Read Chapter 31: Snowbound Trust

The wind had been building all afternoon, a low moan that rattled the chalet’s windowpanes like a persistent beggar. By the time the light faded to a bruised purple, the snow was coming sideways, erasing the shed, then the treeline, then the world itself.

Camille stood at the kitchen window, watching their tire tracks disappear under a fresh white shroud. The Jeep was a ghost now, a faint hump of metal slowly being buried alive. She hugged her arms to her chest.

“We’re not going anywhere,” she said, more to the storm than to Antoine.

Antoine had been quiet since they’d hung up on Bouchard. He sat at the table with the torn photograph between his fingers, turning it over and over like a talisman. Magalie Roy’s face—young, open, laughing into Luc’s shoulder—mocked them from the past.

“No,” he said finally. “Not tonight. Not tomorrow either, if this keeps up.”

Camille turned to him. “And the warrant?”

“Bouchard can’t serve a warrant he can’t drive through.” He set the photo down and rubbed his eyes. “We have two days, maybe three. Then he’ll send a plow ahead of the police car.”

Two days. Two days trapped with Antoine Moreau and a question that hung between them like a third person in the room.

The chalet settled around them as the storm deepened. Antoine banked the wood stove and brought in an armload of split logs, stacking them beside the hearth with practiced ease. Camille made dinner—a simple pot of root vegetable soup she improvised from the pantry—and they ate in silence, the wind filling the space where conversation should have been.

It was Antoine who finally broke.

“You must think I’m a fool,” he said, pushing his empty bowl away. “Failing to notice my own father was in trouble. Failing to notice someone was setting me up.”

“I think you’re grieving,” Camille said carefully. “Grief is not the same as foolishness.”

He let out a short, humorless laugh. “In Quebec, we have a saying. ‘On est mieux seul que mal accompagné.’ Better alone than in bad company.” He looked at her, his dark eyes catching the firelight. “I’ve been telling myself that for a long time. But I’m not so sure anymore.”

Camille’s throat tightened. She reached for her glass of water, for something to do with her hands. “I know that saying too. I’ve lived by it. Paris, my work, my apartment. Everything ordered and mine.” She paused. “It’s lonely, isn’t it? Being right all the time.”

Antoine’s mouth twitched. “I wouldn’t know. I’m never right.”

She almost laughed. Then something in his expression shifted, the dry humor draining away.

“When I first saw you at the bus stop,” he said, “I thought, this woman is going to be trouble. Too much city in her. Too much perfume and opinions.”

“And now?” Camille asked, her voice quieter than she intended.

He stood and crossed to the window, his back to her. The glass was frosted over, a pane of white nothing. “Now I think I was wrong about you. You’re not too much city. You’re too much… *you*.” He turned. “And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since I found you half-frozen in the snow with my mother’s coat on your shoulders.”

The moment hung in the air, delicate as frost. Camille stood slowly, her legs unsteady. She crossed the room until she was close enough to see the pulse beating in his jaw.

“I was wrong about you too,” she said. “I thought you were gruff. Unfeeling. A man who pushed people away because he didn’t want to be bothered.”

“And now?”

She reached out and touched his face, her palm against the sharp angle of his cheek. He hadn’t shaved in two days, and the stubble scratched her skin. She didn’t pull back.

“Now I think you push people away because you’re terrified of what happens when you let them in.”

Antoine exhaled, a shuddering breath, and his hand came up to cover hers. “I’m more scared of you leaving than of staying.”

The wind threw itself against the chalet, rattling the door in its frame. Outside, the storm was erasing all roads, all signs of passage. In here, there was only firelight and warmth and the sound of two people breathing closer than they had ever stood before.

Antoine lowered his forehead to hers. “Camille.” He said her name like a prayer, like a question.

She answered by closing the distance between them.

His kiss was hesitant at first—gentle, testing. She felt the restraint in his fingers as they cradled her face, the care in the way he held her as if she were something precious and breakable. Then the storm outside became a distant thing, a rumble under the floorboards, and she kissed him back with all the words she hadn’t been able to say in a language he’d understand.

When they finally pulled apart, they were both trembling. Antoine rested his forehead against hers again, a shaky laugh escaping him.

“Two days,” he said. “That’s all we have?”

“Maybe less,” she murmured. “The storm could lift sooner.”

He kissed her again, quicker this time, a brush of warmth. “Then we should stop wasting time.”

They didn’t waste it. Not that night. The fire burned low and they talked in the darkness, sprawled on the sheepskin rug before the hearth. He told her about his mother, the stories she used to tell about immigrating to this wild place from a small village in France. Camille told him about her father’s library in Paris, the smell of old paper and cigarette smoke, the way he’d read to her in Italian because he said French was for strangers and Italian was for family.

They fell asleep tangled in blankets on the floor, and when Camille woke, the storm had passed. Morning light poured through the windows, crystalline and sharp, painting the world in blinding white.

Antoine was already awake, sitting up and staring at the window. His face was pale.

“What is it?” Camille asked, sitting up, pulling the blanket to her chest.

He didn’t answer. He was holding the torn photograph of Magalie Roy. His thumb rested on the address written in pencil on the back.

Except it wasn’t a pencil anymore. It had been faint, almost invisible in the poor cabin light. But in the morning sun, a second address had appeared—one Camille hadn’t seen before. A smaller scrawl beneath the first, partially erased, like someone had tried to scratch it out.

Antoine turned it so she could see. “This isn’t Magalie’s address,” he said, his voice rough. “This is my father’s handwriting.”

Camille squinted at the faint lines. *Hôtel Marquis, Montréal—Chambre 14. 3 juin.*

“June third,” she said. “What happened on June third?”

Antoine’s jaw tightened. “That’s the day my father ‘died’ last winter.”

He looked at her, and the warmth that had filled the room moments before drained away.

“Except he wasn’t dead,” Antoine said slowly. “He was in Montreal. In a hotel room. With Magalie.” He swallowed. “And I think he’s still alive.”