Recipe for a Broken Heart

Chapter.16

Chapter 16 — An Ocean Between Us

The call came on a Wednesday afternoon, and Camille knew, before he'd said a single word, that something was wrong. She watched through the glass wall as his posture changed, his expression draining of color.

He found her at her desk moments later. "My father collapsed this morning. They have him stabilized, but his heart is worse than anyone realized. I need to go. Today, if possible."

Camille felt the floor tilt, old fear rising fast, but pushed it down. This was not David leaving. "Then go. I'll help however I can here."

"I do not deserve you, handling this so calmly." He reached for her hand. "I will call you every day, Camille. This is not me disappearing."

"I know. Go. Your father needs you more than this office does right now."

He left within three hours. Camille found herself standing in the lobby, watching his car pull away, feeling the hollow ache of someone she loved walking into uncertainty she couldn't follow him into.

Marcus took to checking in on her nightly, an unexpected shift from his usual teasing. "You don't have to be strong about this, you know. It's okay to just be scared."

"Since when did you get so perceptive?"

"Since I watched you hold everyone else up for years without anyone doing the same for you. Figured it was somebody's turn."

He called that first night, exhausted. "He is asking for me constantly, even sedated." His voice cracked slightly. "I am sorry to be so far away right now. I wish you were here."

He talked for nearly an hour about his father's stubbornness, about summers learning the business at his side. Camille listened, and found the conversation brought them closer rather than further apart.

The calls continued daily. She learned about his mother, who had died when he was nineteen, and the particular loneliness of being raised to inherit responsibility rather than simply being loved.

"I think that is part of why I understood you so quickly," he admitted one night, nearly two weeks in. "You carry weight without complaint, the way I learned to."

"Two people who learned to carry too much too young, finding each other. That's either very romantic or very sad."

"I choose romantic. I have had quite enough sad for one lifetime." He paused. "My father wants to meet you. Apparently my brother mentioned you."

"What did you tell him?"

"The truth. That I have found someone extraordinary, and that I intend to keep her, regardless of what happens with the company or anything else that used to feel so urgent before all of this."

"How's he doing? Really."

"Frustrated. Hates being fragile more than the pain itself. Yesterday he tried to argue with his cardiologist about work emails."

"Sounds like it runs in the family, the stubbornness."

"I resent that comparison. I am nothing like my father." A beat. "I am told this is not remotely true."

"I miss you," he said. "More than I expected to."

"I miss you too. The office isn't the same without you making everyone nervous by working later than everyone else."

He laughed, tired but genuine.

Three weeks after he left, he called with news. "I am coming home. This weekend, if the flights cooperate. My father insisted — told me he did not survive a heart attack just to watch his son abandon a good thing out of misplaced obligation."

"I like him already."

"I have been thinking, these past three weeks, about the future. We should talk, properly, when I am back."

"I'd like that. Come home safe, Étienne."

"For you, always."

She sat in the quiet of her room afterward, letting herself imagine, for the first time, a future with real edges and possibilities.

Her mother noticed the change the next morning. "You're glowing. He's coming back, I take it."

"This weekend. And he said we need to talk about the future." Camille couldn't suppress her smile.

"Baby, that man flew across an ocean, sat with his dying father, and came out the other side wanting to talk to you about the future. That's not a man weighing his options. That's a man who's made up his mind."

Camille carried that thought through the anticipatory hours of a Friday that felt longer than any Friday had a right to feel — and underneath the nervous energy, found a quiet, settled certainty of her own, waiting for the moment she'd finally be brave enough to say it out loud herself.