Recipe for a Broken Heart

Chapter.3

Chapter 3 — First Impressions

He was not what Camille had pictured.

She'd built some vague idea in her head over the last two days — someone older, maybe, softer around the edges, the kind of executive who inherited his position and wore it like a slightly-too-large coat. The man walking toward her now looked nothing like that. Tall, dark-haired, dressed in a charcoal suit that fit like it had been made for exactly his shoulders and no one else's, moving with the unhurried confidence of someone who had never once in his life worried about whether a room would make space for him.

"Miss Bennett?" His accent wrapped around her name and made it sound like something else entirely, something with more weight to it. "Étienne Rousseau. Thank you for waiting."

"Of course." She stood, extended her hand, and reminded herself, firmly, to breathe normally. His handshake was brief, professional, nothing to read into. She reminded herself of that too.

His office, when they reached it, was as unfinished as the rest of the floor — a desk with exactly three items on it, a window with the blinds still wearing their plastic packaging clip, a single framed photo she couldn't make out from where she sat. He gestured for her to sit across from him and took his own seat with the kind of stillness that made Camille immediately, instinctively straighten her spine.

"Your resume is interesting," he said, glancing at the paper in front of him. "A business degree, and then—" he paused, and she watched him decide how to phrase it kindly, "—a few years doing something else entirely."

"Waitressing. You can say it." She kept her voice even, pleasant, the same tone she used on rude customers who thought a tip entitled them to comment on her life choices. "I needed steady income. My family needed steady income. The degree didn't pay bills on its own."

Something shifted in his expression — not pity, which she'd braced for and would have hated, but something closer to attention, like she'd just become more interesting rather than less. "That is not a weakness, Miss Bennett. That is discipline. Most people your age with a diploma refuse work they consider beneath them. You did not."

"I didn't have the luxury of refusing anything." The words came out sharper than she intended, an old defensiveness rising before she could stop it. She caught herself, softened it. "Sorry. It's just — I get asked to explain that gap a lot, and usually people are looking for a reason to move on to the next resume."

"I am not most people." He said it simply, without arrogance, like a fact rather than a boast, and something about the flatness of it irritated her more than actual arrogance would have. Confidence she could roll her eyes at. Quiet certainty was harder to dismiss.

The interview moved through the expected territory — her strengths, her understanding of logistics operations, a scenario question about handling a scheduling conflict between two department heads that she answered better than she expected herself to, given how much of her brain was still occupied with cataloguing the way he listened, fully, without checking his phone once, without the distracted half-attention she'd gotten used to from every manager she'd ever worked under.

"You are very guarded," he said suddenly, somewhere past the twenty-minute mark, apropos of nothing she'd said directly.

Camille blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"Your answers are excellent. Precise. But you hold something back in all of them. I notice these things." He tilted his head slightly, studying her the way she imagined he studied shipping manifests, looking for the discrepancy. "It is not a criticism. I am simply observing."

"With respect, Mr. Rousseau, you don't know me well enough to observe anything about me."

"Étienne is fine. And you are correct — I don't know you. Yet I am rarely wrong about people. It is, unfortunately, one of my more irritating qualities." The faintest suggestion of a smile touched his mouth, gone almost before she registered it. "I hope, if you accept the position, you'll prove me wrong about the guardedness. It would make for a more pleasant working relationship."

Camille felt heat rise in her cheeks, equal parts embarrassment and something uncomfortably close to being seen. She hadn't come here for a stranger to read her like a spreadsheet in the first twenty minutes.

"I wasn't aware self-diagnosis was part of the interview process," she said, and the words came out cooler than she meant them, edged with the particular defensiveness reserved for people who got too close too fast. "Should I expect a psychological evaluation next, or was that the whole test?"

If he was offended, he didn't show it. If anything, the almost-smile from before returned, a little wider this time. "No evaluation. Only an observation, freely given, which you are equally free to ignore." He glanced down at her resume again, tapping one finger against the edge of the desk. "You handled that rather well, by the way. Most candidates apologize when I say things like that. You pushed back instead. I find that far more useful in an employee."

Camille wasn't entirely sure what to do with that — being complimented for the exact thing she'd been mentally bracing herself to apologize for felt disorienting, like the ground had shifted slightly under a conversation she thought she understood the rules of.

"So," she said, steering them back toward safer waters, "what exactly would the role involve, day to day?"

He answered thoroughly, professionally, laying out the scope of the position with the kind of clarity that told her he actually knew the work himself and hadn't just inherited a title without understanding what sat beneath it. Scheduling, vendor coordination, translating between the Lyon office and the new Canadian branch, smoothing the hundred small frictions that came with any operation still finding its rhythm. It sounded demanding. It sounded, if she was honest with herself, like exactly the kind of challenge she'd been starving for without quite admitting it.

By the time the interview wound down, forty minutes had passed, though it had felt shorter, which unsettled her more than she wanted to acknowledge. He walked her to the elevator himself, an unnecessary courtesy that felt oddly deliberate.

"We will be in touch by the end of the week," he said, as the doors opened. "Thank you again, Miss Bennett."

"Camille is fine," she said, echoing his own earlier correction back at him, and thought she caught, just barely, the ghost of that almost-smile again before the doors slid shut between them.

She rode down four floors trying very hard not to think about how long it had been since a man's attention had made her feel unsettled in a way that had nothing to do with anger, and everything to do with something she wasn't ready to name.