Read Chapter 12: The Missing Pages

The London flat was silent in the way rooms become silent after a slammed door—too loud with absence. Elise had been gone nineteen hours. Theo knew because he'd watched the clock through a sleepless night, through the pale dawn that crept across his study floor, through the morning he spent not looking at the empty space on his desk where the manuscript had lived for six months.

It was a stupid thing to have left there. He'd known it was a stupid thing to have left there, even as he'd done it, even as he'd watched her eyes catch on the title page before he could snatch it away. But he'd needed it close. The pages were the only honest thing he owned.

Now, standing in the doorway of his study, he understood the full weight of his idiocy.

The leather folder sat on the corner of his desk where he'd thrown it during their fight. He crossed the room slowly, telling himself it didn't matter, that he'd made copies, that the words were still inside his head even if every physical trace vanished. He'd typed and discarded eight versions of this script over three years. The handwritten draft was something else entirely—the raw version, the one with marginal notes in a hand that no longer existed, the one with Camille's coffee ring on page forty-two.

He opened the folder.

Empty.

The pages were gone. All of them, every last sheet, leaving only the dark leather shell and the faint ghost of pressure where the paper had rested. For a long moment, Theo stood very still, breathing through his nose, counting to ten in French.

She had taken it.

After everything—after he'd given her the contract, the public performance, the careful construction of a relationship that had begun as a lie and become something he'd almost started believing—she had walked out with the one thing he'd never offered anyone.

He pulled out his phone. Found her name. Typed and deleted three messages before settling on four words.

*Where is my manuscript?*

The reply came eleven minutes later, which meant she'd been staring at her phone too, waiting, circling the same unresolved space between them.

*On your desk. I didn't touch it.*

Theo laughed—a short, bitter sound that surprised him. He photographed the empty folder and sent it without comment.

Two seconds passed. Then:

*It was there when I left.*

*It wasn't.*

A pause. He imagined her somewhere in transit—train station, airport, whatever route she'd taken toward Lyon and that godforsaken film. He imagined her reading her phone on a platform, her jaw tightening the way it did when she was cornered.

*I don't know what to tell you, Theo. I took the draft. I read some of it. I'm not proud of that. But I left it on the desk before I walked out.*

*Then where is it?*

*Maybe you misplaced it. Maybe your cleaner moved it. Maybe you're so used to being in control that you can't accept someone else holding your secrets for once.*

He read the message twice, the anger rising hot and immediate, because she wasn't wrong, and that made it worse. He typed a response: *You're the only one who knew it was there.*

*I'm also the only one who told you the truth about where I was going and what I was doing. Remember how that went?*

Theo stared at the screen. He wanted to throw the phone against the wall. He wanted to call her and scream. He wanted to tell her that Camille's handwriting was in those margins, that some of those pages were the only words he'd ever written that meant anything, that he'd rather lose his career, his reputation, every carefully maintained lie of his public life than lose those pages.

Instead, he typed: *We need to talk about the interview Friday.*

Her response was immediate, cold: *The interview that I should have pulled out of when I told you I was done.*

*You didn't tell me you were done. You told me you were going to Lyon.*

*Same thing, isn't it?*

Theo sat down heavily in his desk chair. The room smelled like her—something floral and sharp, stubbornly present even after nineteen hours. He hated that he'd noticed.

He called Vivienne.

She answered on the second ring, which meant she'd been waiting for this. "Tell me you haven't done something monumentally stupid."

"Define monumentally."

The silence on the other end was eloquent. Then: "Theo, what did you do?"

"Elise went through my study. She found the draft. She read part of it. She says she left it, but the folder's empty and she's the only person who touched it."

"Did you ask the cleaner?"

"What?"

"The cleaner. Did you ask the cleaners? Because I sent a team in this morning to prepare the flat for the interview backdrop and one of them might have moved things."

Theo's grip on the phone tightened. "You sent cleaners into my flat without telling me?"

"I sent cleaners into your flat because you have a joint interview in three days and your living space currently looks like a crime scene. I was trying to help, Theo. That's what I do. I help you maintain the illusion that you're a functioning human being."

He closed his eyes. The rage had nowhere to go, which made it worse. He'd spent the past day building a case against Elise, constructing a narrative of betrayal that justified ending everything between them. But if it had been the cleaners—if she'd actually left the manuscript and some well-meaning stranger had rearranged his private papers—

"I'll check with the service," Vivienne said, her voice softer now. "But Theo, listen to me. Whether she took it or not, she saw it. She read enough to know about Camille. That's the issue. That's what you need to address before Friday."

"I don't want to address it. I want the pages back."

"Then call her and sort this out. The interview is happening. The network has promoted it. Your team and her team have both confirmed. If you show up to that couch looking like you want to kill each other, the entire contract collapses and we're back to square one for both of you."

Theo was silent, staring at the empty folder on his desk.

"At minimum," Vivienne pressed, "you can agree on a story. One story. Whatever's happening between you privately does not get to touch that stage."

"And if I can't?"

"Then be prepared to watch Elise's publicist spin this as you being controlling and obsessive while she plays the wounded victim. She's very good at that, by the way. She's been doing it for months. You just haven't wanted to see it."

The words landed like a blade between his ribs. He'd known Elise was fighting her own war, that she'd been maneuvering around him just as carefully as he'd been maneuvering around her. The fake relationship had always been a chess match—two players, same board, opposing goals. But somewhere along the way, he'd started thinking of it as a partnership.

That had been his mistake.

"Fine," he said. "Set up a meeting. Before the interview."

"With Elise?"

"Both of them. Whatever handlers we need. I want to look her in the eye and ask her directly where my pages are. I want to watch her lie to me and see if she can still do it without flinching."

Vivienne was quiet for a moment. "You really cared about that script, didn't you?"

Theo didn't answer. He couldn't. The truth was too close to the surface, threatening to crack through the careful composure he'd spent the day rebuilding.

"I'll make the call," Vivienne said. "Two hours. My office."

The call ended. Theo sat alone in the study for a long while, the afternoon light shifting across the empty folder, the ghost of Camille's handwriting hovering in the negative space where the pages should have been.

---

Elise arrived forty minutes late, which was a message in itself. She walked into Vivienne's office looking composed and untouchable—dark hair pulled back, simple black clothing, her face carrying the professional neutrality she'd perfected through years of red carpets and hostile press. She didn't look at Theo when she sat down.

"Thank you for joining us," Vivienne said, the warmth in her voice entirely manufactured. "I've ordered coffee."

"I don't need coffee." Elise's gaze finally found Theo, and he felt the impact of it like a physical blow. "I need to know why I'm here."

"You know why you're here." Theo kept his voice level, conscious of the two publicists filling the room like oversize furniture, of the fragility of this careful production. "The interview Friday."

"Right. The interview." Elise's mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile. "The one that's supposed to convince the world we're madly in love, despite the fact that we can't be in the same room for five minutes without one of us threatening to end everything."

"It's called acting."

"Is that what we're calling it now?"

Vivienne stepped between them smoothly, a practiced gesture. "Both of you, focus. Friday's interview is a major platform—the kind of exposure that could single-handedly rehabilitate your public image, Elise. And for you, Theo, it's an opportunity to pivot toward the producing deals you've been courting. Neither of you can afford to sabotage this."

"I'm not the one who sabotages things," Elise said quietly. "I just refuse to pretend that everything's fine when it isn't."

Theo felt the words land somewhere between his ribs, hooking into something tender. He pushed the feeling away.

"Where is my manuscript?" he asked.

Elise met his eyes directly. "I told you. I left it on your desk."

"The cleaners don't remember touching it."

"Then maybe your memory of your own desk is faulty. Maybe you moved it yourself and forgot. Maybe you're so terrified of anyone having access to your private thoughts that you invented this entire confrontation rather than admitting I didn't actually take it."

The accusation hung in the air between them. Theo was aware of the publicists exchanging glances, of Vivienne's careful attention.

He leaned forward, lowering his voice. "I read the pages. Last night. All of them." He held her stare, refusing to let her look away. "I know you didn't just skim them, Elise. You read enough to know who Camille is. You read enough to know what I lost. And now you're standing here telling me I'm the one who's confused about what happened."

Elise's composure flickered. Barely. But he saw it.

"I read the pages you chose to confront me about," she said carefully. "I didn't take them."

"Then what do you want?"

"I want you to stop treating me like I'm a liability to be managed. I want you to stop making career decisions with the same producer who killed my deal and expect me to smile about it. I want you to recognize that I'm not some pawn in your redemption arc—I'm a person with my own stakes in this arrangement."

"Fine." Theo stood, conscious of the room's attention shifting toward him. "Then let's be clear about what this arrangement requires. Six months. Joint appearances. Public affection. We pretend to fall in love, we let the cameras document it, and then we walk away cleaner than we started. Can you do that, Elise?"

She looked at him for a long moment, and something passed through her expression that he couldn't quite name—something that looked almost like grief.

"I can do that," she said. "Can you? Without treating every interaction like a battlefield where only one of us gets to win?"

The room was silent. Vivienne watched them both with the careful, calculating gaze of someone who had seen many contracts survive many fractures, and many more collapse entirely.

Theo exhaled. "I can do that," he said quietly.

"Then we have a truce," Vivienne announced smoothly, rising to usher the publicists toward the door. "Twenty-four hours of coordinated responses, mutual respect in public, and separate rooms when the cameras aren't rolling. After the interview, we can reassess."

Elise stood, gathering her bag, and Theo caught the faint tremor in her hand before she steadied it. She paused at the door, not quite looking back at him.

"Thank you," she said quietly, her voice stripped of its armor. "For not telling me I was wrong about what I saw. Even if you think I lied about the pages."

Then she was gone, and Theo was left standing in Vivienne's office with the hollow ache of an unresolved war and the echoing certainty that whatever Elise had taken from his study, it wasn't just paper.

The script—his words, Camille's ghost—held more than secrets. It held the version of himself he'd kept hidden. And somehow, without meaning to, he'd let her see it.