Recipe for a Broken Heart

Chapter.8

Chapter 8 — What Lyon Left Behind

The company held a small gathering that Friday — nothing formal, just drinks and appetizers in the half-finished break room to celebrate the customs crisis they'd narrowly avoided. Camille almost didn't go. But something made her stay this time, some small, stubborn curiosity she wasn't ready to examine too closely.

Étienne stayed too, longer than she expected, standing near the window with a glass of wine he barely touched. Camille watched him from across the room until Priya elbowed her sharply enough to spill a little.

"Go talk to him. You're doing the staring thing again."

"I don't need commentary, thank you."

"You need a nudge, apparently." Priya gave her a gentle shove toward the window, and Camille, slightly buoyed by one glass of wine, went.

"You're not much for parties," she said, coming to stand beside him.

"Neither are you, it seems." A faint smile. "Yet here we both are."

"Priya has persuasive elbows."

"Ah. That explains it." He turned slightly toward her, something looser in his posture. "I find these things exhausting. Everyone performing enthusiasm they do not feel. In Lyon it was the same. Perhaps worse."

"Why'd you leave? Lyon, I mean. Was it just the promotion, or—"

He was quiet for a moment, turning his wineglass slowly. "Partly the promotion. Partly I needed to leave. There was someone. In Lyon. We were together four years. I thought we would marry."

Camille felt something in her chest go very still, recognizing the shape of the sentence before he finished it.

"She left. Two months before I proposed — I had already bought the ring." His voice stayed even, but something underneath it had roughened slightly. "She said she had fallen in love with someone else. A colleague. Someone who could offer her a different kind of life. I had built my whole life around being reliable, and it turned out reliable was precisely what she did not want."

"I'm sorry," Camille said quietly.

"It was two years ago now." He glanced at her, something knowing in the look. "When the position here opened, I took it partly to escape the version of myself that Lyon had become — the man everyone pitied a little. I wanted somewhere I could simply be someone who had not yet been humiliated in front of everyone he knew."

"Two years," Camille repeated softly. "That's exactly how long it's been for me too."

He looked at her properly then. "Your fiancé."

"Boyfriend. We weren't engaged, though I'd planned everything around him." She wrapped both hands around her glass. "He left me for someone with money. One day we were fine, the next he was gone, and a few months later there was a wedding announcement with someone else's name where mine should have been."

"That is a particular kind of cruelty. Being discarded for something as simple as money." Something dark passed briefly across his face, protective. "I am sorry that happened to you."

"It's fine. It was two years ago. I've mostly made my peace with it." Even as she said it, she wasn't entirely sure it was true. "Mostly."

"Mostly is honest, at least. I distrust anyone who claims to be entirely over something like that." His mouth curved, more rueful than amused. "I told my sister, six months after Lyon, that I was completely fine. She did not believe me for a second. She was right not to."

"We're quite a pair, aren't we." Camille let out a short, surprised laugh, more relief than humor.

"Perhaps not entirely a coincidence." He said it carefully, watching her reaction. "Perhaps some things happen for reasons we do not fully understand until much later."

"That sounds like something my mother would say. She's very committed to the idea that everything happens for a reason. I've spent two years arguing with her about it."

"And has she won the argument yet?"

Camille considered the question honestly. "Ask me again in a few months."

"Thank you," she said finally, "for telling me. I know that wasn't easy."

"Neither was your telling me." He held her gaze a moment longer than the conversation strictly required. "I find, strangely, that I do not regret it."

"Neither do I," Camille admitted, even as some old, familiar fear whispered underneath the warmth that this could still, eventually, hurt just as much as the last one had.

They stood there a while longer, not saying much, the party humming quietly behind them. It wasn't uncomfortable, the silence — the particular ease of two people who had just handed each other something fragile and found it held.

"I should get home," Camille said eventually, though she made no immediate move toward the door.

"You work weekends too? On top of everything here?" A small furrow appeared between his brows.

"Not anymore, actually. I gave notice at the diner last week. This is my last covering shift, just helping Denise out until they find someone new." She hadn't quite processed yet what it meant that the job she'd clung to for two years was finally behind her. "It felt strange, honestly. Walking away from something I hated so much for so long."

"Change often does. Even good change." Something warm and unguarded crossed his expression. "For what it's worth, I think you will do remarkable things here, Camille. I suspected it in the interview. I am more certain of it now."

"Goodnight, Étienne."

"Goodnight." He didn't move to walk her out this time, didn't offer the car — like he understood she needed this one to be her own quiet walk home, room to sit with everything that had just shifted between them.