Part one

The Lemaire Brewery has existed since 1921. It is housed in an old square farmstead on the banks of the Sambre, near Thuin, with a cobbled courtyard, a lime tree and a smell of warm malt that hangs over the whole village on brewing days.

My great-grandfather founded it. My grandfather saved it from the war. My father ran it for thirty-five years. And I, Nathalie Lemaire, forty-one years old, have worked there since I was nineteen. I started out washing the vats. Today I am the head brewer.

In 2015, the brewery was in trouble. The big brands were crushing prices, the cafés were closing, my father was talking about selling. So I spent a whole winter in the little brewing room, at night, doing trials. Forty-two of them. The forty-third was the right one: an amber tripel, with a hint of heather honey and orange peel, which I called “La Tilleule”.

La Tilleule changed everything. It won a gold medal at an international competition in Brussels. It started flowing in the cafés of Charleroi, Namur and Brussels, then Paris and Tokyo. In seven years, the brewery tripled its sales. We took on twenty people from the village.

When my father retired three years ago, my brother Gauthier took over as director. He had been to business school in Louvain-la-Neuve. He wore suits. He talked about “development” and “external growth”. I wore wellies. That suited me just fine.

Until the Tuesday I opened the wrong folder on the accounts computer.

That was where I found the sentence meant for me: “As for my sister, no need to worry. She’ll be out on 1 January.”

It was an exchange of emails between Gauthier and a certain Frédéric Van Damme, head of acquisitions at a big international brewing group. A letter of intent. A draft sale agreement. Gauthier was selling the brewery.

He wasn’t quite selling it on his own, of course. When he retired, my father had passed his shares to his two children, in equal halves. But Gauthier had found a trick: he had brought two friends of his onto the board, “independent directors”, and had a capital increase voted through while I was away at a trade fair in Japan. I had signed the proxy without reading it, between two flights. I trusted him. He was my brother.

The result: he had fifty-eight per cent of the shares. I had forty-two. He could sell without me.

The group was buying the brewery for one reason only, written in black and white in the draft contract: “the La Tilleule brand, its recipe and its know-how”. The farm, the vats, the lime tree didn’t interest them. The contract provided for production to move to a factory in Flanders, for six people out of twenty-six to be kept on, and for the rest to be “released”.

The rest included me.

The sale price: twenty-two million euros. The signing: 15 December, at a notary’s in Brussels.

The next day, I acted as if nothing had happened. I brewed as usual. At midday, Gauthier came into the brewing room, which he never did, with two men in dark suits and city shoes that slipped on the wet tiles.

“Business partners,” he told me with a broad smile. “They wanted to see where La Tilleule is born.”

One of them asked questions. Lots of them. The fermentation temperatures. Where the honey comes from. The moment we add the orange peel. He noted everything on a tablet. I answered politely, and I lied about every figure.

When they had gone, Marcel, the oldest of our brewers, who had already been working there in my grandfather’s day, came over to me, wiping his hands on his apron.

“Those weren’t customers,” he said. “Customers taste. That lot were measuring.”

I thought of the twenty-six people who worked on that farm. Of Marcel and his forty years with the firm. Of Sophie, who had just bought a house in Gozée with her husband. Of the two nineteen-year-old apprentices who cycled in every morning. “Six people out of twenty-six to be kept on.”

That evening, Gauthier invited me to dinner. He was lovely. He asked about my holidays, my son, the gold medal. At the end of the meal, he took my hand across the table.

“You know I’ll always do anything for you, Nath. You’re the heart of this brewery.”

I smiled. I paid my half of the bill.

When I got home, I printed out the whole file. Then I did what I always do when I don’t know what to do: I went to see Dad.

He has lived for two years in a care home in Lobbes, ten minutes from the brewery. He is eighty-four. His hands shake, but his head is as clear as spring water. He spends his afternoons watching the Sambre through the window and beating the nurses at cards.

I told him everything. The emails, the capital increase, the proxy signed in Japan, Flanders, the twenty jobs. “She’ll be out on 1 January.”

He listened to the end without saying a word. He didn’t look surprised. That was what struck me. He looked sad, but not surprised.

Then he opened the drawer of his bedside table, rummaged under his glasses and his crosswords, and handed me a thick, yellowed manila envelope held shut with an elastic band.

“I was expecting you,” he said. “Since 2015.”