Read Chapter 21: Vulnerability

The city had gone gray by the time Camille reached Élodie's building, the last of the afternoon light swallowed by clouds rolling off the Seine. She pressed the buzzer and leaned her forehead against the cold metal frame, letting the hum of the street fade into something distant.

Élodie opened the door in her bathrobe, face pale, eyes unfocused. She blinked at Camille as if seeing a ghost.

"Camille. What—" She stopped, took in the state of her friend—trench coat wrinkled, hair escaping its clip, mascara smudged. "Come in."

The apartment smelled like coffee gone stale and something else, something anxious. Papers covered the kitchen table, bills and bank statements and letters with the sharp crimson of final notices. Élodie swept them into a pile with one arm, but not fast enough. Camille saw the numbers. Saw the word *réclamation* repeated across three different documents.

"I didn't mean to interrupt," Camille said, though she had nowhere else to go. Her own apartment felt like a trap, four walls that had witnessed her spiral through the night, replaying Lucas's words again and again until they'd gone soft at the edges. *Resign by Thursday. Or I destroy you.*

"You're not interrupting." Élodie's laugh was hollow. "I was just—" She gestured vaguely at the mess. "Sit. Let me make tea."

But Camille had seen the date on one of the letters. March 12. Tomorrow. She picked it up, scanned the bank's letterhead, the amount owed. The figure made her throat tighten.

"Élodie. What is this?"

Élodie froze halfway to the kettle. The kitchen light caught the hollows under her eyes, the strain in her jaw. She turned slowly, wrapping her arms around herself.

"My brother." The words came out flat. "They found him. The people he owed. They went to his landlord, his employer. And now they've come to me." She laughed again, that same brittle sound. "I thought—I thought if I could just pay enough, they'd leave him alone. But it's never enough, is it? It compounds. The interest, the penalties. It's like watching a fire spread."

She opened the fridge, then closed it without taking anything out.

"The CFO emailed me today. Three reminders about the advance I took against my salary." Her voice cracked. "I used it for what I could of his debt. Two months before the health ministry evaluation, and I've put myself in their crosshairs."

Camille sat down heavily at the kitchen table. The chair scraped against the tile, loud in the small room. She stared at her hands, at the chipped nail polish she hadn't bothered to fix, at the absence of a ring on her finger—the one thing Marc had given her that she'd never worn, never even tried on, but had kept in a drawer like a promise she'd been afraid to break.

"Everyone is running out of time," she said quietly. "Lucas gave me until Thursday to resign. He's going to expose the fabricated metric to the ministry. And Antoine used his veto protecting me, so there's nothing left." She pressed her palms against her eyes. "I told Françoise I wouldn't cut corners, and then I walked out on Antoine when he wanted to, and now I've got nobody."

Élodie sat across from her. "You have me."

"Your brother's debt collectors might disagree."

A silence stretched between them, the weight of it pressing down. Élodie reached across the table and took Camille's hand. Her skin was cold.

"It's funny," Élodie said. "I thought by now I'd have figured it out. The thing that makes you safe. I thought it was money. Then I thought it was being good at your job." She squeezed Camille's fingers. "But it's just luck, isn't it? Being in the right place, with the right people. And when it runs out—"

A knock at the door cut her off.

They exchanged a look. The kind of look two women share when they know exactly who might be on the other side. Creditors. Collectors. Léandre. Camille rose slowly, walked to the door, and peered through the peephole.

Antoine stood in the hallway, his collar turned up against the cold, a manila envelope pressed to his chest.

She opened the door.

He looked at her for a long moment, and something in his expression shifted—relief, or recognition, or a blend she couldn't name. "You weren't answering your phone." His voice was gentle. "Théo said he saw you heading this direction. I took a chance."

"You tracked me."

"I was worried." He said it simply, unapologetically. His eyes moved past her to Élodie, who had retreated to the kitchen doorway. "I'm Antoine. I work with Camille."

Élodie glanced at Camille, then gave a small nod. "I'll give you two some privacy." She disappeared down the hallway, a door clicking shut.

Antoine stepped inside. He didn't sit. He set the envelope on the kitchen table and looked at Camille, really looked at her, in a way that made her feel exposed in a way the board meeting hadn't.

"I spoke to Jacques," he said. "After you left. He wouldn't tell me everything, but he let slip that Lucas has a file on you. Something from before AlgoSens."

Camille felt her chest tighten. "It's nothing. A mistake I made early on. A user metric I overstated to close a funding round. Lucas dug it up."

"Overstated how?"

"Invented." The word came out ragged. "I invented a number. A adoption rate that didn't exist. I knew it was wrong. I did it anyway, because if I didn't, we wouldn't have gotten the seed money, and AlgoSens would have died before it started." She looked away. "I've spent seven years building something real to make up for one lie."

Antoine was quiet. When she finally looked up, his face held no judgment.

"I know, Camille."

"What?"

"I know." He reached into the envelope, pulled out a single sheet of paper. "Maxime flagged it in the founding documents. The original metric projection before you revised it. It's been in the company record this whole time. Any forensic auditor would find it eventually."

She felt the floor tilt. "You've known? Since when?"

"Since the day I reviewed the founding file, before I even took the job." He folded the paper and put it back. "I knew you'd done something to get that first funding. I didn't know what until tonight, when I finally got access to the original server logs."

"Then why—" Her voice broke. "Why did you stay? Why did you protect me at the board meeting? Why not let Lucas take my position and expose me on his own?"

Antoine looked at her, his gaze steady. "Because I've met people like Lucas before. He builds nothing. He breaks things that other people made, and then he sells the pieces for scrap. You built something, Camille. You made a mistake, and you spent seven years making it right. That's not a person who deserves to be destroyed. That's a person worth saving."

He took a step closer.

"I didn't come here to judge you. I came here because I respect you more than anyone I've ever worked with. I didn't come here as your rival. I came here as your partner. If you want me."

The word hung between them. Partner. She'd had partners before—business partners, life partners, people who'd promised to stay and had found reasons to leave. But Antoine looked at her with his whole attention, patient and open.

"Lucas has a board seat," she said, testing the walls. "He has Hugo. He has Jacques. He has the file."

"We have Maxime's code. We have Françoise's safe deposit box—even if she's done with you, it still exists, and the evidence of his fraud is still in it. And we have the truth." He paused. "She couldn't reach Lucas directly because he refused her claims from fifteen years ago. But the public doesn't know that. The journalists don't know that."

Camille felt something stir in her chest. "You want to go public."

"I want to take away his leverage. He's threatening to expose you to the ministry. But if we expose him first—his history with Françoise, his manipulation of Hugo, his acquisition of the stake—then his accusations carry less weight. A man with a proven history of sabotage isn't a credible whistleblower."

"And the user metric?"

Antoine's voice softened. "You tell the truth. Not to the ministry—not yet. But to someone who can frame it. A journalist who can tell the full story. Your mistake, and what you built after it. The product's potential. The ethical code that Maxime left behind."

"He's also threatening to expose my past fabrication," Camille said. "If I go to a journalist first, I'm handing him the story."

"You're taking control of it. The story that's told about you should be the story you choose to tell—not the one he dictates." He met her eyes. "You're not the person who made that mistake. You're the person who fixed it."

Silence filled the kitchen. Outside, a siren wailed somewhere in the distance, fading into the hum of the city. Inside, it was just the two of them, the weight of everything unsaid resting between.

"I've been alone for a long time," Camille finally said. "I told myself it was because I didn't need anyone. That it was safer that way." She laughed softly, without humor. "But I think I was just afraid that if I let someone in, they'd find out I don't deserve to be here."

"And if they found out?"

"Then they'd leave. Like Marc." She said the name carefully, testing her own voice. "Like my father. Like everyone else who stayed just long enough to see the real me."

Antoine was quiet for a moment. Then he reached out and took her hand. His fingers were warm.

"I'm not leaving, Camille."

She looked at him—at the steadiness in his eyes, the lack of pretense. And for the first time in years, she didn't brace for the other shoe to drop.

"Okay," she said. "Then let's plan."

They spent the next hour at Élodie's table, spreading papers between them, sketching timelines on the back of a bank statement. Camille outlined the journalist who had first contacted her—a woman named Sarah Moreau who covered tech ethics for *Le Monde*—and Antoine confirmed the server logs that tied Hugo's communication to the days Lucas acquired his stake. They mapped out the data room she would need, the documents to compile, the story to tell.

"We need to move fast," Antoine said. "Lucas expects you to resign by Thursday. If we can get Sarah to publish before then, his threat loses its teeth."

"And if he publishes the metric anyway?"

"Then he hands her the proof. A journalist doesn't bury a confession like that." He smiled, thin and sharp. "Let him think he's won the board game. We're playing a different one."

Camille looked at him across the table. The shadows under his eyes matched hers. They'd been running on adrenaline and stubbornness for days, and it showed. But there was something else there too. Something that looked like trust.

"Thank you," she said quietly. "For not judging me."

"Everyone makes mistakes that feel unforgivable at the time." He set down his pen. "What matters is what you do next. And I've seen what you're capable of when you're fighting for something you believe in."

She felt the words settle somewhere beneath her ribs, warm and unfamiliar. She didn't know what to call what she was feeling. She only knew that she didn't want him to leave, and the realization frightened her more than Lucas ever had.

"Stay?" She said it before she could stop herself. "Just a little longer. I don't want to be alone right now."

Antoine nodded slowly. "I wasn't planning to go anywhere."

He made more tea, and they kept planning. The city darkened beyond the window, and somewhere above them, Élodie's footsteps faded as she retreated deeper into the apartment, giving them space. Camille looked at Antoine, at the way he tapped his pen against his lip when he was thinking, the way he underlined words twice when they mattered.

*Partner*, she thought. The word felt less foreign now. It felt like a beginning.