Read Chapter 14: Aftermath: The Suspension

The phone call came at 7 a.m., dragging Camille out of a sleep so deep she didn’t recognize the ceiling above her for a long moment. Julien’s apartment. Julien’s couch. The thin blanket he’d thrown over her before retreating to his bedroom, a gesture so unexpectedly gentle it had kept her awake longer than it should have.

She found her phone on the coffee table, squinting at the screen. Delacroix. Not Julien. Not the journalist. The coach's name pulsed there with its usual dread.

“Roussel,” she answered, voice scratchy.

“They’ve handed down the suspension. Two matches, pending review.” Delacroix’s voice was flat, businesslike, the way it got when he was already managing three crises ahead of the one he was speaking about. “And the disciplinary committee wants him in anger management. Mandatory. If he misses a session, they extend it. If he resists, they add another match.”

Camille sat up, pressing the heel of her hand against her temple. “Two matches. That’s not the end of the world.”

“That’s not the end of it. The league office is fielding questions from the press about his mental state. They’re calling it a ‘pattern of behavior.’ The word ‘suspended’ is being paired with the word ‘unstable’ in the same sentence, and the club sponsors are getting nervous.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

A beat of silence. “I’m speaking to you.”

Camille closed her eyes. Of course. That was her role now, wasn’t it? The intermediary. The handler. The woman who stood between Julien Aubert and the consequences of being Julien Aubert.

“I’ll tell him,” she said. “I’ll bring him in for the paperwork.”

“There’s one more thing.” Delacroix hesitated, which was unlike him. “The anger management isn’t optional, and it isn’t just about the league. Moreau called me again. He’s worried about the optics of keeping a player who head-butts people on television. If Julien wants to stay in Toulouse, he needs to show he’s addressing his issues. Publicly.”

“You mean performatively.”

“I mean however he needs to play it to keep his contract alive. You’re his physiotherapist. You’re the one he listens to. Make sure he understands the stakes.”

The line went dead. Camille stared at the phone for a moment, then set it down gently, as if it might shatter.

The bedroom door opened. Julien stood there in a rumpled t-shirt and loose shorts, his arm still in the cast, his hair a disaster, his eyes red-rimmed from a night that had clearly not included much sleep. He looked at her, then at the phone in her hand, then back at her face.

“That bad?” he asked.

“Two matches,” she said. “And mandatory anger management. And the club wants you to make a public statement about how you’re handling your—how you’re handling things.”

He didn’t flinch. He just nodded, walked past her into the small kitchen, and poured himself a glass of water. He drank it slowly, staring at the window, at the grey morning light filtering through the blinds.

“They want me to apologize,” he said finally. “On camera. For losing my temper. For being a violent thug who can’t control himself.”

“They want you to show them you’re working on it,” Camille said carefully. “That’s different.”

“Is it?” He turned to face her, and there it was again—that raw, wounded thing in his eyes that he tried to hide behind sarcasm and muscle. “They don’t want me to get better. They want me to look better. There’s a difference, and you know it.”

Camille stood, folding the blanket and setting it on the arm of the couch. She crossed to him, close enough to see the faint tremor in his jaw, the way his hand tightened around the glass.

“Maybe,” she admitted. “But the alternative is sitting on the bench for more than two matches. The alternative is letting them write the story for you. You’ve spent months hiding what’s really going on in your head. This is your chance to take control of the narrative.”

He laughed, a bitter, hollow sound. “You sound like a PR consultant.”

“I sound like someone who’s watched you destroy yourself in slow motion for three months and is tired of it.”

The words hung between them. Julien’s eyes widened slightly, then narrowed, and for a moment she thought he might push back, might retreat into the anger that was so much easier for him than honesty.

Instead, he set the glass down and said, quietly, “I don’t know how to do this. The public thing. The—admitting I have a problem thing. I’ve never been good at—at saying the words out loud.”

“You don’t have to say them to the cameras,” Camille said. “Not yet. You just have to say them to yourself. And maybe to one other person.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded, a small, almost imperceptible movement, and she knew he’d agreed.

---

The vineyard was quiet in the late afternoon, the rows of vines stretching out in geometric patterns toward the hills, the light softening to gold as the sun began its descent. Camille had driven them out in her battered Peugeot, Julien silent in the passenger seat, his cast resting against the door.

They walked the paths between the vines, not speaking, the only sounds the crunch of gravel underfoot and the distant call of birds. Julien moved slowly, heavily, as if the weight of the past few days had settled into his bones.

They reached the small stone bench at the edge of the property, the one overlooking the valley, and sat down. Camille had brought a bottle of wine from the estate house, a local red the owner had given her weeks ago, and two glasses she’d wrapped in a tea towel.

She uncorked it, poured, and handed him a glass.

“You’re going to have to say it eventually,” she said. “The words. The ones you keep lock up inside.”

Julien stared at the wine, swirling it. “What makes you think I know which words you’re talking about?”

“The ones about Vincent.”

His jaw tightened. The glass stilled in his hand. For a long moment, he didn’t speak, and she thought he might shut down, might retreat into the defensive shell she’d seen him build over and over again.

But then he took a long drink, and set the glass down on the bench between them, and said, “I was the one who wanted to go out that night. Vincent wanted to stay home. He had an early practice the next day. But I—I’d just found out about a girl, a scout from Clermont who was at the bar, and I wanted to—I wanted to show off. Like I always did.”

Camille didn’t speak. She just listened.

“Vincent came anyway. He always came. He knew I was an idiot, and he came anyway, to make sure I didn’t do anything too stupid.” Julien’s voice cracked. “And I got into a fight. Not a big one, just—someone said something, and I reacted, and the next thing I knew, Vincent was pulling me out of there, telling me to let it go, telling me I was going to get us banned from the club if I wasn’t careful.”

He paused, drawing a shaky breath.

“We were walking back to the car when it happened. The driver—he was drunk, he swerved, he—Vincent pushed me out of the way. He pushed me, Camille. And I—I didn’t even see it happen. I heard the impact, and I turned around, and he was just—he was lying there, and I knew, I knew he was gone, because Vincent was the loudest person I’ve ever known, and the silence was—the silence was the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

Tears were streaming down his face now, but he didn’t wipe them away. He let them fall.

“The worst part is,” he said, his voice barely a whisper, “the last thing I said to him before he pushed me was that he was a coward. For not backing me up in the fight. I called him a coward, and then he died saving me from my own stupidity. And I have to live with that. Every day. Every single day, I have to live with the fact that Vincent died thinking I hated him.”

The words fell into the quiet of the vineyard, and Camille let them settle. She didn’t reach for him, didn’t try to fix it, didn’t say it wasn’t his fault. She just sat with him in the silence, letting the truth exist between them.

After a long moment, she said, “My father left when I was eleven. He didn’t die. He just—left. One day he was there, and the next day he wasn’t, and my mother never explained why. She just told me to be strong, to be brave, to not ask questions about things I wasn’t ready to hear the answers to.”

Julien looked at her, his eyes red, his face wet.

“So I stopped asking,” she continued. “I built my whole life around not asking. I left Lyon, I went to Paris, I built a career, I told myself I didn’t need the answers. And then—something happened. Something that made me realize I couldn’t run from it anymore. So I came here. To the south. To a place where no one knew my name and I could start over.”

She picked up her glass and took a sip, the wine warm and dark on her tongue.

“It doesn’t go away,” she said. “The guilt. The questions. The wondering if you could have done something differently. But you can stop running from it. You can turn and face it, and some days you’ll lose, but some days you’ll win, and eventually—eventually, you learn to carry it instead of letting it carry you.”

Julien wiped his face with the back of his hand, a clumsy gesture made more awkward by the cast. “How long does that take?”

“I don’t know,” Camille admitted. “I’m still figuring it out.”

He almost smiled at that. Almost.

They sat in silence as the sun dipped lower, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink. They shared the bottle of wine, passing it back and forth when their glasses ran empty, and when the stars began to appear, faint pinpricks of light in the deepening blue, Julien let out a long breath, as if releasing something he’d been holding for years.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “For listening. For not—for not trying to fix it.”

“I don’t know how to fix it,” Camille said honestly. “I’m not sure anyone does. But I can be here. If you want me to be.”

He looked at her, and in the fading light, his face was softer than she’d ever seen it. “I want you to be,” he said.

She stayed that night. Not in his bed—she wasn’t ready for that, and neither was he—but in the spare room of the little cottage at the edge of the vineyard, the one the owner let her use when she needed to get away from the city. She lay awake for a long time, listening to the crickets, thinking about the things she’d said, and the things she hadn’t.

She hadn’t told him about the degree. She hadn’t told him about the journalist’s deadline. She hadn’t told him how terrified she was that her entire new life was built on sand.

But she’d told him about her father. About the running. It wasn’t everything, but it was something, and for now, that would have to be enough.