Read Chapter 26: Aftermath: The Noose Tightens

The night air of Marseille slapped her face as Camille ran, her flats slapping wet cobblestones, her lungs burning salt and panic. She didn't remember driving here — only the blur of streetlights and the blare of horns she'd ignored. Now she stood outside Julien's apartment, the door buzzer already pressed, her finger jammed against it like a lifeline.

The door swung open. Julien stood in track pants and a thin t‑shirt, hair mussed, jaw tight. He'd been pacing, she could tell — the half-empty coffee cup on the floor by the entryway, the folds in the rug. He took one look at her and his face shifted from irritation to a kind of frightened stillness.

"Camille. What—"

She stepped past him without asking, into the living room, and turned in a circle like a trapped bird. The walls were bare. A rugby ball on the kitchen counter. The television muted on a sports channel. She couldn't look at him. Couldn't stop moving.

"Camille." His voice lower now, soft. He closed the door and approached carefully, as if she were a spooked horse. "You're shaking."

"I need to tell you—" Her voice broke. She pressed her palms to her eyes. "I need to tell you everything, and I don't know where to start, and if I start I might not stop crying, and—"

"Then cry." He was in front of her now. His hands closed over her wrists, gently pulled her hands from her face. His thumb brushed the tear she didn't realize had already escaped. "Start anywhere. I'm not going anywhere."

She laughed — a ragged, broken sound. "That's the problem. You're not going anywhere. That's why they're doing this."

He steered her to the couch and sat her down, then crouched in front of her, waiting. The lamplight carved shadows under his cheekbones. He looked at her with those eyes that had been suspicious of her twelve hours ago, but now only held worry. He was so exhausted. There was a purple smudge under his left eye she'd never seen before.

"Moreau," she began, "is in debt. Gambling. Serious debt. He's been — the club, the syndicates, they're all tangled together. He owes people money. Bad people. They're the ones pushing the surgery." The words tumbled out without order. "It's not about your knee. It never was. They want you broken — publicly, so—" She couldn't finish. Her breath came in those hitched, shuddering waves that embarrassed her even as they happened.

Julien's hands stayed on her wrists, steady. "Slow down. Who are 'they'?"

"The men in the letter. Vincent's letter. The syndicate he warned us about." She felt her face twist, her composure crumbling like old plaster. "I know about the letter, Julien. He sent me a copy the night he died. Vincent wanted me to protect you from them and I—" She choked. "I've had it this whole time and I didn't show you because I didn't know who to trust and now they're winning because I'm a coward."

A long silence. He didn't let go of her.

"You're not a coward," he said, slow, careful. "You're the only person in that club who ever told me the truth about my body. Even when it hurt."

"That's the problem." Her voice cracked on the word. "I didn't. Not all of it."

She pulled her hands free and wrapped them around herself. The confession hung there, thick and heavy. He waited, chin lowered, a patient animal sensing danger.

"My degree from Lyon," she whispered, staring at the floor. "It's not real."

She saw him process this. A single muscle in his jaw jumped. For a terrible moment, he did not speak.

"What do you mean, not real?"

"I never finished my physiotherapy degree. I left Lyon in my third year, after a family emergency, and I never went back. The certificate — the one on the clinic wall, the one on my documents — it was fabricated." The words felt like swallowing glass. "I was eighteen months from qualifying and I panicked. I'd already been working as an assistant, and the clinic where I trained offered me a position if I could present the paperwork. So I found someone who could make it look legitimate. And it never came up. In Paris, it never came up. It's a paperwork felony, Julien. If Delacroix exposes it, I'm not just fired. I lose my medical license — what's left of it — and I go to prison."

Julien sat back on his heels. He ran both hands through his hair, looking at the ceiling for a long moment. When he looked back at her, his eyes had gone somewhere she couldn't read.

"So every test you ran on me. The protocols. The injections, the strength work, the—" he stopped, shaking his head slightly. "That was all still you. That was all real."

"Yes." She met his gaze fiercely. "I know how to do this job, Julien. I learned everything there is to learn about you — about any patient — from the ground up. The paper is a lie. The skill—" she pressed her palm to her chest, "that was never a lie. That was the only true thing I had."

"Then why didn't you tell me?" His voice wasn't accusatory, just raw. "When we were— when this was happening between us, why wouldn't you trust me with something like that?"

"Because look at what they're doing to you with the truth!" She was on her feet now, pacing. "Lucas knows everything about your rehab and you won't work with him, which means you see no one, which means you'll play the finals on a knee I've spent four months building and it will fail. Moreau has me by the throat with this degree and he knows I know about his debts. Delacroix knows about the degree too, and Vincent's letter is sitting in a drawer three kilometers away and I can't use it without putting Vincent's legacy in the crossfire." She stopped, chest heaving, voice coming out small. "I'm out of moves, Julien. And tomorrow morning you have to decide, and I don't know what to tell you to do."

For a long moment, he just looked at her. The weight of the room pressed in — the dusty afternoon sun through the blinds, the hum of the fridge, the far-off cry of gulls above the port.

Then he moved. Stepped close. Wrapped his arms around her so fast and so wholly that her body went rigid before surrendering entirely. She buried her face in his chest and sobbed — ugly, silent shaking that soaked his t‑shirt. He held her the whole time. One hand in her hair, the other flat on her back between her shoulder blades, like he was checking she was real.

Eventually the shaking slowed. She breathed in his smell — soap, clean sweat, the faint copper of old bandages and muscle cream. She was dizzy from it.

"I lied because I was desperate," she murmured into his chest, her voice muffled and hoarse. "Because I had nothing, Julien. My parents split when I was eleven; I have no family money, no connections. The clinic in Lyon was my only chance at a career and they were going to give it to someone else if I didn't qualify that year. I was young and I felt like the door was closing and I made a choice I've been running from ever since." She pulled back just enough to look up at him, eyes red-rimmed and glassy. "And it worked. For eleven years. I've helped— I've healed players like you. I built a practice from nothing. And now one piece of counterfeit paper is going to be the thing that takes me down, and it's going to take you down with me." Her jaw trembled. "That's what I can't live with."

Julien wiped a tear from her cheek with the pad of his thumb. He let out a slow breath, considering something far beyond her — the ceiling, or the past, or the shape of his own lies. "I have a brother I haven't spoken to in six years because I told the press he was a junkie when he wasn't," he said quietly. "I once headbutted a ref in a friendly and got the club fined two hundred thousand euros. I've hidden a knee that could snap at any moment from my own medical staff for three years." He shrugged, a small, crooked thing. "We all do desperate things, Camille. What matters is what we do after."

"I don't know what to do after." Her voice was barely a whisper.

He was quiet for a moment, his thumb still tracing her cheekbone. Then he looked down at her, that familiar stubborn light kindling behind his exhaustion.

"Tomorrow morning, I go to the board and I tell them I'm playing the final on my terms — this knee, this condition, whoever's watching the tape, screw them all." He said it plainly, without bravado. "Because if I'm going to fall, I'm going to do it trusting my body again. Trusting what you taught it. Even if the paper you did it under was a lie."

She stared at him. "Julien—"

"If Delacroix wants to expose you, let him." His voice was low now, dangerously calm. "I'll stand in front of the cameras and tell them that the woman who cleaned me up and put me back together was the best physiotherapist I've ever worked with. Fake paper or not. Let them try to spin that." A shadow passed through his eyes, and he added more softly, "And if Moreau's men come for you, they come through me."

She shook her head, a fresh wave of hot tears rising. "You don't owe me this. After everything I kept from you—"

"Camille." He said her name like a full stop. Then took her face in both hands. "You asked me a question that night in the clinic, before all this. Whether I could trust you. I didn't answer."

He held her gaze, steady as a lighthouse beam.

"I'm answering now. Yes."

She didn't speak. She couldn't. In the quiet of his apartment, the whole city humming its coastal noise outside like a distant tide, they stood holding one another, both of them teetering on the edge of the dark.

Finally, she felt the trembling in her hands still. She pulled back just enough to look him square in the eye, her voice steadier than it had been in the past twenty-four hours.

"Then tomorrow, we go to that board meeting together. And we start with our own search."

His mouth lifted at a corner — that dark, crooked smile she'd learned was his real one. "Our own search?"

"Moreau owes money to men who want to break you," she said. "Men who have at least one person inside that club feeding them everything we do." Her eyes narrowed. "Men who somehow got their hands on my private psychological notes on you. Notes only three people had access to."

Julien's smile faded. "Lucas."

"Or Delacroix." She shook her head — that was tomorrow's battle. Tonight, there was only the small anchor of his hand in hers, solid as bone.

She stayed the night. Not for anything like before — just two bodies on opposite ends of the same couch, the remote between them, the mutter of the muted television painting light across the walls. She watched him sleep for a long while, the deep exhaustion of the past weeks carved into his face, and along with the tenderness she felt there was a new hardness in her chest — a resolve that had been planted the moment he'd looked at her and trusted her anyway.

No one was going to break Julien Morel while she still had a voice, a brain, and two functional hands.

She fell asleep to the sound of his breathing, even and deep, the harbor lights bleeding gold through the blinds.