16. Ryan
Ryan
Camille makes the mistake of telling me he will be busy for most of the day.
I don’t think he realizes it is a mistake when he says it.
Actually, judging by the way he stands at the kitchen island in a crisp white button-down with his sleeves rolled neatly to the elbows, drinking coffee as if he has never once experienced an intrusive thought in his entire life, I’m reasonably certain he believes he is merely informing me of his schedule like a normal person.
“I have a presentation at eleven,” he says, glancing at the watch around his wrist. “Then questions afterward. I expect to be occupied until at least fourteen hundred.”
I pause with my spoon halfway to my mouth. “Fourteen hundred.”
Camille looks at me. “Two.”
“I know what fourteen hundred means.”
“Then why did you repeat it?”
“I don’t know.”
He takes another sip of coffee, which is Camille’s preferred response whenever he decides I’m being too ridiculous to deserve words.
That should probably annoy me.
Instead, I smile into my yogurt.
Three days.
I have been living in Camille’s house for three days, which is not the same thing as moving in, despite what the steadily increasing amount of my shit upstairs might suggest.
Temporary relocation is the phrase I’ve settled on. A.K.A. An emergency housing arrangement necessitated by the fact that some creepy bastard in a dark sedan apparently decided my cottage would make a fun place to case, then break into.
I am not living with Camille. I am staying with Camille.
There is an important distinction.
Granted, my distinction has become slightly less convincing now that my shampoo is sitting in his guest bathroom, my shoes kind of live at his front door, and yesterday I found one of my shirts folded in a basket of laundry that I absolutely did not wash myself.
The only problem is that three days into this supposedly temporary situation, we are no closer to knowing what the fuck somebody wanted from my cottage than we were when I first walked through the door and found everything just slightly wrong.
Well, that isn’t entirely true. We know more. A lot more, actually.
Enough that I’ve spent the last two nights lying awake thinking about illegal animal trafficking, missing researchers, suspicious snakebite deaths, my grandfather’s decades-long relationship with a possibly homicidal venom scientist, and the genuinely insane possibility that Alberte Legrand spent the last twenty-three years sitting on evidence capable of putting him—well, not anymore, R.I.P.
—and his lover in prison for like a million things, or at least it seems like a million things.
That same afternoon, after Camille showed me the surveillance footage and old surveys, we went back to the cottage. He sent the footage of the creepy lurking car to the police and called a locksmith while I packed a few days’ worth of clothes, toiletries, etc.
Then we searched and found absolutely nothing.
The old window from the photograph would have been positioned along the rear portion of the kitchen wall, somewhere between the pantry cabinet and the section where the stone transitions into newer plaster from an old renovation.
We measured. We knocked on things. We inspected the outside.
Camille took photographs from approximately fourteen different angles because apparently one does not simply look at a wall when one possesses a scientific education; one documents the wall as though preparing it for peer review.
There was no door, no visible seam, no loose panel—nothing.
I used a screwdriver to pry up the cracked floor tile that I’d been hiding underneath the table, but all that was under it was stone. When Camille saw what I’d done, he sighed, helped me put the tile back into place without it looking too wonky, and scolded me for “going rogue and causing a mess.”
By late afternoon, the locksmith arrived, replaced the damaged lock, reinforced several points around the frame, and spoke to Camille in rapid French while periodically glancing at me in a manner I found vaguely insulting.
I asked Camille what he said, and he told me the man said my door was old. I am ninety percent certain that was not the entire conversation.
The following morning, we went back.
That search lasted almost five hours.
We moved furniture away from the kitchen wall, checked the pantry, measured the exterior again, and compared every interior dimension against the copies Camille had brought over.
At one point we ended up fucking against the wall outside after an argument about whether the original exterior stonework had been thick enough to explain part of the discrepancy.
I think that was the point when I started to notice Camille getting weird. And while I came twice as he held me against the rough stone and brutally pounded me over and over, I couldn’t ignore that it felt like he’d used sex to distract me from the search.
Every time we got closer to the part of the wall that didn’t make sense, his answers shortened, he’d zone out, or attempt to redirect my attention somewhere else.
I still can’t understand why. Why try to hinder the search when he was the one to tell me there was something to search for?
Based on what I saw in his study, he obviously has had an obsession with what happened, like those people who get hyper-fixated on the Bermuda Triangle or the Zodiac Killer.
Is he worried about actually finding the hidden evidence because that would mean the case he’s spent his life researching would be solved?
Whatever it is, I’m tired of it.
Which brings us to this morning. Camille has a university presentation, so I have three hours, possibly more, to get shit done on my own.
The thought settles into place with a satisfying little click.
Camille looks up from his coffee. “What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.”
“That is unlikely.”
“I’m eating breakfast. I’m thinking about that.” I scoop another spoonful of yogurt into my mouth and point at it as evidence.
Camille studies me.
There are moments when I genuinely understand how a mouse must feel when a snake stops pretending not to notice it.
I swallow. “Don’t you have stuff to do?”
Camille drains the last of his coffee and sets the cup beside the sink. “I will be in my study. Please do not get into any unnecessary trouble while I’m busy. Please also do not interrupt unless something is urgent.”
“I would never.”
His expression becomes profoundly skeptical. “I mean it.”
“I heard you.”
He rubs two fingers between his eyebrows. “There is food in the refrigerator if you are hungry before I finish.”
Camille stops beside my stool, his hand settling briefly against the back of my neck, thumb brushing below my hairline. The touch is so casual now that my body responds before my brain has time to protest, shoulders loosening, head tipping almost imperceptibly into his palm.
Camille bends and presses a kiss to my temple. Nothing sexual, nothing demanding, just warm lips against skin and the quiet rasp of his stubble. “I will see you later.”
“I… Yeah,” I respond, my chest feeling light and bubbly. “Good luck with your presentation.”
He leaves, and eventually, I hear his study door close somewhere deeper in the house. I finish my breakfast, wash my dishes, then go upstairs to the guest room to change into shorts and an old T-shirt. I tie my hair back, put on sneakers, then sneak outside.
Technically, I’m not sneaking out, because Camille specifically told me I can come and go as I please.
The fact that I wait until he’s trapped in some work obligation is completely coincidental, just like how I sprint like my life depends on it to the cottage in the hope that he’ll be too focused on his computer to notice me from the window.
I let out a ragged exhale upon reaching the steps of the cottage, praying that my phone doesn’t buzz in my pocket as I unlock the new lock on the front door and quickly step inside.
I fall back against the door as it shuts, and wait.
When my phone stays silent, telling me that Camille must’ve missed my frantic run across our yards, I finally release some of my tension.
I lock the door behind me, then head to the kitchen.
The room still bears evidence of yesterday’s search.
One cabinet has not been pushed fully back against the wall.
Pencil marks remain on a small strip of painter’s tape near the baseboard where Camille recorded measurements.
The table has been shifted several inches from its usual position, and the pantry contents are still slightly disorganized because I got bored halfway through putting everything back.
I stand in the center of the kitchen, staring at the wall that’s more than likely hiding something behind it.
Yesterday, Camille wouldn’t let me open it. Not because he thinks there is nothing there. If anything, his increasingly bizarre behavior convinced me of the opposite. His objection was “structural safety.”
Which, fine.
I understand the concept of consequences. But there is a huge difference between knocking down an entire load-bearing wall and making one small exploratory hole.
A tiny hole.
Barely a hole.
More of an aggressive peephole.
The section we identified yesterday occupies maybe three feet between the pantry and a vertical run of exposed stone. According to Camille’s measurements, whatever inaccessible space exists should begin behind here and continue several meters along the rear wall.
I tap the plaster with my knuckles—solid.
I move my hand six inches, tap again, and the sound is slightly different.
Or maybe I am imagining it because I desperately want there to be a hidden chamber containing murder evidence instead of discovering that my grandfather’s builder simply sucked at math.
I knock again and feel certain the area behind it is hollow.
Tap.
Hollow.
Tap left.
Duller.
Right.
Hollow again.
I’ve made a rectangle.