Read Chapter 6: The Neighbor's Warning

The knock came not at the front door but at the side of the chalet, a heavy thudding that made Camille’s pen skid across her manuscript. She looked up. Antoine was already on his feet, camera still around his neck, moving past her with a quiet ease that suggested he recognized the rhythm of the visitor.

She heard the door open, then a voice—a man’s voice, gravel-thick and fast, like stones rolling downhill. Antoine’s reply was brief, in the same swift French, and then footsteps crossed the entryway. A moment later, Antoine appeared in the living room doorway, his expression unreadable.

“Marcel from the farm up the road. He needs a wrench.”

Camille rose instinctively, smoothing her sweater. Behind Antoine stood an old man with a face like crumpled leather, his eyes bright and curious beneath a wool cap crusted with frost. He was shorter than Antoine, broad in the shoulders, and he clutched a stained canvas bag in one hand. He saw Camille and stopped mid-step, then broke into a wide grin.

“Ah, la Parisienne!” he said, his voice booming. “C’est elle, la fille dans la neige, hein?”

Camille caught the gist—*the girl in the snow*—and offered a tentative smile. “Camille. Enchantée.”

Marcel ignored her politeness and launched into a torrent of speech so fast Camille could barely catch the contours of it. He was looking at Antoine, his hands moving, the words tumbling out in a dialect that seemed to swallow its own vowels. She caught fragments: *machine*, *Luc*, *toujours pas*, *bois derrière le champ*. Something about the missing snowmobile, she thought, and someone named Luc, and the woods behind a field.

Antoine’s face went still. He answered in the same rapid cadence, short and clipped, and Camille caught the word *tranquille*—peaceful, or quiet—and something that sounded like *rien à craindre*. She watched his jaw set. He was dismissing whatever Marcel was saying.

But Marcel wasn’t finished. He turned to Camille directly, pointing at her with a mittened hand, and now his voice slowed just slightly, as if he were speaking to a child. “Vous restez ici? Toute la semaine?”

“Oui, jusqu’à ce que la route…,” Camille began, but Marcel cut her off with a wave.

“Faites attention. Y’a du monde qui voudrait pas vous voir ici.” His accent was thick, but the meaning broke through like light through a crack: *Some people wouldn't want you here.*

A chill went through her that had nothing to do with the draft. “Pourquoi?”

Marcel opened his mouth, but Antoine stepped between them, a wall of quiet urgency. He spoke quickly, firmly, and Camille caught the word *assez*—enough. There was steel in his tone she hadn’t heard before. Marcel held up both hands in surrender, muttering something that sounded like an apology, and followed Antoine toward the workshop at the back of the chalet.

Camille stood alone in the living room, the words still turning over in her mind. *Some people wouldn't want you here.* Who? And why? She thought of the cleanly sliced strap on her snowshoe, the deliberate cut that had stranded her in the cold. A warning, maybe. Or a message meant for him.

When Antoine returned a few minutes later, he was alone. He picked up the kettle without meeting her eyes and began filling it at the sink.

“He needed a wrench,” Antoine said, as if that explained anything.

“He mentioned Luc.” Camille kept her voice even. “And a machine. He said someone wouldn’t want me here.”

Antoine’s back stiffened. He set the kettle down carefully, then turned. His face was a mask, but she had learned to read the shadow beneath it. “Marcel talks too much when he’s cold. He meant nothing by it.”

“He meant something.” Camille stepped closer, not letting him retreat. “Antoine, the snowshoe. The cut. And now an old man tells me to be careful. Who is Luc?”

Antoine’s gaze flickered to the window, where the winter light was already fading to a bruised blue. He ran a hand over his jaw, and she saw the calculation in his eyes—how much to give her, how much to hold back.

“Luc is a friend,” he said slowly. “He was supposed to come by last week. He never did.”

“And the machine?”

A long pause. When he spoke, his voice was low, careful. “His snowmobile was found on my property. Abandoned, with the key still in it. No sign of him since.”

The words hung in the cold air between them. Camille felt the shape of them, the weight. A missing man. A forgotten machine. She thought of the empty space she’d noticed in the shed that morning, the rectangular shadow on the floor where something wide and heavy should have been.

“That’s why Marcel’s warning?” she asked. “He thinks Luc’s disappearance is connected to me being here?”

Antoine’s jaw tightened. “Marcel thinks everything is connected. It’s the way old men in small towns talk. They take the weather personally and the dark more personally still.”

“But you don’t think it’s a coincidence.” It wasn’t a question.

He turned away from her, reaching for the kettle again. “I think there are things in the woods that don’t need a storm to hide them.”

“Antoine.” She said his name softly, a request. He stopped, but didn’t turn. “You carried me out of the snow. You gave me your own snowshoes. You don’t get to keep the rest of the story to yourself now.”

He was quiet for a long moment. The kettle clicked as the burner caught. Then he turned, and for the first time since she’d arrived, she saw something crack in his careful composure—a fissure, thin and dark, running through the ice he kept around himself.

“My father disappeared too,” he said. “Twenty-one years ago. Walked into the woods with his camera and never came back. They found the camera three weeks later. It still had film in it. Every frame blank.” He paused, and the muscle in his jaw jumped. “So yes. I don’t believe in simple endings anymore.”

Camille felt the breath leave her lungs. The unfinished portrait. The half-blank face. She’d thought it was grief for a man already gone, not the frozen vigil of a son who never learned how. She opened her mouth, but no words came.

Antoine filled the kettle and placed it back on the stove, his movements deliberate and calm, as if he hadn’t just handed her a piece of his soul. “Marcel means well,” he said, his voice level again. “But he’s old, and he’s scared, and he tells stories to keep the darkness at arm’s length. Don’t let him plant his fears in you.”

“And you?” Camille asked. “What do you do to keep the darkness at arm’s length?”

He didn’t answer. But his hand drifted to the camera at his chest, his fingers resting on the lens, and she understood: he didn’t fight the darkness. He hid behind it—a viewfinder, a frame, a photograph of a life he could only observe, never live.

Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the window. Camille stood there in the warming kitchen, a Parisian translator snowed in with a man who photographed ghosts, and for the first time she didn’t feel like a guest in a stranger’s home. She felt like a witness to a story that was still writing itself.

“Marcel said he needed a wrench,” she said quietly. “Did you give him one?”

Antoine pulled a cup from the cupboard. “I handed him a wrench. He put it in his bag and left.” He glanced at her. “He came to warn me, Camille. He didn’t come for the tool. The tool was an excuse.”

“To warn you about me?” Her pulse quickened.

“To warn me about us.” He poured the water, a plume of steam rising into the cold air. “To tell me that whoever cut your snowshoe is still out there. And that when the road clears, I should send you back to Montreal and forget I ever opened my door.”

Camille crossed her arms. “You going to follow that advice?”

Antoine’s eyes met hers—gold, sharp, and unreadable. “I opened my door,” he said. “But I don’t know yet if I’m ready to let you through it.”

---