Read Chapter 26: The Fallout

The news van was still parked outside AlgoSens when Camille walked past the front window. Through the glass, she saw a reporter speaking rapidly into a camera, gesturing toward the building as if it were a crime scene. A crime scene. In a way, it had been. Lucas and Hugo were in custody, but their story—the story Lucas had engineered, the story of Camille’s fabrication—had gone live at dawn, splashed across every tech publication and morning news feed in Paris.

“You’re up in thirty minutes,” Antoine said, appearing beside her with two coffees. He handed her one. “The board wants you to speak first. Then me. Then we take questions.”

“Questions,” Camille repeated. “From whom? The investors who are dialing in? The journalists who already think I’m a fraud? The client who’s probably drafting a termination letter as we speak?”

“All of the above.” Antoine’s voice was steady, but his knuckles were white around his cup. “But Maxime is in the conference room. He’ll be seated behind us. That counts for something.”

Camille took a sip of coffee. It was bitter, over-brewed, exactly what she needed. “Does it? He’s a witness. We’re still the ones who lied.”

“We’re the ones who told the truth in the end,” Antoine said quietly. “That’s the story. That’s our story.”

She looked at him. His eyes were tired but clear. For months, she had seen him as a rival, a threat, someone who had come to take her place. Now he was standing beside her, holding a coffee he’d probably fetched just to give her a moment of normalcy. She didn’t know when that shift had happened. Somewhere between the spilled coffee trick and the police station, she supposed.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go tell it.”

---

The conference room was packed. Not with bodies—the seats were limited, socially distanced, a leftover habit from the pandemic years—but with presence. The board members were on the giant screen, their faces arranged in a grid of grim expectations. Two journalists from major outlets sat in the back, invited by Sarah Moreau as a courtesy, their cameras already recording. Sarah herself was in the front row, notebook open, pen poised. Her balanced story would come after the press conference, but Camille knew the damage control had to start now.

Maxime sat between Antoine and Camille at the long table. He looked older than she remembered, thinner, but his eyes were sharp. He had insisted on being present, despite his lawyer’s advice to stay quiet. “I’ve been quiet long enough,” he had said. “I signed away my patent under duress. I’m not signing away my voice.”

Camille cleared her throat. The room fell silent.

“My name is Camille Laurent. I am the product lead at AlgoSens, and I have a confession to make.”

She let the words hang. No one moved.

“Several months ago, I fabricated a metric. I reported user engagement data that was not collected, that was projected, that was—forgive me—invented. I did this because I believed the product was good enough to eventually deliver those numbers, and because I was afraid that without them, we would lose funding and fail. I was wrong. Not about the product. About the method.”

She glanced at Antoine. He nodded, barely perceptible.

“What I did was unethical. It was dishonest. And it is the reason an exposé was published against me this morning. I own that. I do not own the accusation that it was part of a coordinated scheme to defraud the health client, because it was not. It was a single, terrible decision, made in a moment of fear. Everything I did afterward—the work with my team to build Sentio’s ethical version, the discovery of the sabotage, the documentation that led to Lucas Moreau’s arrest—was done to correct that mistake.”

She paused. The journalists were typing. Sarah’s pen was still.

“I want to be clear,” Camille continued. “If the board decides that my fabrication is disqualifying, I will accept that decision. But I ask them to consider what I did after the error, not just the error itself. I ask them to consider that when I found out Lucas was manipulating the company, I did not run. When I found out he had planted false evidence against me, I did not hide. I came here. With evidence. With witnesses. With the truth.”

She sat down. Her hands were trembling, but her voice had not broken. Antoine rose.

“I’m Antoine Delacroix,” he said. “Most of you know me as the new hire who was brought in to replace Camille, or to compete with her, depending on who you asked. I’m here to tell you that was never my intention. I came to AlgoSens because I believed in the technology. What I found was a woman who was willing to lose her own reputation to save the company’s ethics. That’s not a liability. That’s a founder.”

He outlined the sequence of events crisply: Lucas’s manipulation, Hugo’s sabotage, Théo’s recording, Maxime’s rescue, the police arrest. He kept it factual. Journalists could smell spin, and he gave them none.

“We have the server logs,” he said. “We have Maxime’s documentation. We have a recorded conversation in which Lucas planned to dismantle the company and blame Camille for it. The narrative published this morning is an attempt to discredit her before she could present this evidence. We are presenting it now.”

He looked at the camera. “We are not asking you to forgive us. We are asking you to judge us on the full record, not the excerpt.”

---

The questions came fast and pointed. One journalist asked whether the health client had voided the contract. Camille’s stomach tightened. She had checked her phone a dozen times since breakfast. No termination letter. No confirmation either.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I would invite the client to visit our data room. We have nothing to hide. Every metric will be open.”

Another question: whether she expected to be fired by Friday.

“If the board decides that a single mistake outweighs a pattern of correction, I will leave gladly. But I will go knowing that the product is sound, the team is honest, and the code does what it says.”

She didn’t say what she was thinking: that she had faced worse than unemployment. She had faced the possibility that her entire career was a castle built on fear, and that fear had almost destroyed it.

---

After the press conference, the room emptied. The journalists filed out, Sarah giving Camille a small nod on her way past. “I’ll run my piece by tonight,” she said. “It’ll be fair.”

The board screen flickered. Marie, the chairwoman, cleared her throat. Her face was the center square—sixtyish, silver-haired, unreadable.

“Camille,” she said. “We’ve heard your confession. We’ve read the evidence Antoine shared. We’ll need to vote.”

Camille nodded. She didn’t sit. She stood in front of the screen, feeling like a defendant awaiting a verdict.

“Before we vote,” Marie continued, “I want to note something. You could have resigned quietly this morning. You didn’t. You could have blamed Lucas for your fabrication. You didn’t. You stood here and told us you lied, and then you asked us to make a judgment. That takes courage. Integrity. The kind we don’t always see in this industry.”

She paused. “All in favor of retaining Camille Laurent as product lead, raise your hand.”

The screen filled with raised hands. Uniformly. Unanimously. Camille’s breath caught.

“Welcome back, Camille,” Marie said. “Now let’s go save this company.”

---

The health client’s email arrived at 7:14 PM, just as Camille was packing her bag.

> Subject: Your Press Conference

> Dear Ms. Laurent,

> We watched your statement today with great interest. We have reviewed the evidence you provided through your counsel, and we are impressed by your transparency. In an industry where concealment is the norm, your willingness to disclose your error and correct it is exactly the kind of ethics we look for in a partner.

> We have decided to expand our contract by 30%. We believe Sentio, in its ethical configuration, is the future of care-based AI.

> Best regards, > Dr. Hélène Vasseur, Chief Procurement Officer, Santé Publica

Camille read it three times. She had expected a termination. She had braced for a voided contract. Instead, expansion. Thirty percent more. She leaned against her desk and laughed—a short, disbelieving sound that turned into something like a sob. Antoine poked his head in.

“Good news?”

“They expanded.” She held up her phone. “Thirty percent.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah.” She wiped her eyes. “Holy shit.”

---

Élodie’s voice came through the phone crackly with surprise. “Camille. Why is there a deposit in my account? A huge deposit. Did you—are you insane?”

Camille was sitting on her own couch, the first quiet she’d had all day. “Consider it a loan. No, consider it repayment.”

“Repayment for what? You don’t owe me anything.”

“For the couch. The coffee. The nights I stayed over when I couldn’t face my own apartment. For being my friend when I was barely a person.” Camille’s voice was worn. “Your brother’s debt. It’s done. Don’t argue.”

“Camille…”

“It’s anonymous. I mean, it’s from me, but it’s anonymous. No notes. No strings. Just—” she exhaled. “Just take it. Let someone do something good for you. For once.”

There was a long silence. When Élodie spoke again, her voice was thick. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say you’ll get that drink with me next week. Somewhere terrible. With bad music.”

“Deal.”

Camille hung up, set her phone on the armrest, and closed her eyes. She thought of Lucas, sitting in a police cell. Of Théo, vanished. Of the health contract, expanding. Of the board’s hands, raised in unison.

And of Maxime’s code. The elegant, powerful core of Sentio. The function that, when applied broadly enough, could silently bias care recommendations against certain patient profiles. It was beautiful code. It was also wrong. And no one else had noticed it yet.

She opened her laptop. The code was there, circulating in the production branch, about to be deployed under the expanded contract.

She could keep it. No one would know. The contract was signed. The press conference had been a triumph. She had her job, her reputation, her redemption.

She stared at the screen for a long time.

Then she picked up her phone and dialed Antoine.

“We need to delete a function,” she said. “The one in Maxime’s core. The bias one.”

A pause. “Are you sure? That could set us back months. The client just expanded.”

“I know.” Camille looked at the code that could have been the crown jewel of her career, and knew it was also the poison that could undo everything they had just survived. “I’m sure. If we don’t delete it, we’re no better than Lucas. We just hide it better.”

The silence stretched.

“I’ll pull the build,” Antoine said quietly.

Camille exhaled. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. You’re the one who found it.”

She closed her laptop. The apartment was silent. Outside, Paris glowed under a gray dusk. She had spent years racing against Antoine, against Lucas, against herself. And now, for the first time, she was still.

She would face the engineering team in the morning. She would face the board, the client, the inevitable pushback. But tonight, a single choice, hard made, was enough. She curled up on the couch and let herself sleep.