Read Chapter 36: Saving Luc

The headlights carved a dim tunnel through the white that had swallowed the world. Camille gripped the door handle as the borrowed truck groaned over another drift, the engine a low animal complaint. Antoine’s knuckles were white on the wheel, his jaw set, his eyes fixed on the thin, hand-drawn lines of Magalie’s map that trembled on the dashboard.

“A kilometer more,” he said, voice hoarse from hours of silence. “The logging road splits at a dead spruce. We go left.”

Camille nodded, not trusting her voice. The storm had thinned to a bitter, sifting snow, but the cold had bitten deeper, seeping through the truck’s cracked seals. They had passed the last plowed road two hours ago. Since then, it had been only them and the endless, swallowing forest.

The headlights caught the split, the dead spruce leaning like a weary sentinel. Antoine turned the wheel, and the truck slid, caught, then clawed forward. The trees pressed closer, their branches clutching at the roof in scraping whispers. Then the beams opened onto a clearing, and a low, dark shape huddled at its edge—a cabin, half-buried in snow, a curl of smoke rising from its stovepipe like a single defiant breath.

They piled out into the silent cold. The door was unlocked. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of woodsmoke, old coffee, and something metallic—fear. A man sat at a rough-hewn table, a bottle of whiskey before him, untouched. He had Antoine’s eyes, the same sharp blue, but hollowed out, rimmed with red. Luc.

He looked up, and his face did not register shock so much as a weary recognition of fate finally catching up.

“Antoine.” His voice was gravel. “You found me.”

“We need to talk,” Antoine said, his own voice tight. “Before a warrant does.”

The tale came out in halting, shameful chunks. The debts had started small, a poker game in Montreal that snowballed into loans with names that had no phone numbers, only enforcers. He’d borrowed against his brother’s inheritance, his father’s house, hoping to win it back. When he couldn’t pay, he fled. Faked his death to protect his brother, to give the collectors no leverage. He’d been hiding here for months, feeding himself on canned beans and regret.

“I should have been braver,” Luc whispered, staring at his hands. “I left you to face them alone.”

Antoine stood frozen, a storm of anger and pity warring on his face. Camille watched him, her heart a fist in her chest. She saw the moment he chose. He walked over and sat down across from his brother.

“You’re not alone anymore,” he said. “We’re going to fix this. Together.”

But guilt was not the only foe. The journey back would be the harder one. The storm had settled into a deceptive quiet, but the roads were still a white lie. And there was no guarantee the warrant would be forgotten. They drove through the night, Luc crammed in the back, wrapped in a spare blanket, silent. Every rut, every groan of the suspension felt like a judgment.

They reached Trois-Rivières in the dead hours, a small town with a single, tired-looking police station. Antoine parked. He looked at his brother, then at Camille.

“This is the part I can’t talk us out of,” he said.

Inside, the desk sergeant looked up, bored. Antoine laid it all out—the warrant, the debts, the fake death, the man hiding in the truck. The sergeant blinked, then made a call. They waited in hard plastic chairs as dawn leaked grey light through the windows.

Then a door opened, and a detective in a rumpled suit beckoned them in. Luc’s confession was halting, but complete. He produced a crumpled folder from his coat—bank records, debt notices, a signed confession he’d written months ago and never had the courage to send. The detective read it twice, then leaned back.

“You know there are easier ways to clear a name than driving through a blizzard to fetch your own ghost,” he said, but there was a hint of a smile. He scribbled something on a form. “The warrant is rescinded, pending verification. For now, you’re a witness, not a suspect. Keep your brother close.”

They emerged into a clear, bright morning, the world scrubbed clean and crystalline. Antoine and Luc stood on the steps, breathing the cold air like men released from prison. Camille hung back, letting them have their moment. Antoine turned, and his eyes found her. He walked over, and without a word, pulled her into an embrace so tight she could feel his heart hammering against hers.

“We did it,” he murmured into her hair.

“You did it,” she whispered. “You found a way to save him.”

He pulled back, his gaze soft, tracing her face as if seeing it for the first time in full light. “I had a compass pointing north,” he said. “I just didn’t know it yet.”

A shout from behind made them turn. Luc was on his phone, his voice rising with a familiar, childish excitement—he was talking to Magalie, telling her he was alive, that he was coming home. The town, Saint-Rémi, would know soon. The story would spread, the truth unraveling the lie.

As the sun lifted higher, its light spilling gold over the snow, Camille felt something settle in her chest—a warmth that had nothing to do with the borrowed coat. He was not a fugitive anymore. He was just a man, standing in the light, his brother beside him, and for this one bright, frozen moment, the world had tilted back toward right.

She watched him. And in the clarity of that cold morning, she understood her own heart was no longer lost in translation.