The Two Year Wife

Chapter 7: Damage Control

Camille’s POV

I stare at the photo until the screen goes dark on its own.

It is us. On the terrace. My hand on his chest. His mouth close to my ear. Whoever took it was hiding somewhere close, close enough to catch the exact moment neither of us knew anyone else was there.

“Nico.” My voice comes out thin. “Look at this.”

He takes the phone from my hand. I watch his face change as he scrolls, the calm slipping just a little before he pulls it back into place.

“Someone was at the ball,” he says quietly. “Watching us the whole time.”

“Who sends something like this? And why now?”

“I do not know yet.”

“You always seem to know things right before you tell me about them.”

His jaw tightens. “Not this time.”

Luca appears at the of the end of the hallway, already looking at his own phone, his face pale.

“It is spreading,” he says. “Fast. Someone sent it to three different papers at once.”

“Can we stop it?” I ask.

“No,” Luca says.”But we can control what we say about it.”

We spend the next hour in a small black room,the three of us,deciding what to tell the world before the world decides the story for us. In the end we agree on something close to the truth. We met before we knew who the other one was. We fell into something real once we found out. It is simple. It is mostly true. It leaves out the parts that are no one’s business but ours.

By the time we step back in front of the cameras, my hands have stopped shaking, but my chest still feels tight.

“So the rumors are true,” one reporter calls out. “You two knew each other before the engagement.”

“We did,” Nico says, calm and even, his hand finding mine without looking. “We just did not know each other’s names.”

It gets a small laugh from the room, which helps more than I expect it to. By the time the questions end, the story has shifted from scandal to something people seem to like instead. A love story hiding behind a mask. It is not what happened.But it is close enough that I let it stand.

The days that follow move faster than I am prepared for. There is no talk of a long engagement, not with the board watching every headline and my birthday drawing closer with each morning I wake up in this city that still does not feel like mine. But there is, at least, a week. A short one, but a week all the same, and I find myself grateful for even that much time to breathe.

Renata insists on a formal dinner to introduce me to the small circle of Marchetti family friends who matter most, the kind of people whose opinions apparently shape how quickly a scandal fades or festers.

“Smile like you mean it,” she tells me beforehand, adjusting the collar of my dress with brisk, practiced hands. “And for heaven’s sake, let him hold your hand. It reads better than you standing there like a hostage.”

“I am not a very good actress.”

“You do not need to be a good actress. You need to be convincing for one evening. There is a difference.”

The dinner is exhausting in a way I did not expect, an endless parade of names I will not remember by morning, questions disguised as compliments, compliments disguised as questions. Nico stays close to my side the entire night, his hand finding the small of my back whenever the conversation turns pointed, and somewhere in the middle of it I realize I have started to rely on that small, steady weight without meaning to.

“You did well tonight,” he says afterwards, in the quiet of the car ride back.

“I feel like I just ran a marathon in heels.”

“You looked like you were born to it.”

“That is either a compliment or an insult. I cannot tell which.”

The corner of his mouth lifts, the closest thing to a real smile I have seen from him since the terrace. “Take it as a compliment. I do not give many.”

We spend the next few evenings working through smaller, quieter versions of the same performance. A dinner with my own remaining board members, nervous and watchful, trying to read whether their new arrangement will hold. A visit to Marchetti Group’s headquarters so the staff can see their CEO’s fiancée is not simply a headline. Small, ordinary moments stitched together into something that is beginning, despite everything, to feel less like a business transaction and more like two people learning the shape of each other’s days.

“Tell me something about your father,” Nico says one evening , the two of us alone for once, sharing a quiet dinner in his penthouse instead of another room full of strangers. “Not the company. Him.”

The question catches me off guard. “Why?”

“Because I am about to marry his daughter, and I realize I know almost nothing about the man who raised her.”

I turn my glass slowly on the table, considering. “He used to hum while he worked. Old French songs, mostly, off key. My mother used to tease him about it constantly.”

“I cannot picture that. The man everyone described to me was terrifying.”

“He was terrifying to competitors. To me he was just Papa, badly singing over spreadsheets.” My throat tightens unexpectedly. “I miss the sound more than I expected to.”

Something shifts in Nico’s expression, quiet and unguarded in a way I have not seen from him before.

“My father never hummed anything,” he says. “He barely spoke unless it was about business. I used to think that was simply how powerful men behaved. It took me a long time to realize it was only how he behaved.”

“I am sorry.”

“Do not be. It is not a competition for whose father was more difficult to love.” He says it lightly, but there is something underneath it that tells me it is not entirely a joke.

We sit with that for a moment, two people who lost very different fathers in very different ways, and for the first time since the boardroom, the silence between us does not feel like a negotiation. It feels almost like company.

The night before the wedding, Elodie flies in early, insisting on staying with me at the small Marchetti guesthouse rather than the main residence.

“Last night as a free woman,” she says, pouring us both a glass of wine we barely touch. “How do you feel?”

“Terrified. Exhausted. Strangely calm, underneath all of it, which frightens me more than the rest combined.”

“That does not sound like nothing.”

“It is nothing,” I admit. “I do not know what it is yet.”

She studies me for a long moment, the way she has since we were teenagers, like she can read whatever I am not saying out loud.

“Whatever this becomes,” she says finally, “I am glad you are not walking into it completely alone anymore.”

I do not have an answer for that, so I simply lean my head against her shoulder, and we sit like that until the wine goes warm and the city outside the window finally starts to quiet down for the night.