Read Chapter 30: The Truth About the Credentials

The notification arrived at 6:47 a.m., while Camille was still in the bathroom, her toothbrush halfway to her mouth. Julien's phone buzzed on the nightstand, then his tablet, then his laptop. A cascade of digital alarms that pulled him from sleep with a curse.

By the time she came out, wrapped in his oversized bathrobe, the article was already glowing on his screen.

*MONTPELLIER PHYSIO'S DEGREE A FABRICATION, SOURCES SAY*

She read the first paragraph over his shoulder. The journalist—the same one who had cornered her weeks ago—had done her homework. University of Lyon records. A discrepancy in the registration dates. An administrative source confirming that Camille Roussel had never completed her physiotherapy license. The implication hung between every line like a guillotine blade.

Camille's hand went to her stomach. "She has the paperwork."

"Or enough of it." Julien's voice was rough with sleep and fury. "This isn't a leak. This is Delacroix feeding her everything."

The club would be buzzing already. Moreau would have seen it. The board, voting this morning, would now have all the ammunition they needed to push Julien out and bury Camille entirely.

She pulled her phone from the charger. Fourteen missed calls. Eleven texts. Three from the club's communications director, two from the head physio, one from a number she didn't recognize that had left a voicemail beginning with *"Ms. Roussel, this is France 3—"*

She deleted it without listening to the rest.

"Camille." Julien stood, the sheets pooling at his waist. "Don't—"

"I have to go."

"Go where? Face them alone? No."

"I have to face *someone*." She was already pulling clothes from his closet—yesterday's jeans, a sweater that smelled like him. "It's seven in the morning. The board meeting is at nine. If I don't show up and give them something, they'll assume everything in that article is true."

"Because it *is* true." He said it quietly, without accusation. A statement of fact.

She stopped. The word hung between them like a physical weight.

"Yes," she said. "It is."

"Then let's tell them."

"Tell them what? That I fabricated my credentials? That I've been treating professional athletes—including you—without a license for eight months?" She laughed, bleak and short. "That doesn't fix anything. That makes it worse."

Julien crossed the room and put his hands on her shoulders. His palms were broad, warm, steady. She hated how much she wanted to lean into that steadiness.

"Delacroix is going to expose you at the meeting today whether you're there or not. Moreau is going to fire you either way. The only question is whether you tell the truth on your own terms or let them twist it into something that serves their narrative."

"Julien, the truth *is* damaging. There's no way to spin it that doesn't end with me leaving Montpellier in handcuffs or a scandal sheet."

"Maybe." His jaw tightened. "But there's a difference between being forced out and walking away with your head up. I've been in that locker room long enough to know how this works. The players will smell fear before they smell scandal. If you own it, if you stand in front of them and say *I fucked up, and here's why, and here's what I did with that second chance*—some of them will respect that."

"And the rest?"

"The rest were never going to respect you anyway."

She wanted to argue. Wanted to point out that players didn't get to decide whether a physiotherapist was qualified, that the medical board would revoke her ability to practice anywhere in France, that her entire professional life—the years of work, the clients she'd helped, the recovery programs she'd designed—would be retroactively invalidated by a piece of paper she'd never actually earned.

But he was right about one thing. She couldn't run from this.

She was still formulating a response when her phone buzzed again. A text from the club's communications director, formal and final:

*Ms. Roussel, please collect your personal effects from the training facility by 10 a.m. Your access badge has been deactivated. A formal letter will follow.*

She read it aloud. Julien's expression went dark.

"They fired you before the meeting."

"They were going to anyway."

"Camille—"

"I need to go." She stepped around him, grabbed her bag from the chair by the door. "I'll pack my office. I'll be gone by the time the board convenes. Whatever happens with your contract—"

"Wait." He caught her wrist. "Wait. You're going to the facility?"

"To get my things, yes."

"Not alone you're not."

"Julien, if you're seen with me right now—the press is already circling. Any association with me will—"

"I don't care about the press." His voice dropped. "I care about you walking into that building alone while Delacroix and Moreau and God knows who else are waiting to tear you apart. I'm coming with you."

She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. He was already reaching for his jeans.

---

The training facility was chaos.

Journalists clustered at the main gate, cameras raised, voices overlapping. Camille's cab slowed to a crawl as the driver peered at the crowd. "Madame, perhaps we go around?"

"Pull up to the side entrance."

The driver obeyed, and Camille slipped out before the car fully stopped. Julien followed, hood up, sunglasses on—useless camouflage for a man his height and build. A few reporters turned at the movement, but the gate guard—old Marcel, who had known Julien since his juniors days—waved them through with a sympathetic grimace.

"Inside's worse, son," he muttered. "Better brace yourself."

The locker room was empty. So was the physio suite. But the main corridor hummed with the muted electricity of staff avoiding eye contact, of doors closing as they passed. Camille felt it like a physical recoil. She had spent eight months here. Eight months of early mornings and late nights, of ice baths and strapping tape and players who made crude jokes that concealed real vulnerability. In eight months she had become part of this place's fabric.

Now she was being excised, and the wound was closing fast.

Her office—*her* office, a windowless closet with a treatment table and a desk she'd covered in lavender—had been stripped. The drawers gaped empty. Her framed certificate, the one she'd hung on the wall in a moment of perverse pride, was gone.

Delacroix had already been here.

"He moves fast," Julien said from the doorway.

"He's been waiting for this." Camille picked up the one thing they'd left—a half-empty bottle of massage oil, the brand she preferred. She slipped it into her bag. A small mercy. A small piece of herself to carry out.

"Camille." Julien's voice softened. "Come here."

She turned. He was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching her with an expression she couldn't quite read.

"I'm not finished," he said.

"What?"

"The fight. I'm not finished. I told you last night we do this together. That hasn't changed."

"Julien, you have a board meeting in two hours. Your contract—"

"My contract is a piece of paper. You're not." He pushed off the frame and closed the distance between them. "I'm going to that meeting. I'm going to tell them I'm playing the final. And I'm going to tell them that if they want me on that pitch, they'll have to accept that you're coming back as my physio. No conditions."

"They'll never—"

"Then they'll lose their star player a week before the biggest match of the season." He shrugged. "Their choice."

"You can't blackmail the board with your own career."

"I'm not blackmailing them. I'm giving them a binary option: they get me, or they get me gone. That's not a threat. It's a fact. And they know it."

Camille stared at him. The fear was still there—cold, coiled in her chest—but beneath it, something else stirred. Something that felt dangerously like hope.

"And if I stay?" she asked quietly. "If I fight? What then?"

Julien smiled. It was his pitch-side smile, the one he wore when the match was on the line and he knew, absolutely knew, that he was going to win.

"Then we tell the truth. All of it. The degree, the syndicate, Moreau's debts. We take this thing apart and see what's left underneath."

Camille took a breath. Somewhere beyond the walls, she could hear the reporters chanting her name. She could hear Moreau's voice, oily and triumphant, preparing his statement to the press. She could hear Delacroix sharpening his knives for the board meeting.

But here, in this stripped-bare office that no longer belonged to her, she heard something else: Julien's voice, patient and unbroken, asking her to stay.

She picked up her bag.

"Okay," she said. "Let's give them the truth."