22. Ryan
Ryan
The first photograph is of Camille’s mother.
I know before Camille says anything, although the woman smiling up at us from inside the plastic case looks different from the photographs I saw in newspaper clippings, where Nadia Moreau had been reduced to the visual language of tragedy with grainy university portraits, one passport-style picture printed beneath a headline asking where she had gone, and another image of her leaving some conference with her face turned away from the camera.
This Nadia is alive in a way those women weren’t.
She is sitting in the grass in front of Le Mas with her legs crossed at the ankle, one hand lifted as if she has just realized someone is taking her picture and is halfway through telling them to stop.
Her dark curls are wild from the wind, and there is a broad, unguarded smile stretching across her mouth that makes something in my chest hurt before I even look at Camille.
He has stopped breathing.
Not metaphorically.
I watch his chest remain completely still beside me as he stares down at the photograph held delicately between his fingers.
“Is that her?” I ask, even though the answer is obvious.
Camille swallows. “Yes.” His voice barely exists.
I don’t touch him.
Five days ago, that would have been instinctive.
I would have leaned into his shoulder, reached for his hand or something.
Now I don’t know whether comfort would help or hurt, whether he would interpret it as forgiveness, whether I would interpret it that way myself, so I stay where I am and let the space between our chairs remain untouched.
Camille turns the photograph over.
There is handwriting on the back. The ink has faded to a dull blue, but the words are still visible.
Pour Alberte — puisque tu refuses toujours d’être sur les photos. Nadia, juin 2000.
Camille translates automatically, his voice more stable when it has something concrete to do. “For Alberte—since you always refuse to be in the photographs. Nadia, June 2000.”
I let out a breath. “She gave it to him.”
Camille does not answer.
There are more.
A lot more.
Not hundreds, but enough that opening the case becomes an excavation through the final years of a place that existed before I knew any of these people had names.
Some photographs are ordinary—staff dinners, workbenches, people standing beside greenhouses or outside stone buildings with handwritten dates along the bottom.
Henri appears repeatedly. Alberte appears less often, usually half turned away from the camera or standing close enough to Henri that, now that I know what they were to each other, the intimacy becomes obvious.
There are pictures of animals too, as well as crates and transportation documents photographed beside containers.
A few images are clearly meant as evidence rather than memories, the framing pretty blunt, capturing identification numbers, handwritten labels, and paperwork that I cannot understand but Camille apparently can because his face becomes harder with each one.
One photograph makes him curse quietly in French.
“What?” I ask.
He turns it toward me. “Transfer documentation. The destination listed here does not match the institution marked on the container.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning someone wanted the paper trail to say one thing while the physical material went somewhere else.”
Eventually, underneath the photographs, we find a folded sheet of paper protected inside a clear sleeve. It is not a letter, exactly. More like a list written in Alberte’s hand of dates, abbreviated names, numbers, and fragments that mean nothing to me but make Camille lean closer.
I stiffen when his shoulder nearly brushes mine. When he notices and leans back to put more space between us, it hurts.
Which is stupid, because I’m the one who wanted space. I’m the one who literally demanded space.
I try to focus on the paper rather than my feelings and ask, “What is it?”
“I think these correspond to files.”
“On the USB?”
“Possibly.”
Near the bottom of the page, Alberte has written one line separately from the rest.
Ce qui nous a sauvés n’était jamais un lieu. C’était l’idée d’un autre.
I stare at it. “What does that say?”
Camille’s eyes remain on the handwriting. “What saved us was never a place. It was the idea of another one.”
“Well, that’s cryptic as shit.”
“Yes.”
“Very Alberte-chic.”
“I am beginning to understand that.”
There is another line beneath it, smaller.
Virginia est pour les amoureux.
I blink. “Oh.”
Camille looks at me. “What?”
“He wrote that in the journal.”
I reach for the green book and flip backward, searching by memory until I find the entry from October 2003.
“There.” I point. “He said he chose to move to Virginia because Americans say Virginia is for lovers.”
As Camille reads it, my eyes go back to the paper, and an idea pops into my head. “The password clue. What if it has something to do with that?”
“Possibly.”
“Virginia?”
“We can try it.”
It isn’t Virginia.
Neither is VirginiaIsForLovers, virginiaisforlovers, lovers, or the French equivalent Camille tries after he very kindly points out that Alberte was French.
Eventually, while rereading the page, I notice a date beside a tiny notation written in the margin.
24.02.96
“That was one of the journal entries.”
Camille looks at me.
“The dinner,” I say. “When he was trying to fix things with Henri.”
I flip again and find it.
February twenty-fourth.
Flowers.
Dinner.
Dancing.
Choosing each other again.
My chest aches with the memory of reading it.
At the bottom of the case, underneath everything else, there’s a photograph I had overlooked because it had stuck to the plastic lining.
Henri and Alberte.
They are dancing.
Actually dancing.
Henri’s hand is at Grandpa’s waist, Alberte’s arm around his shoulder, both of them laughing at something outside the frame.
For several seconds, I can only stare.
The monster and the coward.
Except they don’t look like either.
They look happy.
Camille turns the photograph over. There is one word written beneath the date.
Encore.
I look from the photograph to the journal, then the password field glowing on his laptop.
“No fucking way.”
Camille types it.
The drive unlocks.
Neither of us speaks. The cursor blinks in the sudden silence. On the screen, a folder tree expands in clean rows, each one labeled.
“Alberte, you dramatic bastard,” I whisper.
Camille lets out something that might almost be a laugh, although his eyes are still wet, and the sound of it dies quickly in the dark room.
We lean in together toward the light of the screen, and the rest of the night disappears.
By three in the morning, I know more about illegal animal transfers, falsified research documentation, private payments, shell entities, and institutional corruption than I ever wanted to know in my life.
Camille understands most of it far better than I do, but he translates everything into normal-person language when I ask, and to his credit, he never takes control of the process.
Not once.
He asks before opening every folder.
He asks before enlarging photographs.
When we find a scanned page containing Nadia’s handwriting, and Camille goes completely motionless beside me, he still waits until I say, “Open it.”
That nearly breaks me.
The document turns out to be notes she had apparently made while tracing inconsistencies in Henri’s research accounts. There are names, dates, project numbers, questions written furiously in the margins. Some entries match Alberte’s copies exactly. Others fill gaps he didn’t catch.
Together, they make a pattern.
Not a perfect one.
Not the kind of magical evidence package where a dead woman has conveniently written, “Henri murdered me.”
But enough.
More than enough.
There are payments to private buyers who had no legitimate research affiliation.
Transfers that Camille says would have violated multiple regulations even at the time.
Photographs of animals that should not have been at Le Mas.
Correspondence from Henri instructing staff to modify records after materials had already moved.
And then there are the things that make my skin crawl.
A file created after Josef disappeared documenting the removal of his access credentials before anybody officially reported him missing.
A memorandum referring to Théodore’s “departure” dated one day before the journal says anyone realized he was gone.
Correspondence between Henri and an intermediary discussing Alain Moreau’s supposed marital problems before police began focusing on him.
Camille stops reading after that one and leaves the room for around twenty minutes.
When he returns, his face has been washed, and his hair is wet around the temples.
I don’t mention it.
We continue.
By sunrise, neither of us has slept, and the whole thing has stopped feeling like discovery and started feeling like digging out a grave, one handful of dirt at a time.
The evidence doesn’t tell us where the bodies are buried. It doesn’t name the exact moment each person vanished from the earth. What it does is colder.
Henri knew when people were about to vanish—the records would shift in tone days before, permissions would be revoked, access logs would be wiped clean.
He manipulated timelines, backdated memos, planted whispers about marital problems and unstable behavior.
He deliberately redirected suspicion toward Alain Moreau’s quiet grief, and the documents prove it.
My throat feels dry. “I want copies out today.”
Camille looks at me from across the study, the lamplight catching the exhaustion in his bloodshot eyes. “So do I.”
By noon, encrypted copies exist on three separate drives, sent to Alberte’s estate lawyer in the neighboring city, an attorney Camille trusts professionally but has never involved in the investigation before, which makes me feel marginally better about using him, and a journalist.
That one scares me most.