Read Chapter 8: Broken Glasses

The dawn came gray and soft, the kind of light that made the snow look like old linen. Camille had been up for an hour before Antoine knocked, translating the same sentence four times and crossing out all four attempts. Her eyes burned. She reached for her reading glasses on the nightstand, but they weren't there.

She patted the quilt. Then the pillow. Then, with a sinking realization, she shifted her weight and heard the crack.

A clean snap. The bridge of the glasses had split in two, and the left lens lay separated from the frame like a dead insect on the bedsheet. Camille stared at it, not breathing. Then she picked up the pieces, fitted them together, watched them fall apart again in her palm.

"Merde."

She tried anyway. For twenty minutes she worked with the glasses perched on her nose, held together by pressure and denial, one hand keeping the bridge closed while the other typed. But every few words, the pieces slipped, and the text smeared into a gray blur that made her temples throb.

A knock at the door. Antoine's voice, low and patient. "The roads should be passable by nine. We could leave early."

She had forgotten. The logging roads. The plan. And now this—this new humiliation, her own body betraying her in a country where she already felt blind.

She opened the door with the broken glasses in her hand. Antoine looked at them, then at her face.

"Ah."

"Do not say it," she said.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Good."

He examined the pieces. "These are thin. Not made for winter."

"They are made for reading. And I was sitting on them."

Antoine's mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but close. "Then it is the sitting that is the problem."

She snatched the glasses back. "I will manage."

But she did not manage. She sat at the kitchen table with her laptop open, the morning light strong and useless, the text on the screen dissolving into a wash of black shapes. She typed a sentence. Deleted it. Typed another. She was not translating anymore; she was inventing, and badly. The rhythm of the original French—a dense and lyrical novel about a lighthouse keeper's daughter—was escaping her entirely.

Antoine moved around the kitchen, making coffee, not looking at her. This was worse than if he had looked. She could feel him not looking, the effort of it, the care.

"The coffee is strong," he said. "You want some?"

"No."

"Milk? Sugar?"

"No."

He poured a cup anyway and set it at her elbow. She ignored it.

"I could drive you to the village," he said. "Chantal has a sister who sells glasses for reading. Cheap ones."

"The roads are closed. You said so yourself."

"They are closed. But there is the snowmobile."

Her hands stopped over the keyboard. She thought of Luc's abandoned machine. Of the stranger who had used Antoine's father's snowmobile without permission. Of Marcel's warning, delivered in that rapid French she still had to piece together like a puzzle.

"No," she said.

"The trail is safe. I know it better than—"

"You," she said, turning to face him, "are not taking me anywhere near a snowmobile before the sun is fully up, given everything you have told me about your father."

The sentence came out harder than she intended. She saw the flicker in his eyes—the shutter closing—and immediately regretted it.

"I did not mean—"

"You did not mean to mention my father. But you did." He picked up his coffee and drank. His face was calm, but his hand trembled slightly around the cup. "I have noticed that you say most of what you think, Camille. It is one of your qualities."

"My translator's curse. Words do not have passports."

He almost laughed. Almost. Then he set the cup down and looked at the broken glasses in her hand.

"May I?"

She hesitated, then handed them over. He turned them over in his fingers, studying the construction with the attention he gave to his camera lenses.

"The bridge is gone," he said. "But the lenses are intact."

"I know what a broken pair of glasses looks like."

"Do you know what a magnifying lens looks like?"

He went to the shed. She heard him rummaging, the clatter of metal and wood. When he returned, he carried a small brass magnifying glass—the kind used for checking film negatives, the kind that folded into a leather case.

He set it on the table beside her laptop. "Not elegant. But it will enlarge the screen enough for you to see."

Camille stared at the instrument. It was old. The brass was scratched, the glass slightly yellowed at the edges. A tool with history.

"Where did you get this?"

"My father used it for developing photographs. Before digital." He paused. "It was in a box of his things. I kept the box. I do not know why."

She wanted to say something gentle, but she had no French phrase for this, no English one either. The gap between languages yawned.

"Show me how it works," she said instead.

He positioned it on a small stand he improvised from a stack of unused books—a local phone directory, a hunting guide, a novel left by a past guest. The magnifying glass angled downward toward her laptop screen, enlarging the text to three times its size.

She leaned in. The words swam, then settled. The lighthouse keeper's daughter stood on her cliff, the wind in her hair, the sea below her a black sheet.

Clear.

For the first time in an hour, Camille saw the sentence she had been mangling.

"Ah," she said softly.

"Good?" Antoine asked.

"Better than good." She typed. The correction took four seconds. The sentence glowed with precision. "Where did you learn to improvise like this?"

"Winter teaches you. Things break. You fix them with what you have."

"Or you accept help."

He looked at her. The kitchen light caught his face, the hard lines around his mouth softening by a fraction. "That too," he said. "Though it takes longer."

She typed another sentence. The work flowed now, the way it did in the good hours in Paris when the cafés were full and the light was kind. But this light was québécois, hard and white, and it felt like its own kind of gift.

They worked in silence for an hour. She at the laptop, her eyes moving through the glass. He at the counter, repairing the strap of his own boot, occasionally glancing up at her. When she finally stopped to stretch her neck, he pushed a fresh cup of coffee toward her.

"This time, you will drink it?"

"This time, I will drink it."

The coffee was strong enough to strip paint. She drank it anyway, and it warmed her from the inside out.

"The logging roads," she said. "The snowmobile. You said we could go this morning."

"I said the roads would be passable. I did not say the journey was necessary."

"But you think it is."

He set down his work. The strap hung loose in his hands, unfinished.

"It was necessary before," he said. "Before Luc disappeared. Before you came. But now—"

"Now it is also necessary." She met his eyes. "Your father's snowmobile was used without your knowledge. Luc's machine was abandoned on this property. Someone cut my snowshoe strap with a blade, Antoine. A blade."

The word sat between them, sharp and cold.

"I know," he said.

"Then we go. Today. Before the light fades."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he nodded, slowly, the way a man nods when he has decided to look over a cliff.

"Get your coat," he said. "The magnifying glass stays here. But you—you come with me."

She should have said no. Every rational part of her, the meticulous translator who counted syllables and weighed meanings, told her to refuse. But she thought of the cut strap. The empty shed. The vial of fear she had been swallowing since Marcel's visit.

She stood, and fetched her coat.