Read Chapter 10: The Missing Co-founder

Camille set her cup down without drinking. The coffee had gone cold ten minutes ago, and the café's afternoon light was doing nothing for the headache forming behind her eyes. Antoine sat across from her, his sleeves rolled to the elbows, a smear of graphite on his thumb from the whiteboard they'd spent the morning on.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," he said.

"Funny you should say that."

He waited. She watched the steam rise from his espresso, thinking about how easy it had become to sit across from him like this. A month ago she'd have been calculating his weaknesses. Now she was weighing how much truth she could afford to give him.

"Maxime was the co-founder," she said finally. "The original CTO. Before the series A."

Antoine's coffee paused halfway to his mouth. "I read his name in the investor materials. The file said he'd left to pursue other opportunities."

"That's what we told them." Camille twisted her cup in its saucer. "It's not what happened."

"What happened?"

"He vanished." The word felt thin, theatrical, but it was the truth. "One morning a year ago he didn't show up for standup. His apartment was empty. His laptop was wiped. He'd told no one he was leaving. Not me, not Jacques, not HR. He just—" She spread her hands. "—stopped existing."

"That's not how people leave companies. Not founders."

"No."

Antoine leaned back, processing. "You never reported him missing."

"To whom? The police? If we told them, we'd have to tell investors. And it was our first year of serious fundraising. A CTO who vanishes without a trace is a detail that kills a round." She swallowed the rest of the sentence, but it sat between them anyway: *and it was my job to keep the story clean.*

"What was he working on?"

The question came soft, almost gentle. It was worse than an accusation.

"A next-generation recommendation engine. He called it the backbone algorithm. It was supposed to read behavioral signals faster than anything on the market. We demoed it to two potential clients before he disappeared." She paused. "It was brilliant. It was going to change everything."

"But he never shipped it."

"He never finished it. Or he finished it and took it with him. I don't know. The repo stayed untouched for four months before we archived it. I was going to audit it after the board meeting. But then the pilot, and the Kirn term sheet, and—"

"Julien Perrot." Antoine finished her thought.

"Everything."

He nodded slowly, turning his cup in his hands. The café hummed around them—a laptop keyboard clicking in the corner, the hiss of the milk steamer, a couple arguing in rapid French near the window. In the middle of it, the two of them sat suspended, holding the weight of a year's worth of secrets.

"There's something else," Camille said. "The way Maxime left. It wasn't clean. I went to his apartment after the third day. His neighbor said she'd heard him fighting with someone the night before. A woman's voice, raised. She never saw her face."

"Maybe he wasn't alone in this. In whatever he was building."

"I've thought about that every day for a year."

The café's bell chimed as a new customer entered. Camille didn't look up. She was watching Antoine's face, looking for the moment he decided she was too much risk, too many holes in the story. But he didn't flinch. He just sat there, jaw tight, thinking.

"Who was his girlfriend?" he asked.

"Lucie. Lucie Moreau."

Antoine's eyebrows lifted, just a fraction. "Moreau."

"Any relation to Lucas Moreau? I asked myself that too. I could never prove it. Different surnames were all I had to go on. She was an analyst at a competitor. She left her job around the same time. Then she dropped out of sight too."

"Two people vanish from the same project, and no one connected the dots?"

"We didn't have dots to connect. Not then." Camille rubbed her temples. "I was too busy keeping the machine running. I told myself it didn't matter, that we had other engineers, that the algorithm wasn't essential. But it was. It was the differentiator. And without it, we've been limping along on incremental, promising innovation-rich second-tier work and disguising it as breakthrough."

The word *fabrication* hovered in the air between them. It didn't need to be said.

Antoine was about to speak when his phone buzzed on the table. He glanced at it, then went still. "Camille."

"What?"

He turned his screen toward her. The message was from an unlisted address—a jumble of letters and numbers with no subject line. The body contained no text. Only a link.

"Don't open it," she said.

"I wasn't going to." He held up the phone anyway. "But look at the timestamp. Four minutes ago."

Camille pulled out her own phone and opened her inbox. There it was, identical, same unlisted sender, the same timestamp. Both of them getting it. That mattered, she realized. Whoever sent it knew they were both in the room.

"The café is right across the street," she said.

"What?"

She pointed at the link's metadata. She'd done enough forensics in the last week to recognize the naked IP address before the domain resolved. "That's the router DNS for the Café des Arts. The one with the terrace and the terrible croissants."

Antoine turned, looking out the window. Across the boulevard, under a faded green awning, a handful of patrons sat at occupied tables. Any one of them could be watching. Any one of them could have sent it.

He looked back at her. "You want to take the risk?"

"I want to know what's in the file."

She clicked the link on her phone. The browser opened, and a single file loaded—a download prompt for something called *backbone_v2_key.enc*. Encrypted. Protected.

"They sent us Maxime's unfinished code," Camille breathed.

"Or a trap."

"It's a message, Antoine." She looked up at him, and for the first time in a year, the shape of the void Maxime had left behind began to sharpen into something solid. "He's alive. He's been alive this whole time. And whatever is happening in our building, whatever happened to your reputation, whatever happened to my metrics—it started before either of us got here."

The encryption key sat at the top of the file. It was her name. Camille.

"No," she whispered. "No, that's not possible."

But it was. The address of the sender was not a café. It was the office of Lucas Moreau—her late co-founder's brother. And the file was addressed, in clear text, to her.

"Camille." Antoine's voice came from a long way off. "What does it say?"

She turned the phone toward him. On the screen, in small black letters, one line beneath the encryption key:

*"You should have looked for me, Camille. I never left. - M."*

The afternoon light felt suddenly cold. The café kept chattering around her, indifferent. Camille Laurent, product lead of AlgoSens, stared at the screen, and for the first time in her careful, guarded life, she had no idea who the enemy was—or whether the enemy had ever been an enemy at all.