3. Camille #2
My father spent the following two years trying to find my mother while simultaneously defending himself against the suggestion that he had made her disappear.
He wrote to investigators who stopped answering.
He contacted journalists.
He hired a private investigator we could not afford.
He drove south so many times that I learned the route by landmarks visible from the back seat.
And when every effort failed, he began turning that failure inward.
Occasionally, I woke in the night to my father’s voice apologizing to my mother. He’d sit at our kitchen table at three in the morning with her photograph between his hands and a half-drunken bottle of Bordeaux at his side.
I would catch him on the phone with his sister, telling her that he’d failed Nadia. That he should have done something. That a husband was supposed to know when his wife was in danger. That he should’ve done better. Been better.
That he should’ve saved her.
No argument convinced him that whatever happened to Nadia belonged to the person who harmed her rather than the man who failed to foresee it.
Grief became guilt.
Guilt became hatred.
And eventually, there was very little of Alain Moreau left beneath either.
I was ten when my father died.
He took his own life in the apartment we shared in Valence.
My aunt found me afterward and brought me home with her.
People spoke around me for months as if I were the only one in the room who could not hear the truth.
I heard it just fine. My mother was dead, made so by Voclain.
My father was dead because of what her absence had hollowed out of him.
I was not too young to understand, just too small for anyone to care what I made of the aftermath.
At twelve, I began collecting newspaper articles. At fourteen, I learned how to search public records. At seventeen, I created the first version of the file now beneath my hands.
I move a finger along the edge of the survey map.
A penciled notation in the lower-right corner, dated three years ago, marks a discrepancy between the cottage’s recorded interior and the outbuilding’s footprint visible on the agricultural survey.
On paper, the interior measures 94 square meters.
The exterior walls, measured from the outside, suggested a structure closer to 110.
Not a dramatic difference, but enough to leave me certain there was space unaccounted for—a gap Alberte Legrand had left deliberately off the record.
I flex the folder open, scanning the names, the scribbled arrows, the photos of missing persons.
The weight of the file is a comfort. I have always preferred the documents to my memories.
Inside paperwork, nothing changes or hurts more than expected.
I can control the story, write it over and over, until it bends around me like a protective shell.
My gaze drifts to the cottage. The lights are on; Ryan moves through the rooms, a vague silhouette behind the glass. I watch him for a long time, constructing possible futures in which the boy becomes either my adversary or, more likely, my unwitting accomplice.
Eventually, I set the file aside and return downstairs to the lab.
There is a peace that falls over it after dusk, when the air outside thickens with coastal humidity and the only light comes from the long, shrouded bulbs overhead. I find myself in the rhythm of it, the tap-tap of glass, and the faint but omnipresent musk that snakes exude when handled.
Tonight, I work with the inland taipan. Her enclosure is at the far end, away from the sun’s reach, kept at a steady 29 degrees.
I have named her Mireille, for reasons even I can’t quite explain—it was the first name that came to me when I saw the iridescent shimmer of her scales, and the way her eyes followed motion with a calculated, sentient awareness.
She’s three years old now, raised from a hatchling, and she regards me with the wary tolerance of a professional colleague.
In this, I find her more relatable than most of the humans I know.
The milking process is one of choreography more than brute force.
I ease on my gloves and reach inside her tank with my snake hook, guiding her body forward with a gentle but unambiguous pressure.
Her muscles coil, a rippling tension that says, “I am allowing this, for now.” The trick is to be neither hesitant nor aggressive; Mireille, like all taipans, is a connoisseur of hesitation, and punishment comes swiftly to those who fumble.
Once she’s in a good position, I reach in with my other hand to grab her just behind her eyes. Carefully, I let go of the snake hook and bring the venom collection cup in front of her. She opens wide, more cooperative than I expected, and the fine membrane over her gums splits as her fangs extend.
She pierces the thin covering of the cup, and viscous beads of venom well up at the tips of her fangs, each drop landing safely at the bottom of the small container.
There is an old truism among venom researchers that to work with snakes is to court humility.
One develops a sense for the ways in which the world resists being known; all the protocols and safety culture in the world cannot change the fact that you are, at every moment, one mistake away from disaster.
Once the snake is safely contained again, the next step is to seal the cup, label it, and transfer its contents to the refrigerated unit.
Each vial is marked with the date, time, and the initials of the extractor—an archival habit I’ve never been able to break, even in private research.
Mireille’s vial joins the others on the rack, clear glass lined up like the pipes of an organ, each holding a fraction of a milliliter of the world’s most potent biochemistry.
Most days, I find the act of labeling almost ceremonial, as if each time I do it I hammer another small nail into the coffin of my own uncertainty.
My records are meticulous, cross-referenced to the point of compulsion.
It is the only place in my life where order reliably prevails.
To the left of Mireille’s enclosure is the refrigerated unit.
I open it, slide the vial into its assigned row, and pause a moment to check the temperature gauge.
Steady at 4.1 degrees Celsius. I let the cool air wash over my face, savoring the clarity it brings, then shut the door and return to my workbench.
Across the bench, arranged with the same care as the vials, are sheets of graph paper.
The first page is a hand-drawn grid noting the mass of each venom sample, its color, opacity, and whether any particulate matter is visible.
The second page is a timeline, tracing my inventory against the needs of the research institute, and the third is a chart with a column marked “Private Use,” into which I enter only the briefest of notes.
It is a breach of the rules to use the facility’s resources for personal projects, but I like to tell myself that what I do out here after hours is still in the service of science.
My science, not theirs.
The night’s extractions proceed in sequence. The Montpellier viper is next, a female just over seventy centimeters, with a mottled hide that makes her nearly indistinguishable from the sun-bleached gravel of her native range.
I coax her forward, mindful of her quickness; she is less forgiving than Mireille and has left me with a crescent-shaped scar along my index finger as a testament.
Tonight, she is calm, docile even, and the extraction goes without incident.
Her venom is less dramatic in appearance—clear, almost watery—but the sample is valuable in its own way, especially for the photometric assays I run on weekends.
As I finish, I glance at the wall clock. The hands point to 21:17.
This time of night, especially if it’s spent in the confines of my lab, almost always brings up the memory of my mother.
I often picture her bent over a desk, her knuckles ink-stained, and her hair clipped back in a way that left her old acne scars exposed.
She was not beautiful in the way women are supposed to be, not even in her own recollections of youth.
But she was singular, always. When I was very small, I used to sneak into her office at the university after hours, marveling at the ordered chaos of her bookshelves and the way the world shrank to a precise, navigable grid once the rest of the campus went dark.