Recipe for a Broken Heart

Chapter 7

Chapter 7 — The Wall Cracks

The trouble with letting your guard down even slightly, Camille was learning, was that it never stayed at slightly. It crept.

She noticed it first in small ways. The way she started saving up little observations throughout the day, things she wanted to tell someone, and realizing, with a small jolt, that the someone in her head was Étienne. The way she'd started arriving ten minutes earlier than she needed to, because those ten minutes sometimes overlapped with the window when he came in, and she liked the quiet good morning that passed between them before the office filled up around them.

It unsettled her more than she wanted to admit. She'd built an entire architecture of self-protection over the last two years, and now here was this infuriating, perceptive Frenchman, dismantling it one small kindness at a time without seeming to even notice he was doing it.

"You're staring again," Priya said one Tuesday, sliding into the empty chair beside Camille's desk.

"I am not staring."

"You are absolutely staring. At his office door, specifically, for the third time in ten minutes." Priya grinned, unbothered by Camille's glare. "I'm just saying. You wouldn't be the first person in this building to notice he's, you know. Objectively very easy to look at."

"This is a professional workplace."

"It's also a workplace with eyes, and mine happen to work perfectly fine." Priya lowered her voice. "For what it's worth, though — I've been here since day one, and I've never seen him look at anyone the way he looks at you. He's very controlled. But controlled isn't the same as absent."

"There's a betting pool?"

"There's always a betting pool, Camille. Welcome to office life." Priya walked off, laughing.

She tried to bury herself back in the spreadsheet, but her mind kept drifting to small details she'd catalogued without meaning to. The way he took his coffee black. The way he rolled his sleeves to precisely the same fold every morning. The way he'd once corrected a junior associate's mistake without a hint of condescension, patient in a way most people in power rarely bothered to be with people who couldn't do anything for them in return.

None of it should have mattered. And yet there it was, filed away carefully, the way you filed away things about people you were trying very hard not to admit you cared about.

The thing that scared her most wasn't the attraction itself — that, she could have managed. What scared her was how naturally he'd slipped past defenses she'd spent two years reinforcing, without her ever consciously deciding to let him in. It was the way Étienne actually listened when she talked, not the performative nodding David had done while mentally drafting his next move. It was the way he'd never once, in six weeks, made her feel like her circumstances were something to apologize for.

That Thursday, a genuine crisis landed on both their desks at once — a critical shipment stuck at customs, a client threatening to walk if it wasn't resolved by end of day. Camille found herself pulled into Étienne's office for an emergency planning session, the two of them working the problem from opposite ends, her handling the client while he negotiated in rapid, irritated French she couldn't understand but found, embarrassingly, kind of magnetic to listen to.

"You're smiling," he said, covering the phone's receiver.

"I'm not smiling."

"You are, slightly. It is very distracting when I am trying to threaten a customs official." But there was warmth under it, and something in her chest loosened.

They solved it an hour and a half later, both slightly hoarse, quietly triumphant. Étienne leaned back, exhaling, and looked at her with an expression she hadn't seen before — open, unguarded.

"We make a good team," he said simply.

"We do," Camille admitted, the words bigger than the moment strictly called for.

"You handled the client well. She was ready to walk an hour ago." He said it plainly, which somehow made it land harder than flattery would have. "I don't think I could have talked her down the way you did."

"You threatened a customs official in three languages. I think you'd have managed."

"Threatening customs officials is a different skill than keeping a frightened client calm. You are better at the second one than I am." He rubbed a hand across his jaw, tired but pleased. "I don't say that to many people."

For one dangerous, suspended second, something passed between them — the air shifting into something neither friendship nor professionalism quite covered. His eyes held hers a beat longer than necessary.

Then his phone rang again, and the moment broke.

But Camille carried it home anyway, watching the city blur past the train window without really seeing it. Marcus caught her smiling at nothing over dinner and, for once, didn't push — just exchanged a knowing look with their mother that Camille pretended not to notice.

Lying awake, she made herself think it through honestly. She was falling for him. Not hypothetically — actually, presently, inconveniently falling, the way you fall down stairs. Two years ago she would have called this excitement. Now hope came wrapped in caution, every good feeling shadowed by the memory of how quickly good feelings could curdle into humiliation.

But underneath the fear, stubbornly, something else persisted — something that sounded almost exactly like her mother's voice, telling her David didn't get to keep haunting every good thing that happened to her. She wasn't ready to admit that out loud. But lying there in the dark, she found, to her own quiet alarm, that hope was winning anyway.