Semua Bab EYES OPEN: Bab 11 - Bab 20

I read the message three times.Then I screenshot it, forward it to my personal email, and save the number.Then I sit down on the couch because my legs have made a unilateral decision about standing.Photos. Someone has photos of me and Rhys at Archer's and they are threatening to hand them to Derek's lawyer. Which means someone was there deliberately. Not a coincidence, not Vivienne walking past, someone who knew we would be there and positioned themselves to document it.Which means this goes deeper than Vivienne sending threatening texts from an unknown number.I call Rhys.He picks up immediately. "Hey.""Someone has photos of us at Archer's," I say. "They just texted me. New number, not the same one as before. They are threatening to give them to Derek's lawyer."Complete silence.Then, very quietly, "Say that again."I read him the message word for word.Another silence. Longer."Rhys.""I am thinking," he says. "Give me a second."I wait. I can hear him moving around, a door c

I change outfits three times.Which is ridiculous and I know it is ridiculous and I change a fourth time anyway because the third option looked like I was trying and the whole point is to look like I am not trying, which, now that I think about it, is itself a form of trying, so I am back to square one standing in front of my wardrobe in my underwear at six fifteen feeling genuinely annoyed at myself.It is a meeting, Camille. A strategic meeting between two adults navigating a shared problem.I put on dark jeans, a simple black top, my good coat.Done. Neutral. Functional. Absolutely not trying.I grab my bag and leave before I can change again.Rhys lives twenty minutes across the city in a building that is quiet and well maintained with a lobby that has no doorman, just a key fob system and clean lines and the kind of understated quality that does not need to announce itself. I find his floor, find his door, and stand outside it for exactly three seconds longer than necessary befor

Her name is Nora Callahan.I know this because Rhys says it under his breath like a man bracing for weather he has been watching approach from a distance and hoped would change direction.She walks in ahead of whoever is with her, small and sharp-eyed with dark hair cut blunt at the jaw and the specific energy of a woman who has decided something before she arrived and is here to execute it. She looks like Rhys around the eyes. Same directness. Same economy of expression.She stops when she sees me.Her gaze moves from me to Rhys and back to me and she does the entire calculation in about two seconds."You must be Camille," she says.I glance at Rhys."I did not tell her," he says immediately."Vivienne told me," Nora says, walking further into the apartment like she lives here, dropping her bag on the kitchen counter. "She called me last night. Forty minutes of crying and strategic information sharing." She turns and looks at her brother with an expression that contains many years of

The article is on a mid-level entertainment and lifestyle site with enough readership to matter.The headline reads: I Reported My Ex. Nobody Believed Me. Here Is What Happened Next.There is a photo of Isla Reeve. Pretty, dark haired, sitting in what looks like a coffee shop with her hands wrapped around a mug and her eyes doing something practiced and sad for the camera. The kind of photo that gets taken deliberately for exactly this kind of piece.I read it fast, then slow, then fast again.She does not name Rhys directly. The article is careful about that, legal reasons obviously, referring to him only as a property developer in his mid thirties. But anyone who knows him, anyone in his professional circle, anyone Vivienne has been talking to, will connect it in under a minute.The story she tells is not what Rhys told me.In her version there was no mutual breakup. In her version he became cold and controlling in the final months, isolated her from friends, and when she ended thin

Rhys says nothing for five seconds.Which is four seconds longer than his usual processing time and tells me everything about what that name means to him."Who is Petra Haynes to you?" I ask.He stands up from the couch, walks to the window, stands there with his back to the room looking out at the street below and I watch his shoulders do the thing where they carry something heavy and try not to show it.Joel is very still in the armchair.Which means Joel knows too."Rhys," Nora says from the kitchen. Quiet. Warning."She was before Isla," he says finally, without turning around. "Before Vivienne. Four years before either of them."I wait."We were together two years," he says. "It ended badly. She wanted things I could not give her at the time and I handled the ending poorly." He pauses. "I was twenty eight and selfish and I hurt her more than I intended to.""How badly did it end?" I ask.He turns around. "Badly enough that she has apparently spent the last several years building