18. Ryan
Ryan
I reach the end of the journal and pause, fingertips still brushing the faint ridges of ink.
Then I force myself to read it again.
Not the whole entry—just the last few lines, because some masochistic nerve in my brain still believes that repetition will dull their impact, but it doesn’t.
I killed Josef Klein.
I killed Théodore Desmarais.
I killed Nadia Moreau.
I killed Jean-Paul Fournier.
Hell will greet me when I die.
My thumb rests against the bottom corner of the paper.
I feel its slight warp beneath my nail. I don’t turn it.
There isn’t another page. No final note from Virginia explaining that somehow everything worked out.
No later paragraph in blue or black ink announcing that Henri served time, that everyone received therapy, and the nightmare was a tragic misunderstanding.
Just those five white-hot lines. Then nothing.
I sit perfectly still, the hidden chamber around me cloaked in a silence so absolute I can hear my own breath rasp against my ribs—each inhale catching halfway up my chest as if my lungs are wrestling with the notion that there is room here for both oxygen and the guilt I’m desperately trying to hold.
I should move. I know this. My legs are stiff from hours of crouching on the rough stone floor; the back of one knee prickles with damp dust that clings to sweat.
A black smear, dried and granular, cakes the skin on my wrist—leftover from whichever stagnant water pooled beneath the loose slabs overhead. None of it matters.
I stare at the looping swirls of my grandfather’s handwriting. Hell will greet me when I die.
No.
The word forms in my mind like a fist unclenching. It lodges in my throat. I open my mouth. Silence. I swallow. Try again. Still nothing emerges. Maybe there isn’t a word for this.
My mouth twitches. Not a smile. Not a grimace. Just my body’s reflex, reaching for relief and finding none.
I lower the journal into my lap, cradle its weight.
Nadia Moreau. The name screams in my mind.
Camille Moreau. His mother. His goddamned mother.
I squeeze my eyes shut and see him—one, seven, eight.
My eyes sting. I blink hard. No. No—I will not do this. Still, tears burn and spill from the corners of my eyes, carving hot tracks down my cheeks. I wipe them frantically with the heel of my hand.
“Fuck.” This time the word tears out of me, rasping, raw.
I stare into the darkness beyond the hole in the wall. Camille was eight. He knew. Not then—but now. He must know by now. There’s no way he doesn’t. How could he fail to mention that his mother was one of the missing researchers?
My chest constricts. He promised me honesty. That promise glints sharper than any blade—after Paul, after I spilled my wounds about lies and betrayal, Camille took my hand and looked miserable, but promised.
He promised.
And then the very next morning, when I asked him why he cared so much about Henri Voclain, he said that unresolved things bothered him.
Unresolved things.
What a beautiful fucking way to describe your mother disappearing.
I want to be furious.
I am furious, but each time the anger surges, it crashes against the image of that little boy, waiting.
And then what? I want to tear across the yard, scream until I’m hoarse, “How could you sit with me, listen to my pain, then keep this from me?” I want to demand an explanation that doesn’t taste like betrayal. And I want—God, I want—to hold him.
That admission nearly shatters me. I press both palms to my closed eyes, seeing blooms of light behind my lids.
Now I understand the gravity of why his life centers on this story, these documents. Why he has shelves heavy with files, why he knows so much about my grandfather, and even why he moved to this region.
My stomach twists, and I find myself wanting to rewind time so that none of this knowledge ever pierces my mind.
Did he approach me because of the house?
The journal suddenly feels too heavy. I put it on the stone beside me.
I know he lied about Nadia.
I know he hid why Henri mattered to him.
I know he omitted his personal connection after specifically promising not to hide anything involving my grandfather, my house, or Henri.
Those are facts.
Everything else is panic filling empty spaces with the worst possible answers.
I learned that lesson with Paul.
Except—
Paul.
My stomach twists again.
I fold forward, elbows on my knees, fingers threading into my hair.
I hate that Alberte reminds me of me—that might be the worst part of the fucking journal.
I should despise him, and some parts of me do, because he knew things were wrong years before anyone disappeared; he watched Henri hide things and accepted explanations because confrontation was harder.
Nadia came to him frightened, and he told her to wait, and then she was gone.
Then Fournier came to him privately, gave him a card, told him to call from somewhere safe, and he turned around and gave that fucking card to Henri. And boom, Fournier’s dead.
How do you live with that?
“You fucking coward,” I whisper hoarsely, staring at Alberte’s final entry through blurred vision. “You knew.” The accusation hits stone and dies. “You fucking knew.”
I want him alive suddenly.
I want him alive so I can ask him how he slept.
How he woke up every morning knowing a little boy was waiting for a mother Alberte believed Henri murdered.
How he went to Virginia.
Bought groceries.
Got older.
Had birthdays.
Christmases.
Whatever the fuck else people do with decades.
How do you live twenty-three years after writing I killed Nadia Moreau without telling her son what happened?
He promised her.
Nadia made him promise.
“Why didn’t you tell him?” My voice breaks, and my stomach folds in on itself. I put the journal down again before I tear it.
Maybe Alberte was afraid.
Obviously he was afraid.
Henri had already made people disappear.
He believed the documents would be the only thing to keep him alive.
I understand fear.
Fuck, I understand it so well that it makes me sick.
How many times did I stay with Paul because leaving seemed bigger and more dangerous than enduring one more day?
How many times did I tell myself something wasn’t really abuse because admitting it was abuse would require me to do something about it?
How many times did I accept an apology because the alternative was recognizing that the man I loved was choosing to hurt me?
He is right often enough that I have learned to distrust my own indignation whenever it stands opposite his certainty.
That sentence.
God.
I knew that feeling before I knew Alberte.
Paul could turn anything around if I gave him enough time. By the end of an argument I’d be apologizing for reacting to whatever he’d done in the first place. I read Alberte doing the same thing and wanted to reach backward through twenty-seven years and shake him, which is probably hypocritical.
Maybe if somebody read my life laid out as diary entries, they’d ask why the fuck I stayed too.
Why didn’t you leave after the first time he grabbed you?
Why did you keep planning a wedding with someone who hated every change that made you happier?
Why did you let him fuck you even when you supposedly didn’t want to?
Because love makes you stupid.
No. That’s too simple.
Love makes you hopeful, and hope makes you stupid.
You keep waiting for the person you remember to come back, even when they’re standing right in front of you, proving that version of them either disappeared or maybe never existed in the first place.
By the end, Alberte knew exactly who Henri was, and still loved him.
That terrifies me.
Because the final entry doesn’t say I used to love a murderer.
It says I love a man who killed four people.
Present tense.
I understand that too, a lot more than I want to.
I hated Paul when I left. I was terrified of him, and I knew what he’d done to me was unforgivable, and yet there were still nights in that motel when I wanted to call him because something funny happened and, for six years, he was the person I told funny things to.
The body does not care about moral clarity.
It misses routine, and familiar hands.
It misses the version of safety that existed before safety became dangerous.
So yes, I understand Alberte, but I am also so fucking angry at him that I could scream; both can exist.
I wipe my cheeks. They are wet again, and my nose is running. I sniff miserably and stare down at Nadia’s name.
Then Camille’s.
That boy becomes the man who keeps sixteen snakes in a private laboratory and knows more about venom than any sane person should.
His mother researched compounds at Le Mas.
His mother disappeared inside a scandal built around venom research.
And Camille became a venomologist.
My heart cracks a little more.
Was that because of her?
Did he choose it deliberately?
Did he spend his entire life walking toward the place that swallowed her because that was the only way he knew to remain close?
I think of him in the lab and how controlled he is in there, how nothing happens without him understanding exactly why.
Control.
That makes sense now too.
So much of Camille suddenly makes sense that I resent him for it. I didn’t ask to understand him this much. Understanding makes being angry much harder.
I would prefer simple anger, simple betrayal, and instead, I have this clusterfuck.
A man whose mother vanished when he was eight. Whose father spent years being treated like a suspect because Henri apparently manufactured stories about their marriage.
Wait.
Alain.
Camille has never once mentioned his father. I mean, sure, he never mentioned his mother either, for obvious reasons, but what happened to his father?
Maybe Alain rebuilt his life. Maybe he remarried. Maybe he moved away from all this, and Camille grew up somewhere safe, raised by a father who eventually learned how to exist around the shape of his grief.
I want that to be true, but I have a gut feeling it’s not.
God, fuck.
Our first conversations. His interest in what I planned to do with the property.