Page 119 of Where the Snakes Sleep

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.”

“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.”