Read Chapter 40: Spring Thaw

The thaw came the way everything in Quebec seemed to arrive—without apology, all at once. One morning the drifts still reached the windowsill of the chalet’s kitchen; by the following week, rivulets ran silver down the driveway and the air smelled of wet earth and pine needles long buried.

Camille knelt in the patch of ground beside the porch, her knees sinking into the black mud, and pressed a seed into the furrow she’d drawn with the handle of a trowel. Émile had driven over the week before with a sack of seeds and a skeptical look.

“You plant these before the last frost, they die,” he’d said, chewing on the stem of his pipe. “You plant them after, they die from the heat. You plant them in the window of luck, maybe you get lettuce.”

“And when is the window of luck?” she’d asked.

“When it rains and it doesn’t.” He’d shrugged and left the sack on the porch.

Camille had taken it as a blessing. She pushed another seed into the dark soil and patted it down with the flat of her palm. Behind her, the chalet’s front door opened and closed, and she heard Antoine’s boots on the wooden steps before she felt his presence settle beside her.

“You’re talking to them again,” he said.

“I’m telling them to grow. In French and English. In case they only understand one.”

He crouched beside her, elbows on his knees. He wore his father’s wool cardigan now, a faded grey thing with a leather patch at one elbow. He’d stopped avoiding it months ago. “And if they only understand Latin?”

“Then I will learn Latin.”

He smiled, and she felt it like the sun breaking through the thinning clouds—rare and warm. He reached out and ran a thumb along her jaw, leaving a smear of dirt. “You have mud on your face.”

“I have mud on my face, on my knees, under my fingernails,” she said. “I am becoming a Quebecoise.”

“You’ve been one for months. The mud is just decoration.”

She leaned into his touch, then turned back to her furrow. The garden was small, a narrow strip of turned earth where spring’s first hopeful weeds had already begun to push through. She’d measured it three times against the back of her hand before digging, a translator’s attention to proportion applied to soil. It was hers now—the chalet, the land, the man beside her. The paperwork had arrived from the estate lawyer in early March, a thick envelope of documents that Antoine had spread across the kitchen table and stared at until Camille took his hand and walked him through each clause. Notarized. Filed. The debts settled from the sale of a plot of land clear on the other side of the county, a parcel Antoine hadn’t even remembered owning but which his father had bought in the 1980s as an investment. The chalet was theirs. The word still made her breath catch when she thought it. *Theirs.*

“What are you photographing this morning?” she asked.

He tilted his head toward the far edge of the property, where the treeline met the clearing. A maple stood there, half its bark still sheathed in old ice, its crown beginning to show the faint pink haze of buds. “The last frost line,” he said. “It’s only there for a few hours after sunrise. If you blink, you miss it.”

“Will I be in it?”

“No. You’d be a distraction.”

“A welcome distraction.”

“A very welcome distraction.” He kissed her temple and stood, brushing his hands on his thighs. “Luc is coming for dinner. He said he’d bring fish.”

“He said that yesterday. He said it the day before. He brought nothing but his own good mood last time.”

“Then he’ll bring his good mood again, and we’ll eat soup.”

Camille laughed and pushed another seed into the soil. Antoine’s boots retreated across the porch, the studio door opened and shut, and she was alone with the earth again. The quiet settled over her like a blanket she had chosen rather than been given. She thought of Paris—the noise of it, the constant pressure of other people’s expectations, the way the city had always felt like a performance she was giving. Here, the only audience was the birds returning from wherever they had fled for the winter.

She finished the row and sat back on her heels. The portrait of Antoine’s father hung in the main room now, above the mantelpiece. Antoine had finished it—the same face she’d first glimpsed months ago, but different now, gentled by the work of a son who had finally stopped fighting what his father had been and started loving what he had tried to be. Every Sunday, Antoine wiped a soft cloth across the frame as if it were a relic. In a way, it was. In the bottom drawer of the desk, wrapped in the same chamois cloth his father had used to polish his camera lens, lay the locket. Camille had found it there one afternoon while looking for a stamp, and she’d held it for a long moment before putting it back, exactly as she’d found it. Some things deserved to be kept safe without needing to be worn.

The crunch of tires on gravel pulled her from her thoughts. She stood, brushing dirt from her knees, and saw Émile’s truck roll to a stop at the end of the driveway. He climbed out, a man built of angles and winter resignation, and raised a hand.

“Heard you were planting,” he called. “Brought you something.”

From the bed of the truck he lifted a wooden crate, weathered grey, the kind that had once carried apples from the orchards south of Montreal. He set it on the porch and pried open the lid. Inside, nestled in newspaper, were flats of seedlings—tiny green shoots, coiled and waiting.

“Started them in my windowsill a month back,” he said. “You’ll have better luck than seeds, this time of year.”

Camille stepped forward and ran a fingertip along the edge of a leaf. “Émile. You grew these for me?”

“I grew them for me. You just get the benefit.” He paused, then added, almost grudgingly, “Figured you’d be staying. No point letting the good ones rot when I can watch you kill them instead.”

Her laugh came out wet. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving fresh mud across her cheek. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Plant them. That’s thanks enough.” He nodded toward the house. “Luc been by?”

“He’s coming for dinner. Bearing fish. Allegedly.”

“Allegedly,” Émile repeated, and the word came out as dry as the newspaper the seedlings were wrapped in. “I’ll come back tonight and eat his allegations.”

He climbed into the truck and rolled away, leaving Camille standing beside the crate. She lifted the flat of tomato seedlings and carried it to the turned earth, settling it in the sun before she began to dig again. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She ignored it. Her editor had been sending increasingly cheerful emails about the third book in the series—*the third*, which meant the first had sold well, which meant the second was already in production, which meant the publisher’s contract stretched ahead of her like a road she had chosen to walk and would never have to turn back from. Camille Moreau, translator. Camille Moreau, resident of a chalet in the woods of Quebec. Camille Moreau, fiancée of a photographer whose work was now being exhibited in a small gallery in Montreal, of all places. The pieces had come together in a way she hadn’t dared hope for, each one clicking into place like a lock finding its key.

The low sun warmed her shoulders. She heard the studio door open again, heard Antoine’s step on the gravel, and turned to find him standing with his camera in his hand, eyes bright through the viewfinder.

“I thought I said no distractions,” she said.

“I changed my mind.” The shutter clicked. “Mud on your face. Morning light. You’re going to want this one later.”

She smiled at the lens, and the shutter clicked again. Behind him, the maple tree had shed its last collar of ice, and the buds were opening, small and green, in the spring light. Camille pressed another seedling into the earth, felt it take hold, and looked up at the man who would come to the door of the house she now called home.

“Are you going to take pictures of me all day?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said simply. “I have a lot of catching up to do.”

The words landed in her chest, warm as the soil in her hands. She didn’t need to say anything more. The garden was planted. The portrait hung proud. The locket waited in its drawer, safe. And the man she loved stood in the spring light, photographing her as she grew roots in a place that had once felt like exile and now felt like the only truth she knew.

From the gravel road, wheels again. Luc’s truck appeared, fish in the back, a grin on his face, the brother restored to his story. And Camille Moreau—late of Paris, now of a chalet in the northern woods—rose to her feet, wiped her hands on her jeans, and went to welcome him home.