's people who stop trying. You haven't stopped. Even at three in the morning, you're sitting in a stranger's house wearing his sweater, thinking about manuscripts and mountains." He sat on the arm of her chair instead of returning to his work. "You are the opposite of average. You're just too close to yourself to see it."

The distance between them had shrunk without her noticing. She could smell him—developer and wood smoke and something clean beneath. His hand rested on the chair's arm, inches from her knee.

"Antoine," she began, but she didn't know what sentence she intended to finish.

The wind picked up outside, rattling the windowpanes. He glanced at the frost creeping across the glass. "Storm's starting to circle. Montréal might have to wait."

"Will you be trapped here with me that long?"

"I can think of worse fates." He said it lightly, but his eyes stayed on hers.

Two hours passed before either of them looked at a clock. They talked about her grandmother's locket—the photograph had been taken in 1958, in a garden that no longer existed. He described his father's handwriting, so precise it looked printed, and how much that precision had cost him. She discovered he had nearly studied in Paris once, had even been accepted into an art program, before his father's health declined.

When first light bled gray through the windows, the photographs had dried and the developer had gone cold. Antoine clicked off the safelight and stood in ordinary light for the first time in hours.

"Thank you," Camille said softly. "For the company. For the—" she gestured vaguely at her chest, meaning the weight that had lifted.

"Anytime."

"Any time like this? With the red light and the confession hour?"

His smile was slow, almost shy. "Especially then."

She laughed—a real laugh, loose and warm from her chest—and for a moment she could imagine a life where this was ordinary. Where she woke beside this man who printed her in silver and told her she was not average and fed her his dead father's recipes.

Then she stood up, ashamed of the fantasy. "I should try to translate something real before the coffee runs out."

At the door, his voice stopped her. "Camille."

She turned.

"The box in Montréal. The safety deposit box." He rubbed his jaw. "My father's lawyer also mentioned it contains a draft of my mother's will. She updated it last year. I don't know why she'd include it with his things."

The information landed like a stone in still water. "Are you going to go?"

"Depends if the storm clears." But his voice faltered on the word *storm*.

She nodded slowly, understanding something new. This was not just about closure with his father. The mother who abandoned him was still alive, still shaping events from the other side of the country—and Antoine had no idea what she wanted from him now.