My Rival Co-CEOS

Chapter 10

The internet knows everything about Camille Arnaud except the one thing that matters.

Monday morning finds me at my desk forty minutes before the executive floor wakes up, laptop open, coffee growing cold beside my elbow, my fingers moving across the keyboard with the focused precision of a woman reopening a wound she thought had scarred over.

I know her LinkedIn by heart. Columbia, art history. Curatorial fellowship at the Guggenheim that turned into a directorship by twenty-six. Board positions at two nonprofits.

I know the society pages — Camille and Theo at a benefit for the New York Philharmonic, her hand resting on his forearm with the proprietary ease of a woman who never questioned whether she belonged beside him.

Camille and Theo at a rooftop reception for a gallery opening. Camille and Theo at a Met Gala afterparty — his hand low on her back, her body curved into the angle of his shoulder, both of them looking like the kind of couple that makes strangers on the sidewalk reconsider their own marriages.

Two years of appearances. Then — nothing.

Saturday night changed the equation. The version of him in those photographs is someone I have never met. Someone who touched without calculating, who smiled without performing, who loved without filing it under professional risk.

And that version didn't die when Camille left. It went into hiding. I watched it surface for eleven seconds on Saturday night before the shutters came down.

So now I'm back in the search results, hunting for the thing I never found — why it ended. What broke him so thoroughly that three years of standing beside me, learning my laugh, memorizing my efficiency, never once unlocked the door she apparently kicked shut on her way out.

No breakup announcement. No PR statement. No tabloid speculation. Camille Arnaud simply vanished from Theo Bracken's orbit the way a star vanishes at dawn.

I zoom in on the Met Gala photo for the hundredth time. His face. His eyes aimed at her with his whole attention, his whole gravity, every carefully managed emotion unlocked and aimed at one person.

Three years of looking at this image, and I always studied her. Tonight I study him. And the difference guts me.

I close the tab.

"You look like you haven't slept since Friday," Piper says, materializing at my desk with two cups from the lobby café and the observational instincts of a woman who minored in criminal psychology. "What happened at the gala?"

She sets one cup in front of me — cream, no sugar, because Piper learned how I take my coffee during our first week of orientation and has never once forgotten.

"The gala was fine." I wrap my hands around the warm cup and angle my laptop screen a calculated two degrees away from her sightline. "Long speeches, expensive wine, a string quartet that played the same Vivaldi piece three times like they were being held hostage."

"Uh-huh." She perches on the edge of my desk, silver earrings swinging, and studies me with the expression she uses when she knows I'm editing. "And Theo? How was Theo at this fine, long-speeched, hostage-quartet gala?"

"Professional. Attentive. Exactly what you'd expect from a man introducing his girlfriend to six hundred of his closest donors."

She narrows her eyes. I reach for my coffee and realize too late that my other hand is still resting on the trackpad, the browser minimized but not closed, Camille's name visible in the search bar for exactly the half-second it takes Piper Nguyen to read upside down.

Her eyebrow lifts. One degree. The degree that precedes interrogation.

"The senator's wife wore white to a charity gala," I say, pivoting with the desperation of a woman throwing furniture in front of a closing door. "Floor-length, backless, with a train that nearly took out a waiter during the second course. Piper, it was a spectacle. I need you to understand the level of audacity."

Piper's mouth twitches. The eyebrow lowers by half a degree. She files whatever she just saw into the mental cabinet she keeps for things she intends to revisit at a more vulnerable hour, and lets me have the deflection.

"White to a charity gala," she repeats, shaking her head. "In July. Bold or deranged?"

"Both. Simultaneously."

She steals a sip from my cup, makes a face at the lack of sugar, and leaves with a parting look over her shoulder that communicates, in the universal language of best friends, that this conversation is not over.

Mid-morning, the intercom on my desk clicks.

"Wren, do you have a minute?"

Theo's voice through the speaker is composed, unhurried, stripped of every fracture I watched spread across his face on Saturday night. I gather a stack of files I've been meaning to bring him and cross the twenty feet to his office.

He is seated behind his desk, jacket off, sleeves rolled with his usual architectural precision. The morning light catches the sharp planes of his face, and he looks — restored. Rebuilt. Every crack from the gala plastered over with CEO-grade efficiency, the emotional equivalent of a renovation completed overnight.

"The Henderson contracts need your signature on page six and eleven," I say, setting the files on his desk. "And Mitchell's team sent revisions on the Harbour Street projections. I flagged three inconsistencies in the margins."

"Of course you did." He reaches for the files, and his fingers brush my wrist — deliberate, lingering a full beat longer than any professional handoff requires. "Thank you, Wren. Truly."

He has already thanked me for the Henderson contracts via email this morning. The repetition sits in my chest — compensatory, recalibrating, the attentiveness of a man who knows he underperformed and is adjusting his output accordingly.

"How was the rest of your weekend?" he asks, leaning back in his chair, giving me the full weight of his attention in a way that feels less like routine and more like reparation. "I realized I never asked."

"Quiet. Laundry. A thriller novel that turned out to be less thrilling than the dust jacket promised." I keep my voice light because light is the only register that survives proximity to him without cracking. "The usual post-gala recovery."

He nods, watching me with an expression I can't quite place — warmer than his boardroom face, more deliberate than his briefing mode, somewhere in the uncharted territory between the man who pulled away on the terrace and the man who kissed me at his grandfather's dinner table.

"There's a charity auction this Friday evening," he says, and the shift in his tone is subtle enough that anyone who hasn't spent three years decoding his vocal patterns would miss it entirely. "Smaller than the gala. More intimate. The kind of event where couples sit close, bid on weekends they'll never use, and pretend the wine isn't overpriced."

"And Victor wants us there?"

"Victor doesn't know about it." He sets his pen down and folds his hands loosely, palms open, the posture of a man making a request rather than issuing a directive. "I want to take you. Not for appearances, not for my grandfather, not for any strategy we've discussed. A real date night, Wren. Just us."

The words land in my chest, and I wait for the rush.

I wait for the soaring, breathless, incandescent joy I have imagined for six years whenever I let myself fantasize about this exact moment — Theo Bracken sitting across from me, choosing me, saying just us in a voice that means it.

The rush doesn't come.

What comes instead is a quiet coat check alcove, cedar and whiskey and the sound of a man's voice stripped of every performance: I didn't bring her to hurt you.

What comes is Julian Bracken leaning against a wall with his hands in his pockets, delivering truths so unvarnished they left marks. Someone should at least tell you where the landmines are.

Honesty. Raw, unpackaged, offered without expectation of gratitude. The opposite of every carefully constructed kindness Theo has handed me since this arrangement began.

I blink, and the realization settles — quiet, disorienting, unwelcome — that Julian's honesty left a deeper mark than any of Theo's rehearsed warmth.

"Friday sounds perfect," I say, and my smile holds because it has survived harder mornings than this one.