19. Ryan
Ryan
I tense so hard my head slams into stone, pain flaring white behind my eyes. “Fuck,” I hiss, hand clapping over my mouth.
Too late.
He’s here.
In the cottage.
My body locks. I press the journal to my chest, curl in on myself, every instinct screaming to disappear. If I stay absolutely still, maybe Camille won’t notice the gaping hole I smashed into the kitchen wall.
“Ryan?” He’s closer now, inside the kitchen. His voice, softened by stone, holds something unexpected—fear. My chest twists. Fear? For me? Him? It’s another wound.
I squeeze the journal tighter, knees drawn in, praying for extra seconds—one minute where he doesn’t know what I know, one minute before our worlds collide and everything shatters.
His footsteps pause. A shoe scratches tile. Then there’s silence. I imagine him seeing the destruction, the mess of dust and plaster everywhere.
“Ryan.”
My throat clenches. I close my eyes, picturing his face. I don’t want him to see me.
A shadow crosses the hole, and he appears, crouched just beyond reach. He can barely see me from this angle.
His gaze lands on the journal, and he freezes.
That’s the moment he knows. He needs no words. He sees the proof I found—Alberte’s secrets, Nadia’s fate, the evidence of forty years.
“Ryan,” he says again.
“Don’t.” The word is rougher than I intend.
“How long have you been here?”
I laugh, a cracked sound. “That’s your question?”
“It was the first thing I managed to say. I couldn’t find you, Ryan. You weren’t answering your phone. I’ve been worried.”
“Congratulations.”
“Ryan—”
“Nadia.” I level him with my tears and fury.
His voice is a flat confession. “…Yes.” His subsequent quiet makes me want to scream.
I shove the plastic case in my pocket and crawl forward through the hole, journal first, because I can’t bear the suffocating space between us.
“Be careful, it’s sharp—”
“I said don’t,” I reply coldly.
He stops and slowly rises from the floor. I scramble out into the kitchen, shouldering past rough edges until I stand on shaking legs. I back away, needing distance—even though every atom of me wants to collapse into him.
Camille looks wrecked. Perfectly neat shirt, hair in place, posture taut. But I know him, or thought I did. My eyes burn with questions I’m too scared to voice.
“Did you know I was coming?” I force the words out. “To France?”
His silence answers before he speaks.
“Yes and no,” he eventually admits, albeit quietly. “I knew the property transferred to you, and I knew you were coming, but I didn’t know exactly when.”
I stare at him. “Would you have approached me if we were neighbors somewhere else, away from all of this?”
He meets my gaze. “I can’t say.”
“Was the sex part of the plan?” I force out.
“No.” His voice breaks. “Only at the start.”
My legs quake. “I told you.” The words make him go still. “I fucking told you what lies did to me.”
His eyes become glassy—not tears exactly. Camille does not look like a man who cries easily. But something is there.
“I know,” he whispers.
“And you promised.”
“Yes.”
“You promised me no more omissions about anything involving me, the house, my grandfather, Henri—”
“I remember.”
“AND YOUR MOTHER IS ONE OF THE FUCKING PEOPLE HE MURDERED!” My voice tears through the room.
Camille’s face has gone utterly still.
I point at him with a shaking hand. “You looked me in the eye and told me this was basically an academic obsession because unresolved things bothered you.”
“I know.”
“Your mother was murdered.”
“Yes.”
“You were eight.”
“Yes.”
“Your dad—” My voice falters. “What happened to your dad?”
His gaze drops, and he replies quietly, “He died when I was ten.”
“W-what?” I stutter.
Camille looks at the floor. “He spent two years trying to find her. The suspicion surrounding him destroyed much of what remained of his life. Eventually…” He pauses, an expression of pain passing over his face. “He killed himself.”
Everything inside me goes quiet.
“Oh, my God.”
I wish I hadn’t asked—no, that isn’t true. I needed to know. But what the fuck? Henri orphaned him.
How am I supposed to stay furious at him without also wanting to cross the room and wrap my arms around him?
I hate this.
I hate him.
I care about him so fucking much.
Camille continues, “I was raised by my aunt afterward. I began researching my mother’s disappearance when I was old enough to understand what records existed.”
“And you thought the answers were here,” I conclude.
Camille’s gaze drops to the journal. “Yes.”
Something about that one word sounds broken.
He has spent twenty-three years wanting this, and now that the evidence is right here, he makes no moves toward it.
Not once.
His eyes keep returning to me instead.
“I—” I don’t know what to say. There’s nothing I could say that could ever convey how I’m feeling at this moment. “I’m sorry. That’s terrible—I… I’m sorry. But—but that doesn’t change the fact that you used me. You didn’t have to do things this way. You could’ve told me. I would’ve helped you.”
“I know.” The answer is so quiet, so stripped of argument, that for a second it leaves me with nowhere to put my anger.
I was prepared for excuses—for Camille to tell me that I didn’t understand, that there had been no safe time to explain, that he’d been protecting me from Henri or waiting until he knew more or any of the other perfectly reasonable sentences people construct when they want to make betrayal sound like benevolence.
Instead, he simply stands there and agrees with me, and somehow that is worse, because agreement means there is no misunderstanding to untangle.
He knew there was another way. He knew I would have helped him.
He chose not to trust me with that choice.
“Then why?” I ask, and the word comes out smaller than everything that preceded it, almost pathetic in its simplicity. “If you know I would’ve helped you, why didn’t you just tell me?”
Camille’s eyes flick briefly toward the broken wall, then return to me.
“Because when you arrived, I did not know you. I knew your name, your relation to Alberte, the fact that you had inherited the property, and very little else. I had spent years looking for something Alberte may have taken from Le Mas, and suddenly his grandson was living in the one place I had never been able to search thoroughly enough. I did not know whether you knew anything, whether he had told you something before his death, whether you had inherited documents separately, or whether you would simply sell the cottage and leave before I could determine what remained here.”
The words are measured, but I can hear how much effort it costs him to keep them that way.
Camille is no longer explaining a theory.
He is confessing to the architecture of our relationship, piece by piece, and I hate how clinical the beginning sounds when stripped of everything that came afterward.
“So I was an opportunity.”
His jaw tightens. “At first, yes.”
I look away before he can see exactly what that does to me, but there is nowhere useful to look.
The kitchen is still wrecked from my search, dust floating in the sunlight and broken chunks of plaster scattered across the floor.
Everything feels exposed now, even the ordinary things—the coffee mug I left by the sink, the crooked cabinet door, the little strip of painter’s tape from our measurements—because they belong to a version of my life that existed an hour ago and no longer does.
Camille keeps talking, perhaps because he understands that if he stops now, I may never let him start again.
“I tried first to make myself useful to you. The contractors, transportation, repairs, information about the area—I told myself those things were harmless because you genuinely needed them, and because helping you did not require me to hurt you. When you rejected most of it, I realized very quickly that dependence frightened you, though at the time I did not understand why.”
A bitter laugh escapes me. “So you changed tactics.” His expression flickers. “You realized I wanted you.”
“I did.”
I stare at him, waiting for some instinct to soften the wording, to rescue me from the brutality of hearing exactly what I already suspected, but Camille gives me the truth I demanded even while it visibly disgusts him.
“I knew you were attracted to me,” he says.
“I was attracted to you as well, very strongly, and I allowed myself to treat that mutual attraction as justification for encouraging something I knew would bring you closer. I convinced myself that because you wanted the sex, because I never coerced you into it, because I wanted it too, there was no meaningful harm in allowing it to become useful to me.”
“Allowing it to become useful,” I repeat, and my voice trembles despite how hard I try to steady it. “Do you even hear yourself?”
I take a step back, wrapping my arms around myself because I suddenly feel cold despite the late-afternoon heat pressing through the windows.
Camille grimaces, but I don’t feel any satisfaction from it.
I am too tired. My anger is burning through itself so quickly that beneath it, I can feel something much more frightening waiting—grief, maybe, although grieving a relationship that technically never existed the way I thought it did feels humiliating.
Camille’s mouth twists. “I wanted the sex independently of the investigation. My desire for you was never fabricated, Ryan. But I also knew intimacy would create access and trust that I had failed to obtain another way.”
I press my lips together, fighting the sickening heat behind my eyes. “Do you have any idea what that makes me feel like?”
“I can imagine.”