Read Chapter 39: A Winter Proposal

The truck’s heater wheezed its last warm breath as Antoine killed the engine. Frost crackled along the windshield seams, and beyond the glass, the lake lay like a sheet of hammered silver under the deep violet sky.

Camille pulled her collar up and stepped out. The cold hit her squarely, that dry, crystalline Quebec cold that she’d learned to respect over these months. Her boots sank two inches into the snowpack. She heard Antoine’s door slam, then his footsteps approaching.

“You brought me all the way out here to show me a frozen lake?” she asked, breath pluming.

“Not just a lake.” He set the camera bag on the hood of the truck but didn’t unzip it. Instead he looked up, and she followed his gaze.

The sky was moving. Ribbons of green light unspooled across the black, shifting and pulsing like something alive. They deepened into violet at the edges, caught themselves in folds, and spread again. Camille had seen photographs of the aurora borealis. She’d never imagined it could move like this, that the sky itself could dance.

“Antoine,” she breathed.

“Wait. It gets better.”

He led her down the slope toward the shore, where the snow had been packed smooth by wind. The ice beneath was clear enough to show dark water moving underneath, patient and slow. At the lake’s edge stood a small wooden bench, the kind someone had built by hand and left to the seasons. Dusted with snow, it looked like it had been waiting for this exact moment.

He brushed the seat with his mitt, and she sat. Her heart had picked up a strange rhythm, half nervous, half something she couldn’t name.

The aurora climbed higher. In the green wash of light, Antoine’s face looked younger, almost boyish despite the beard and the lines around his eyes. He didn’t kneel. He simply stood before her, close enough that she could smell the woodsmoke in his coat.

“I’ve been trying to find the right words for a week,” he said. “Everything I’ve learned about you—you’re precise. You choose your words like they matter.”

“They do matter.”

“I know. And that’s why I keep failing, because I don’t have the right words in French or English. I only know how I feel, and it doesn’t fit into grammar.”

She laughed softly. “Try anyway.”

He reached into his inner pocket and pulled out a small box—worn leather, clearly old. Her breath caught. He opened it, and inside sat a ring of silver, thin and unadorned, with a small stone that caught the green light and threw it back in a blaze of white.

“It was my mother’s,” he said. “My father kept it in a drawer. He never told me why. When I found it after he died, I thought maybe he’d been waiting for the right person to give it to.” He paused, the fragility in his voice making her throat tighten. “I think that person is you.”

The aurora swelled above them, washing the ice in waves of pale fire. Camille stared at the ring, then at Antoine’s face, at the uncertainty there—for all his quiet strength, he was afraid of her answer.

“Camille,” he said, and his voice dropped. “Stay. Not for the winter. Not for a season. Stay with me, in the chalet, in this place. Let it be home. Be it with me.”

The words she’d been carrying for weeks surfaced. She’d practiced them in her head a hundred times, in the dark of her room, in the truck, in the quiet moments when he thought she was reading. But now that the moment had come, she didn’t need the speech.

“Yes,” she said.

His eyes widened. “Yes?”

“Yes, I’ll stay. I’ll stay for as long as you’ll have me. For good, if you mean it.”

“I mean it.” He exhaled a laugh that fogged into the cold. “God, I mean it.”

He slid the ring onto her finger. It fit perfectly, cool silver that warmed against her skin. She looked at her hand, at the light playing off the stone, and felt something settle in her chest. A long-held tension, a quiet fear that she would always be passing through, finally let go.

“There’s a question you haven’t answered,” he said.

“Which one?”

“What made you say yes?” He was smiling now, but the question was genuine.

She considered lying, or deflecting with wit. Instead she told him the truth. “Because in Paris, I knew every street, every Metro stop, every café menu by heart. And I never once felt like I belonged. Here, I don’t know the roads. I don’t know the winter names for half the birds. I get lost on the way to the grocery store.” She turned her hand, watching the ring catch the southern lights. “And somehow, this is the first place I’ve ever felt at home.”

He didn’t speak. He pulled her up from the bench and folded her into his coat, his chin resting on the top of her head. The aurora burned above them, indifferent and magnificent. And she stood there, held by him, held by the cold and the light and the astonishing truth that she, Camille Moreau of Paris, had chosen a frozen lake in Quebec.

The ice groaned far out, a deep sound that traveled up through her boots. In the spring, the lake would thaw. The chalet’s roof would shed its snow, the river would rise, and the world she’d walked into in November would give way to something greener. She would still be here. She would have a garden, he’d joked once. She’d dismissed it.

Now she thought, maybe.

“There’s one thing I need to tell you,” she said against his chest.

“What’s that?”

“I want to sign a lease. We have to be official about this.” She tilted her head up, grinning. “The estate. The chalet. I can’t just freeload forever.”

He laughed, a full sound she rarely got from him. “You want to be my tenant?”

“I want to be your partner. With paperwork.”

“That’s the most Parisian thing you’ve ever said.”

“I’m a translator. I like terms and conditions.” She stepped back and fixed him with a mock-serious look. “And I want it in writing that you’ll take me out to see the northern lights at least once a year.”

He’d unzipped his camera bag. The shutter clicked, and in the green glow, she knew he’d captured the moment—her wild hair, the silver ring, the frozen lake behind her, the sky on fire.

“I can do that,” he said. “I might even throw in a picnic on the ice.”

“In this weather?”

“In this weather.”

The aurora pulsed again, and she turned her face to it, letting the cold burn her cheeks. In Paris, she had never looked up at the sky. There was too much else to attend to—the next manuscript, the next deadline, the next perfectly chosen word. Standing here, she understood she’d been holding her life at a distance, reviewing it like a draft, waiting for the revision that would make it right.

No more revisions, she thought. This is the final version.

Antoine moved behind her, setting up the tripod. “One more shot,” he said. “Together.”

She walked to him, tucked herself under his arm, and faced the camera. He set the timer, and they waited in the whirring silence. When the shutter clicked, they were both laughing, breath clouding together in the cold, two figures under a winter sky.

“That one’s going on the wall,” she said.

“It’s not even developed yet.”

“It’s going on the wall anyway.”

He kissed her temple, warm breath against frozen skin. “Welcome home, Camille.”

She looked out over the lake, at the light moving on the ice, at the ring on her finger, at the man beside her who had not once told her she was too much, too precise, too strange. Who had instead shown her, in his unpolished French, that she had been the one holding herself at arm’s length all along.

“I’m home,” she said.