Chapter 10 - THE WOMAN WHO FOUND HERThe photograph carried a handwritten note:
If she remembers, give her this.
The initials belonged to Amélie Rousseau, the nurse who helped Sophie leave the clinic.
Marc found an old telephone number on the back.
It was disconnected.
A search revealed Amélie now lived in Lyon.
Adrian sent a car for her.
She arrived that evening carrying a worn leather bag.
The moment Sophie saw her, she began to cry.
Amélie embraced her carefully.
“I thought they found you.”
“Who?”
“Vivian’s people.”
Amélie was sixty-three, with silver hair and a quiet voice.
She worked at Maison Sainte-Cécile during Sophie’s first three years there.
The clinic was presented as a private neurological recovery center.
In reality, it operated with little oversight.
Residents with memory impairment were kept under identities supplied by whoever paid the bills.
“Who brought Sophie?” Adrian asked.
“A doctor named Étienne Delacroix.”
The director of the laboratory that identified Sophie’s supposed remains.
Amélie remembered Sophie arriving unconscious with burns and a serious head injury.
No ambulance record accompanied her.
Delacroix said she was an unidentified homeless woman found near a railway line.
Two days later, Vivian visited.
“What did she say?” Sophie asked.
“That you were dangerous to yourself. She instructed staff not to allow outside contact.”
“Why did no one question her?”
“She paid privately. The director said she was your legal guardian.”
Amélie had doubted the story.
Sophie spoke fluent French and English.
Her dental work was expensive.
Her hands showed no signs of living on the street.
Then Sophie began drawing the same three people.
A dark-haired man.
A blonde baby.
A woman with red hair standing behind flames.
Amélie secretly photographed the drawings.
Vivian discovered one.
“She ordered us to increase your medication,” Amélie said.
Sophie touched her temple.
“That is when the memories stopped again.”
Amélie eventually reduced the medication without permission.
Sophie’s mind began clearing.
They planned her escape.
Before Sophie left, Amélie photographed Vivian at the clinic and hid the picture behind The Blue Garden during a restoration transfer.
“How did the painting reach the clinic?” Adrian asked.
“It hung in the director’s private office.”
The artwork Sophie investigated had been removed from the archive before the fire and placed where she could see it every day without understanding why it mattered.
Vivian was not only hiding Sophie.
She was hiding evidence beside her.
“What happened to the clinic records?” Marc asked.
“Destroyed when Maison Sainte-Cécile closed.”
“Who closed it?”
“Vivian Laurent purchased the property through another company.”
Amélie opened her bag.
She had saved copies of Sophie’s medication logs and payment records.
Every invoice went to a holding company called Rouge Étoile.
Adrian recognized it.
Rouge Étoile had also received funds from the Beaumont Arts Foundation.
The art fraud paid for Sophie’s captivity.
Amélie produced one final item.
A photograph of Sophie taken two weeks after the fire.
Her face was bandaged.
A hospital label identified her as Élise Martin.
In the corner stood Dr. Delacroix.
He held a sealed evidence bag containing Sophie’s wedding ring.
“Why did he have that?” Adrian asked.
Amélie looked at him.
“Because he used it to identify another woman’s remains as Sophie.”
The question Vivian asked in the gallery returned.
If this woman is Sophie, whose remains were found in the fire?
Amélie knew the answer.
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The remains belonged to a missing clinic patient named Camille Renard.
And according to Amélie, Camille had been alive when Vivian brought her to the archive.
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