Read Chapter 31: The Morning After

The coffee in Camille’s hand had gone cold, but she barely noticed. The morning light poured through the floor-to-ceiling windows of AlgoSens’ main room, catching the dust motes suspended in the air like tiny satellites orbiting the whiteboard.

She was still wearing yesterday’s smile when Mariam, the health client’s project director, video-called with a request that wiped it clean.

“It’s elegant,” Mariam said, her face flat and corporate on the screen. “The doctors use the tool to flag at-risk patients for early intervention. But now they want to see the *confidence scores* broken down by patient history. That means we need the longitudinal model. The one you disabled.”

Camille’s stomach tightened. She glanced at Antoine, who stood by the kitchenette, raising an eyebrow.

“Mariam,” Camille said carefully, “the longitudinal model contained a data-access function that we’ve identified as non-compliant. It’s off the table. But we can build you something better.”

“The integration is live in two weeks. We can’t wait for a ground-up rebuild.”

“You won’t have to.” Camille kept her voice steady, even as her mind raced. “Give me one hour. We’ll show you a workaround that delivers the same insights without touching that code path.”

Mariam sighed—a long, pressurized exhale that made Camille feel like a vendor at a market who had dared to haggle. “One hour,” she repeated. “Then I need an answer.”

The call ended.

Camille pressed her palms against the edge of the desk. Across the room, Antoine had already crossed to the whiteboard, uncapping a marker. “Okay,” he said. “Show me the logic gap.”

They spent the next four hours in front of that whiteboard. Not in the usual tense silence of buried disagreements, but in a vigorous, productive back-and-forth that felt like jazz.

“What if,” Camille said, tapping a node in the diagram, “we split the risk score into two orthogonal components—baseline chronic risk and acute episode risk?”

Antoine stared at the board, tilting his head. “The doctors want the history overlay. But they don’t need the full trajectory model for it.”

“Right. They need the delta.”

“The delta.” He drew a line from one node to another, connecting two circles. “So if we deploy a marginal-risk estimator that runs on *aggregated* cohort data—not individual patient histories—we can show them, per patient, how their current status compares to the population baseline. No backdoor, no raw history ingestion.”

“And the specificity is actually better.”

“It’s *higher*.” He grinned—that boyish grin she was starting to recognize as his real one, not the polished boardroom version. “Doctors get a more useful number, and we don’t violate our own ethics.”

Camille laughed—an actual laugh, quick and surprised. “We just invented a better product because we couldn’t ship the worse one.”

“That’s usually how it works when you’re not cutting corners.”

They coded the prototype side by side, Antoine driving the keyboard while Camille annotated the requirements. By 2 p.m., they had a demo ready. Mariam came back on the call, watched the walkthrough, and paused for a long moment.

“This gives us something the original didn’t,” she admitted. “The cohort-based marginal risk is more clinically actionable. I’ll take it to our ethics board this week.”

When the call ended, Camille leaned back in her chair, letting out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. The room felt quieter, almost fragile. She caught Antoine’s eye, and for a second, the air between them hummed with something that wasn’t just colleague satisfaction.

“That went well,” he said softly.

“It did.” She looked away first, suddenly aware of the proximity of his shoulder to hers. Laughter faded. The memory of his almost-kiss hovered between them like a held note.

She was about to say something—anything to break the sensation—when her phone buzzed with an email from the board secretary.

Camille read it, and her face cooled.

“What is it?” Antoine asked.

“The board wants me to lead the new syndication project with Fondation Aube. It’s a system design initiative—AI in public health infrastructure.” She scrolled. “They’ve assigned me a dedicated cross-functional team. Two architects, one data scientist, a policy advisor.”

“That’s excellent.”

“It is.” She paused. “But they haven’t mentioned you.”

Antoine’s hand stilled on the marker. “They want me to keep running engineering while you run the new project? That’s… that’s a separate lane.”

“It’s a separate lane that makes it look like you’re not co-CEO anymore.”

He set the marker down slowly. “I don’t need a title to know what I built.”

“That’s not the point,” she said, and she could hear the sharp edge creeping into her own voice. “We agreed to split leadership. Product vision me, engineering you. But if the board slates me for a flagship initiative and you’re still buried in pipeline maintenance, then in six months, when they look at the org chart, they won’t see a partnership. They’ll see a CEO and a technical lead.”

“So what do you want me to do—fight the board for the project too?”

“I want us to be on the same page before they move.” Camille stood, pacing to the window. “I don’t want to wake up in a month and find out you feel sidelined because I didn’t read the room.”

Antoine was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was lower, slower. “You’re right.”

She turned.

“You’re right,” he repeated. “And I should have seen it coming. I drafted the split that said ‘product and engineering,’ but I didn’t think about what happens when the board assigns *you* a flagship project. That’s not a product problem. That’s a power problem.”

“It’s not about power.”

“It’s about optics.” He walked toward her, stopping a respectful two feet away. The distance felt deliberate, careful—something they’d both learned to maintain since the rooftop. “Camille, I’m not going to be the guy who secretly resents his partner because the board likes her better. I need to be on that project team. Not as your second-in-command. As your co-lead. If the board sees this as yours, we’ll never correct that trajectory.”

She looked at him, and for a moment she was struck by how easy this felt—not the planning, not the strategy, but the *having* of a partner who said what he meant.

“You’re not wrong,” she said. “I’ll draft a joint proposal tonight. We’ll present it as a co-lead architecture: I handle the deliverable vision and stakeholder relationships, you handle the technical design and resource allocation. It fits what we already agreed.”

“And if the board pushes back?”

“Then we push back harder.” She smiled, but there was steel behind it. “We just told the health client we’d rather delay a month than ship something unethical. We can tell our own board that we’d rather have two CEOs than one and a half.”

Antoine nodded slowly. “I’ll draft the engineering roadmap section. We can review it this evening.”

“This evening?”

“Dinner?” He said it lightly, but there was a question underneath. “At that bistro on Rue de Cléry. We can review the proposal and eat actual food—not cold coffee and stolen croissants from the kitchenette.”

Camille hesitated. The word *dinner* carried different weight now. Since the rooftop, they’d been careful—professional lunches, coffee runs, always public, always within an arm’s length of their desks. She told herself the cautious boundaries were for the company’s sake. But she wasn’t entirely sure that was the real reason.

“I’ll bring the draft,” she said.

“Good.” He held her gaze a beat longer than necessary, then turned back to the whiteboard and started wiping the diagrams clean.

Camille watched him, a smile threatening at the corner of her mouth. Then her phone buzzed again. This time, it was a news alert.

She tapped it open. The rival outlet—the one that had planted the journalist—had run its piece. The headline read: “AlgoSens Founder Admits Fabricating Metrics; Whistleblower Status Questioned.”

The story spun her confession as an act of self-preservation, not transparency. The comments beneath were merciless.

Camille’s hand tightened on the phone. She glanced at Antoine, who had not yet seen.

She heard herself speak—calm, measured, professional—with a small, rehearsed smile. “I’ll handle this. We already closed the round. The investors know the truth.”

But as she looked down at the screen, she saw that the article had been written by Sarah Moreau—the journalist who had earlier reported Lucas’s claims of a second data breach. And at the bottom of the piece, in bold print, was a new line: *Sources confirm that a second breach at AlgoSens' former partner company involved data sold to a third party. That third party remains unidentified—but appears to be connected to the current AlgoSens leadership.*

A cold knot tightened in Camille’s stomach. Someone inside AlgoSens—or someone who knew its inner workings—was feeding Sarah information. And the implication, framed carefully, attached to *leadership*.

The dinner would have to wait.