Chapter 9: CAMILLE’S PANIC

Camille pov:

I saw her face before anyone told me.

I was in my office at Calloway Enterprises my office, the one I'd earned, the one I deserved after years of being the daughter nobody looked at twice while Lyra got everything handed to her on a silver tray simply for having the right mother when my assistant burst in without knocking, her face bloodless, holding her phone out like it was something that might explode.

“Calloway Heiress Alive.”

I read the headline four times before the words rearranged themselves into something my brain could process. Then I saw the photograph beneath it Lyra, unmistakably Lyra, sitting beside Ethan Vance in a studio I didn't recognise, wearing an expression so composed, so utterly unbothered, that for one disorienting moment I thought it had to be doctored.

It wasn't doctored. I would have known. I would have felt it in my chest the way I felt everything about Lyra, the particular ache of comparison that had lived in me since we were children, since our father used to look at her with a pride he never quite managed for me.

She was alive.

I don't remember standing up. I remember the sound my chair made scraping back against the floor, too loud in the sudden ringing silence of my office, and I remember my assistant flinching like I might do something unpredictable, which, in retrospect, was not an unreasonable thing to flinch about.

"Get out," I said, and my voice came out strange, thin, nothing like the polished, controlled voice I'd spent two years perfecting for board meetings and press events. "Get out, get out, get “out”"

She left. I locked the door behind her, and then I stood in the middle of my office, my office, my company, my life, built carefully on the foundation of a grief that apparently nobody had actually needed to grieve and I let myself, for exactly ninety seconds, fall apart completely.

I want to say the fear came from guilt. I want to say that somewhere underneath the panic clawing up my throat, there was remorse for whatever role I'd played in whatever happened on that coastal road two years ago. I've told myself that story enough times that some days I almost believe it.

The truth, the truth I would never say out loud to anyone, not even in the privacy of my own head if I could help it, is that the fear wasn't about guilt at all.

It was about losing everything, again, the way I'd always secretly suspected I would.

I had spent two years building an identity around being the Calloway heiress. Not Lyra's shadow, not the disappointing daughter, not the girl who watched her father's eyes light up for someone else's achievements while mine went unnoticed the “actual” heiress, finally, unquestionably, mine. I'd learned to run board meetings. I'd learned to command a room the way Lyra always had effortlessly and I'd always had to fight for it. I had, for two years, finally been enough.

And now she was back, alive, engaged to a man powerful enough to end companies before lunch, sitting on camera with a coldness in her eyes that I recognised instantly because I'd seen a version of it in the mirror every day since the funeral I'd cried real tears at, whatever else was true about that day.

She knew something. I could see it in her face, in the careful, deliberate way she'd chosen her words. “Some people carry grief. Some people simply use it as an opportunity.” She wasn't talking about strangers when she said that. She was talking about me.

My phone buzzed. Julian.

“Have you seen it?”

I didn't answer right away. I sat down on the floor of my office, my back against the door, my knees drawn up to my chest in a position I hadn't taken since I was a teenager hiding from an argument between our parents, and I stared at my reflection in the dark screen of my phone until the panic in my chest slowly, gradually, curdled into something colder.

Fear is useful, if you let it become something else. I'd learned that lesson from my mother, watching her navigate this family for years with a composure I'd envied and feared in equal measure. Fear alone gets you nowhere. Fear sharpened into strategy gets you everything.

I stood up. I fixed my makeup in the small mirror by my desk, smoothing the evidence of ninety seconds of collapse off my face until nothing remained but the polished, controlled woman the board expected to see. Then I called my mother, because if anyone in this family knew how to survive an unwelcome resurrection, it was Margaret Calloway.

She answered on the first ring.

"I saw," she said, before I could speak, her voice carrying a calm that unsettled me more than panic would have. "We knew this day might come, darling. We simply need to be prepared for it."

"You told me she was gone." My voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word. "You told me it was handled."

There was a pause on the line, long enough to make my stomach drop.

"Come to the house tonight," Margaret said finally, her voice gone quiet and careful in a way I'd learned, over twenty-seven years, to be afraid of. "We need to discuss exactly how much your sister actually knows."

“Your sister.” Not “Lyra”. Not a name, just a designation, cold and clinical, and something about the way my mother said it like Lyra was a problem to be managed rather than a person who'd nearly died sent ice down my spine that had nothing to do with fear of getting caught.

I hung up the phone and sat very still in my office, staring at the headline still glowing on my assistant's abandoned phone on my desk, and understood, with a dawning, sickening clarity, that I had spent two years assuming I understood exactly what my mother had done to make sure Lyra's inheritance came to me.

I was no longer certain that was true.