Read Chapter 6: The First Win

The pilot room smelled of stale coffee and nervous sweat. Camille stood at the back, arms crossed, watching Antoine walk a group of skeptical health-sector administrators through his UX mockup on the wall screen. She'd prepared herself to hate it. She'd prepared a list of objections, a mental spreadsheet of flaws, a rebuttal ready for every over-designed flourish he inevitably added to her clean, data-driven product.

Instead, she watched the head of procurement—a woman named Delphine who had not smiled once in three meetings—lean forward. And smile.

"This view," Delphine said, pointing at a dashboard Antoine had designed, "I can see patient outcomes against our intervention costs in real time. Without having to ask one of your engineers for a custom report."

"Exactly," Antoine said. "The whole point of Sentio should be that the algorithm works for you, not the other way around. You set the parameters. The model adjusts. You stay in control."

Camille's stomach tightened. It was the exact argument she'd made to herself months ago, in a different form, before she'd gotten buried in feature creep and investor decks. He'd taken her unspoken instinct and made it concrete, cleaner, more intuitive than anything she'd shipped.

She hated how good it was.

Delphine turned to Camille. "Can we see the integration with our existing legacy systems?"

Camille stepped forward. Her moment to trip him up. She could say the integration layer wasn't ready. She could mention the security review wasn't complete. She could manufacture doubt.

Instead, she heard herself say, "We've already built the API bridge. Antoine's mockup is built on top of the same data pipeline we've been running for six months. It'll work with what you have."

Antoine shot her a look—part surprise, part something warmer she didn't want to name.

The meeting ended with handshakes and a promise to run a two-week paid pilot. Delphine's team would pay the reduced rate, but it was revenue. Actual revenue. The first new client since the funding round had gone sideways.

Camille waited until the conference room door clicked shut behind the last administrator, then let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.

"That was—" Antoine started.

"Don't," she said, but without bite. "I'm not ready to say it yet."

He laughed. A real laugh, not the defensive one he used in meetings. "Okay. I'll wait."

They stood in the empty room, the screen still glowing with his interface. She walked up to it, traced a line of code that appeared in the debugging window. "You built this on my framework."

"The backend's yours. I just made it look like something a human actually wanted to use."

It was, she realized, the closest thing to a compliment he'd given her. And it didn't feel like a dig. That was the strangest part.

---

They worked through the afternoon, side by side in the shared office that had once been hers alone. Antoine had moved his laptop next to hers at some point during the pizza-fueled drafting of the health-sector pitch, and she hadn't objected. They traded slides back and forth, cut each other's worst phrases, argued about the pricing model until Camille threw a marker at him and he caught it without looking up.

"The churn issue," she said, tapping the revenue projection. "We can't show them eleven percent. That kills us."

"Agreed. So we show them why churn happened under the old onboarding—before you implemented the new tutorial flow—and we show them the projected impact of the redesign." He flipped a slide she hadn't seen. "I pulled the cohort data from the last three months. Users who completed onboarding before your fix stayed at eighty-seven percent. After your fix, it's ninety-one."

"Wait." She leaned in, scrolling through his numbers. "You used my onboarding data?"

"You made the improvement. I just didn't ignore it."

For a moment, neither of them spoke. She felt something shift—a crack in the wall she'd built between them. She'd expected a saboteur, a usurper. She hadn't expected someone who read her documentation.

"There's still the Élodie problem," she said, changing the subject before the crack got wider. "She needs the promotion before her maternity leave, but Paul's going to push back on the budget."

"Then we don't ask Paul," Antoine said. "We restructure. Give her a co-lead title on the integration team. It's lateral on paper, but it puts her on the critical path. No one can cut a role that the health-sector pilot depends on."

"That's—"

"Manipulative?" He grinned. "Yes. But it works."

It would. She hated that he was right again.

They ordered pizza at eight. Antoine paid, which surprised her. He'd been careful with money ever since the layoffs, even though Camille knew he was probably earning double her salary. When the delivery arrived, he handed her the box with a solemn nod.

"Peace offering," he said.

"For what?"

"For being right about the redesign. For you being right about the onboarding. For all of it." He shrugged. "I'm not good at the truce stuff. But I'm trying."

She took a slice. "You're terrible at the truce stuff, actually."

"I know. I keep telling you my ideas when I should just steal yours and present them to the board."

"Don't you dare." But she was smiling.

They ate in comfortable silence for a while. Outside, the lights of Paris flickered on, the Eiffel Tower blinking in the distance. It was the first night in weeks she hadn't felt like the city was closing in on her.

"The pilot's just two weeks," she said. "If it goes well, we might actually survive."

"If it goes well," Antoine echoed, "we might actually have a product worth surviving for."

She opened her mouth to say something—maybe a real compliment, maybe an apology for the presentation sabotage she'd planned back in chapter one—when her phone buzzed on the table. She glanced at it.

Théo.

The message read: *Heads up. The server logs from the weekend job are weird. I was going to dig into it but didn't want to make trouble. Come by the office before tomorrow's board meeting. Trust me, you want to see this.*

Camille's blood went cold. She'd planned to question Théo about Antoine's credentials, about the runaway training job. But Théo was coming to her first, with server logs. That could mean he was innocent and trying to help. Or it could mean he was manipulating her, framing Antoine and now drawing her into whatever game he was playing.

"What is it?" Antoine asked, noticing her face.

She put the phone face-down. "Nothing. Intern stuff."

"Théo." It wasn't a question.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because your face changes when you hear his name. Like you're trying to remember a reason not to trust him." He studied her. "What do you know about him?"

She almost told him. Almost said, *I think he might have used your laptop to launch that training job*. But if Théo had done it, Antoine deserved to know. And if Théo hadn't done it, she'd just have accused an innocent intern and made her own paranoia visible.

"I know he's good at his job," she said slowly. "Maybe too good."

Antoine waited. She didn't elaborate.

"Okay," he said finally. "Strange hill to die on, but fine."

"One more thing." Camille pushed her plate away. "About the user metrics story I told the board last quarter. The engagement increase I claimed for the recommendation engine."

"Yes?"

She swallowed. "It wasn't entirely true. I extrapolated from a smaller sample. I smoothed the curve. If anyone audits the raw data, it'll look like a pattern. But it's not what I presented."

Antoine's face went still. "How much of it was extrapolated?"

"Forty percent."

"Forty percent of the number that the entire funding round is based on."

"The number that was going to get us funded," she countered. "The real data was good. Just not good enough to make headlines. I made it better. And now if anyone goes digging—if the framing on you was meant to force an audit—"

"They'll find it." He ran a hand through his hair. "Camille. That's not a smoothing. That's manufacturing."

"I know what it is." Her voice came out sharp. "I know exactly what it is. I did it because we were going to die otherwise. Because I believed in Sentio enough to lie for it. And now—"

"Now someone's digging." He leaned back. "Someone who targeted me to make an audit happen. Which means whoever it is either knows about your numbers or is hoping to find something like them."

"The meeting with Lucas Moreau. He said he knew things. He might know about this."

"Then we go to that meeting ready to negotiate, not beg." Antoine met her eyes. "We still have the pilot. We still have Élodie's position protected. We have a pitch that might actually work. We're not dead yet."

She wanted to believe him. The problem was, she'd told herself the same thing a hundred times, right before she'd made the choice to lie. The line between confidence and delusion had blurred months ago.

Théo's message glowed on her phone.

Another loose thread. Another reason to worry.

For the first time all night, the pizza tasted like nothing.