19. Ryan #2
“No, you can’t.” My voice rises again, not into a shout this time but something shakier, more dangerous because I can feel myself losing control of it.
“Because I keep replaying everything, and every time I think I find something that felt real, there’s another explanation underneath it.
So what am I supposed to do with the things I thought meant something? ”
Camille’s expression breaks in a way I have never seen before, not dramatically, but enough that the immaculate composure finally seems more like a shell than a personality. “I don’t know.”
I lean back against the counter because my knees have started to ache from standing rigidly in one place, and the contact with the solid wood is grounding enough to keep me from sliding to the floor.
For a moment, the only sound in the kitchen is our breathing. Looking at Camille physically pains me. And yet, rather than continue arguing, I feel a sudden, overwhelming need to tell him something else.
I look down at the journal, then meet his gaze.
“Nadia made him promise,” I say. “He wrote that she made him promise you would know she didn’t abandon you.” My anger fractures under a wave of grief so sudden I have to press my tongue against the roof of my mouth to keep from crying harder. “He wrote about you asking when she was coming home.”
Camille looks away. “I know enough of my childhood, Ryan.”
“I’m sorry.” My voice breaks completely now.
“I’m so fucking angry at you, but I read all of that, and I kept thinking about you being a little kid, and I don’t know what to do with that.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to look at you and be furious when your mom was murdered, and your dad—Jesus Christ, your dad—and—and Alberte didn’t keep his promise. ”
Camille’s face crumples for half a second before he regains control. “He was afraid,” he reasons quietly. “Do not carry his guilt, Ryan. It’s not your burden. You are not responsible for anything that happened back then.”
“I know that intellectually.”
“That distinction matters.”
“Does it?” I gesture toward the journal.
“Because I’m standing here reading about my grandfather telling your mother to wait when she wanted to go to the police.
He handed Fournier’s card to Henri, and then Fournier died.
He promised Nadia he would tell you she didn’t abandon you, and instead he fucked off to America.
How exactly am I supposed to separate myself from that when I’m the person who inherited the house and found the evidence he was too scared to release? When I’m his grandson?”
Camille steps forward, then realizes what he is doing and stops himself. “By remembering that you were not born when any of those decisions were made. And even if you were, you are not culpable for mistakes someone else made, related or not.”
His shoulders have lowered, and his face seems exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with the afternoon spent looking for me.
“Ryan, I know what I say may be seen as worthless to you now, but I need you to hear this. I don’t know when I began wanting you to stay for reasons that had nothing to do with Alberte,” he continues.
“There was no singular moment. I simply realized that I had begun counting how long it had been since I had seen you. I knew what foods you liked without intending to memorize them. I noticed when you stayed later after sex and was disappointed when you left quickly. I began anticipating your arguments before you arrived and enjoying them despite myself. I started looking toward your cottage because I wanted to know whether you were home rather than because I was thinking about what might be hidden there.”
My throat tightens, and Camille takes a breath that trembles slightly on the way in.
“I began this badly, Ryan. I began it selfishly and with motives you never consented to. But whatever this became afterward was not an act.”
I hate how desperately I want to believe him.
“That doesn’t erase the beginning.”
“No.”
“Or the lies.”
“No.”
I stare at him until my vision blurs again. “Then I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Nothing.” Camille’s answer is immediate. “You do not owe me reassurance. You do not owe me forgiveness. You do not even owe me the opportunity to explain further than you have already allowed.”
My eyes drop toward the journal. “And the evidence?”
His gaze follows mine but does not linger. “What about it?”
“You’ve spent twenty-three years looking for this.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re just standing there.”
Something almost bitter twists through his expression. “Would you prefer I lunge across the kitchen and rip it out of your hands?”
“No,” I mumble.
“Neither would I.”
“But you want them.”
“More than I can explain.”
The honesty hurts.
Camille looks toward the hole again, and for the first time I see what it costs him not to move toward it. His whole body seems oriented around restraint, as though every instinct that carried him through decades of searching is screaming at him to cross the room.
He doesn’t; rather, he looks at me. “But they are yours.”
I frown. “What?”
“Alberte hid them in your property. You found them. Until you decide what you want done with them, I will not touch anything.”
I stare at him, suspicious. “You could take the journal right now. You’re stronger than me.”
“I know.”
“Then why aren’t you?”
Camille’s expression softens with something so sad that I immediately regret asking. “Because I have spent enough time taking choices from you.”
The words hollow me out, and I look away.
Part of me wants this to be manipulation too, because holding my anger would be easier if Camille remained consistent in his awfulness. Instead, he is standing feet away from the answer to the central question of his entire life and refusing to touch it because I haven’t given permission.
It doesn’t repair anything. It matters anyway.
“I can’t do this with you standing here.
I can’t even figure out what I think because every time I look at you, half of me wants to scream and the other half wants to make sure you’re okay, and I’m really fucking tired of caring whether you’re okay,” I rasp, my throat in dire need of water after all the dust and crying and whatever else I inhaled behind the wall.
Camille’s eyes close briefly. “I understand.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Probably not.”
I almost laugh. It comes out as a sob instead. I turn away, embarrassed, and wipe my face with both hands.
Behind me, Camille does not move, but after a moment, he says, “Your phone was on silent. You missed several calls. I was frightened when I couldn’t find you.”
My spine stiffens. “I didn’t see anything come in.”
“I am not telling you that to make you feel guilty.”
“Good.”
“I only want you to know why I came inside.”
I glance over my shoulder. “What do you think would’ve happened if… if it wasn’t you who found me back there?” I ask, almost mutely.
He grits his teeth. “I am not sure.”
The answer should not frighten me as much as it does, but Camille has spent the last several weeks having an answer for everything, even when the answer was irritatingly qualified or buried beneath enough scientific language to make me regret asking, so hearing uncertainty from him now feels somehow worse than if he had simply told me Henri’s people would have dragged me out of the wall and murdered me on my kitchen floor.
At least that I could understand. Instead, there is only Camille standing several feet away, jaw clenched hard enough that a muscle jumps beneath his skin, looking toward the hole I tore through the wall as though his imagination has already supplied several possibilities he has no intention of sharing.
I hug the journal a little closer without meaning to. “That’s comforting.”
“It was not intended to be.” He looks at me again, and the expression in his eyes makes my stomach tighten despite everything else between us.
“You asked what I believe might have happened, and I genuinely do not know. Whoever entered this cottage before was searching, not stealing, and the vehicle had been watching the property well before the break-in. If that person—or anyone associated with them—knew enough to understand what Alberte may have hidden, then finding you alone inside the space with these materials could have created a situation considerably more dangerous than the first intrusion.”
The words are careful, but the fear beneath them is not.
Camille can dress terror in clinical language all he wants; I have learned enough about him to hear what he is trying not to say, and despite the anger still burning through me, my gaze automatically drifts toward the kitchen windows.
The sunlight outside has begun taking on the deeper amber of late afternoon, casting long shadows across the yard and making the trees beyond the cottage look thicker than they did this morning.
Until an hour ago, Henri Voclain was still partly theoretical to me, some ancient monster preserved in newspaper clippings and Camille’s obsessive research, possibly alive and possibly responsible for a dark sedan and a break-in.
Alberte’s journal changed that. Henri is no longer a collection of allegations.
He is the man my grandfather believed killed innocent people; the man he was frightened enough of to flee across an ocean; the man who apparently had enough reach to make investigators disappear and then live for more than two decades without leaving a trail.
And if he is alive, or even if only the people he once worked with are still around, I have just smashed open the one place somebody came searching for.
The thought sends a cold ripple down my spine.
Camille watches me register it, which irritates me because I don’t want him to know me well enough to see exactly when my anger collides with common sense.
“I’ll leave,” he says.
My head snaps toward him.
The reaction is embarrassingly immediate, a spike of alarm so overwhelming that I take a step forward before catching myself. “What?”