Read Chapter 28: The Ghost of the Past

The call came at 7:42 on a Tuesday morning, when the studio was still empty and the only light came from the blue glow of Camille's monitor. She almost didn't answer the unknown number. But something—maybe the Paris area code, maybe the particular rhythm of the ringing—made her pick up.

"Camille."

The voice was thin, hollowed out, but unmistakably his. She gripped the edge of her desk.

"Maxime. You're supposed to be in a clinic. The police said—"

"I know what the police said." A pause, and she heard the soft hum of machinery in the background. "I checked myself out for an hour. I needed to call you before they make me disappear into their program."

"You don't disappear. You're a witness. You're the victim here."

"Am I?" His laugh was brittle. "Lucas is telling everyone I was complicit. That the data breach at my old company was my doing. That I ran because I was guilty."

Camille stood up, pacing between the desks covered in tangled cables. "No one believes that. We filed your documentation. You walked into the police station with proof."

"Proof helps. But narrative wins." Another pause. She heard him exhale, long and slow. "I didn't call to talk about Lucas. I called because I owe you an apology. A real one. I left you to carry this alone, and that was cowardly. I thought if I disappeared, I could protect the company from what Lucas was doing. I thought if I gave him what he wanted—the patent, the leverage—he'd leave the rest of you alone."

"He kidnapped you."

"He outmaneuvered me is what he did. I was flying to Geneva to meet with a whistleblower from his old fund. He intercepted me at the airport. Next thing I knew, I was in a farmhouse outside Lyon with a guard who watched me sleep." His voice cracked. "I was so ashamed, Camille. A grown man, a founder, and I couldn't outsmart one ex-business partner with a hired thug."

"You're not a fool, Maxime. You're a builder. Different skill set."

"Thank you." A beat. "Which is why I'm giving you what I have left. The one thing Lucas doesn't know I know."

She stopped pacing. "What are you talking about?"

"Before he had me taken, I'd been tracking his side deals for months. I suspected he was skimming from the health contracts and running patient data through a shell company for insider trading—that's what the code function was really for, not insurance optimization. But I also found something else. A list of investors he'd been cultivating for a rival fund. Investors who want to back ethical AI but don't trust the traditional VC structure. They'd never touch Lucas directly—they're too clean for that—but he was planning to recruit them for a separate vehicle, to launder his reputation through their social capital."

He gave her the details fast: names, firms, the concierge service he'd built to court them, the private dinners at L'Ambroisie, the sailing weekends in Brittany. Camille scribbled on a scrap of paper, struggling to keep up.

"There are seven of them, Camille. Seven funds with combined dry powder of over a billion euros. They're looking for exactly what you're building now. But they're skittish. They've been burned by greenwashing before. If you go to them with your story—the real one, the ugly one—they'll listen. But you have to be direct. No agency, no intermediaries. They want to meet the people who bleed for the product."

The line crackled. She heard a nurse's voice in the background, soft but firm.

"I have to go," Maxime said. "One more thing. The list is real, but they'll test you. They don't fund companies; they fund founders who can hold their gaze in the fire. You've passed worse tests."

"How did you know about the press conference? You're in a clinic."

"I watched. Every minute. Then I threatened the director of my physical therapy program with a lawsuit if he didn't let me make this call."

She laughed before she could stop herself—a raw, unsteady sound. "You're still a chaos agent."

"That's what they told me in my intake session." He paused. "Thank you, Camille. For not abandoning me."

"Don't thank me yet. I'm about to take your investor list and do something very stupid with it."

"That's my girl."

The line went dead. Camille stared at the scrap of paper, her heart hammering. Seven names. Seven potential life rafts.

But the board had frozen Lucas's shares. The company was starting over. What she did with this information would determine whether they had any future at all.

She walked to the window and looked out over the rooftops of the 11th arrondissement, the zinc glinting under the morning sky. Her phone buzzed. Antoine.

*Morning. I'm coming in with croissants. Don't tell anyone I'm becoming the office baker.*

She smiled, then typed: *Bring two. We have work.*

He arrived twenty minutes later, carrying a paper bag that smelled of butter and yeast. His hair was still damp from the shower, and he wore a navy sweater she suspected was new—his wardrobe had upgraded since the insurance money came through.

"Good news or bad news first?" he asked, setting the bag on the conference table.

She slid the scrap of paper toward him. "Depends how you feel about bypassing our entire board structure."

He read the list. His jaw tightened. "These are the investors I pitched at my last job. They turned us down in forty-eight hours. Said we were too conventional. Too safe." He looked up at her. "You want to pitch them now?"

"I want to pitch them *us*. The real version. Not a deck with inflated projections and a fancy logo. I want to walk in with our story: the fabrication, the confession, the ethical rebuild, the contracts we won anyway. And I want to do it before the board can stop us."

"Is that legal?"

"Is it *ethical*?" She shrugged. "I've been asking myself the same question. But here's the thing—the board reports to shareholders. Maxime's list is an asset we discovered through his personal investigation. He gave it to us freely. The question isn't whether we can pitch new investors. It's whether we're willing to do it without a safety net from the old board."

Antoine set the bag down without opening it. "We have real revenues now. The health client expanded. The beta is scheduled. We have a story—an actual, honest one."

"We do." She pulled the crumpled list back toward her. "I want to pitch five of these funds next week. Direct outreach, no intro calls. You and me, in their offices, telling them exactly what we did and what we're building."

"That's a lot to pull together in seven days."

"It's less than you pulled together in four weeks to launch Sentio."

Antoine studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded. "Okay. But we do it right. We build a deck that's transparent—real numbers, the failures, the timeline of the rebuild. And we add a personal note."

"A personal note?"

"The story isn't about the technology. It's about why you didn't run. Why you stayed and confessed and rebuilt." He reached across the table, not quite touching her hand. "That's what makes it fundable. Not the product. The willingness to face the fire."

She felt something shift in her chest—a warmth that was becoming increasingly familiar, and increasingly dangerous. She pulled her hand back, but slowly.

"I'll draft the deck. You handle the numbers."

"I can do that."

They worked late that evening, the studio lit by three desk lamps and the glow of their screens. By eleven, they had a skeleton framework: a 32-page deck with case studies, data visualizations, and a section they'd tentatively titled "What We Got Wrong" with seventeen slides that documented every failure, every misstep, every near-fatal assumption.

Camille leaned back in her chair, rubbing her eyes. "This is the most exposing document I've ever written. And I wrote my own resignation letter three times."

"Twice for me." Antoine was on the couch, laptop balanced on his knees. "The first one had more semicolons."

She grinned. "You use semicolons when you're nervous."

"I do not—" He stopped. "I do, actually. It's a tell."

"It's kind of endearing."

The words hung between them. He set the laptop aside and stood, crossing the room. She rose too, unsure of herself—the same way she'd been unsure at nineteen, before she learned to armor everything with confidence.

He reached up and brushed a strand of hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear.

The gesture was soft, almost hesitant. She didn't recoil. Didn't move away. She stood perfectly still, feeling the ghost of his fingertips against her cheek, the space between them shrinking to inches.

"It's late," she said, but her voice was barely a whisper.

"It's early," he corrected gently. "Everything starts over at midnight, remember?"

She could feel his breath warm on her forehead. Her phone buzzed once—Sarah Moreau's article going live. She ignored it.

A second buzz. The board's group chat lighting up.

She ignored that too.

"I should go over the engagement metrics," she said, but she didn't move.

"You should. But you won't."

He was right.

His hand was still on her face. She could feel the roughness of his palm, calluses from years of soldering and climbing. And somewhere beneath the warmth, a warning: this is the same man who was recruited into Lucas's game. The same man who tried to take Sentio from her.

But the man in front of her wasn't that person anymore. And neither was she.

The door to the studio opened. Élodie stepped in, saw them, and stopped mid-stride.

"Oh," she said, a slow smile spreading across her face. "I'll come back tomorrow."

"Élodie, wait—"

"It can wait. It's about the clinic list Lucas tried to access. But honestly? It can wait." She backed out, still grinning. "Good morning, you two."

The door clicked shut.

Antoine didn't pull away. "She's going to insufferably remind us about this for the rest of our lives."

"If there's a *rest of our lives*, that'll be because we got this funding."

"Then let's get it."

His hand fell from her face, but he didn't step back. The space between them was charged, electric. She felt awake in a way she hadn't felt since the launch, since the confession, since—perhaps—ever.

"We start convincing tomorrow," she said.

"No." He shook his head. "We start convincing *now*."

He pulled out his laptop and opened a new document. She watched the cursor blink. Then she pulled her chair close to his, hip against hip, and together, in the gray hours before dawn, they began to write.