Lire le chapitre 11: The Hidden Draft

The pages were warm in her hands, the ink of his handwriting—small, precise, almost obsessive—covering every line. She had read only the first three pages of the folder before the weight of it pressed against her chest. *The phrase.* Her mother's phrase. The one she whispered to Elise on the night of her first audition, the one Elise had never told Theo, never told anyone outside her family.

*"Quand tu traverses le pont, tu ne regardes plus derrière toi."*

And here it was, typed in French, on page forty of his unfinished draft, woven into a scene where a man watches a woman cross a bridge at dawn, her coat too thin for the cold, her stride carrying the weight of a country she left behind.

She didn't hear his footsteps. The door opened, and the light from the hallway cut across the study floor like a blade.

"What are you doing?"

Theo's voice was flat. Not angry—worse. Controlled. Elise didn't turn around. She held the folder open, the pages fanned across the desk like evidence.

"You wrote about me."

A pause. The air thickened.

"Theo. You wrote about *me.*" She turned now, holding one page up, her finger tapping the line where her mother's phrase appeared in a scene about a woman he described as *"l'actrice qui a perdu son nom en le cherchant."* "This is my mother's saying. I never told you this. I never told anyone. How long have you been writing this?"

He moved past her in silence and closed the folder with deliberate care, sliding it into the drawer as if handling something fragile and stolen. His jaw was set. When he finally looked at her, his eyes were shuttered, the warmth she had seen at the gala—just hours ago—completely gone.

"That was private."

"*Private?*" She laughed, a hollow sound. "You've been watching me for months. Playing the perfect boyfriend in front of every camera in London, and all this time you've been… what, documenting me? Researching me for a screenplay?"

"I wasn't *playing*, Elise." He said it too fast, then stopped, as if the truth had slipped past his guard. He recomposed his face into that mask she knew from every red carpet, every interview, every lie they'd told together. "It's fiction. You read it out of context."

"It's my mother's phrase, Theo. That's not context. That's my life."

"You broke into my desk."

"I fell into your study. This is our home." She stepped toward him. "But you've never thought of it that way, have you? This is a set. A stage. And I'm just the actress you're directing."

Something flickered in his face. Pain, maybe. Or rage. She couldn't tell anymore.

"Everything we've done has been for the public." His voice was low, measured, brutal in its calm. "That was the deal. That was always the deal. You needed a clean image, I needed a sympa love story to counter the boring bachelor rumors. We signed a contract. We perform. And when it ends—"

"When it ends, we walk away." She finished the sentence for him, bitter. "I know the terms, Theo. I've read them a hundred times. But I didn't sign up for you hiding a manuscript about me in your desk like a fetish."

"It's not about you." He said it too quickly, and they both heard the lie. He pressed his palm flat on the desk, steadying himself. "It's about a version of someone. A muse. A story I've been writing since before we met."

"Before we met?" She froze. "You said this contract was your agent's idea. 'A mutually beneficial arrangement.' When did you start writing about me, Theo?"

He didn't answer. The silence stretched—long enough to confirm every suspicion she'd been burying for weeks. D'Ambert's threats. Marcus's blackmail. Theo's cold pragmatism at the gala, pitching himself to Nadia behind her back. And now this: a man who had been observing her, documenting her, long before he ever touched her hand for the cameras.

"Say it," she whispered. "Tell me the truth."

"The truth," he said, and his voice cracked, just once, before he sealed it shut, "is that none of this is real. And I think we forgot that. You and me. We forgot that it's business."

The words landed like a shot. Elise blinked, stunned, the folder still clutched in her hands. She hadn't even realized she'd taken it. The pages were crumpled now, crushed between her fingers.

"Theo—"

"It was never supposed to matter." He wouldn't look at her. "And you were never supposed to read that. Now you know. Doesn't change anything. We finish the six months, we take our separate deals, and we never see each other again."

She stared at him. The man who had laughed with her over cheap takeaway in Paris, who had defended her at the interview, who had let her mother believe they were in love—who had *written* her mother's words into a private manuscript—stood before her like a stranger made of marble, flawless and unreachable.

"Fine," she said.

She left the room with the folder pressed against her chest. Behind her, Theo called her name once, sharp and desperate—*"Elise."*—but she didn't stop. She walked through their apartment, past the staged photos of their fake romance, past the champagne glasses from the gala still drying on the rack, and she didn't look back.

She had hidden so many truths from him. But this one—the one she now carried, the story he wrote about her, the story he never meant her to see—would not stay hidden anymore.