The Two Year Wife

Chapter 13: Isabella’s Interview

Camille’s POV

By morning the story is everywhere.

Nico shows me the article on his phone at breakfast, his face unreadable, his coffee going cold in front of him. The headline alone makes my stomach turn.

The Masked Bride: What Isabella Rinaldi Says Really Happened in Paris.

I read it twice. Isabelle tells the reporter everything, or close to everything. The masquerade. The mystery man. How she always knew, somehow, that Nico had met someone that night, long before any of us found out who that person was. She frames it carefully, just enough truth mixed with just enough suggestions, so that by the end of the article it sounds like Nico and I planned this whole marriage from the very beginning. A trick. A performance. Never real.

“She is lying,” I say.

“Most of what she says is not technically a lie,” Nico says quietly. “That is what makes it dangerous.”

“People will believe this.”

“Some will.”

My phone starts buzzing before I even finish my coffee. Elodie first, then two reporters I do not recognize, then my own board members, all asking the same question in different words. Is any of this true.

By noon, Luca calls an emergency meeting at the office. Renata is already there when we arrive, standing near the window with her arms crossed, her face harder than I have ever seen it.

“This is a mess,” she says, the moment we walk in. “A mess that could have been avoided if either of you had handheld Isabella properly months ago.”

“I did not create this,” Nico says.

“No, but you let her believe things were still open between you for far too long. That is on you.”

“That is not fair.”

“Fair has nothing to do with it,” Renata snaps. “The board is asking if this marriage was ever what it claimed to be. Investors are asking the same thing. We need a plan, and we need it today.”

Luca clears his throat, sliding a folder across the table. “There is worse news.”

“Worse than this?” I ask.

“Julien Moreau used the story overnight to approach three of your board members directly,” he says, looking at me. “He is offering to buy their shares at double the market value if they vote to remove you as head of Laurent Ateliers.”

The room tilts slightly. “He cannot do that.”

“He can if enough of them agree,” Luca says gently. “Right now, with the scandal fresh, some of them might.”

I press my hand flat against the table to steady myself, the same way I did the first day I sat across from Nico in this building, and for a moment I feel like none of the last few months have changed anything at all.

“I need to call an emergency board meeting myself,” I say. “Before Julien gets to anyone else.”

“I will help however I can,” Nico says.

“You have helped enough,” Renata mutters, not quite under her breath.

I do not have time to ask what she means. My phone rings again, and this time it is my own assistant back in Paris, her voice shaking.

“Camille, I think you need to come see something,” she says. “It is about your father. About the final deal he made before he died.”

My chest goes tight. “What deal?”

“There are files here. Old ones. Someone must have sent them, because I did not pull these myself. They mention Mr Marchetti by name. Not Nico. His father. But there is something else too.”

“What else?”

She hesitates, and I can hear papers shuffling on the other end.

“There is a note attached,” she says slowly. “Recent. Only a few months old. It looks like Nico requested copies of these exact files before your father even died.”

The floor seems to shift beneath me.

I turn slowly and look at Nico, who is watching me with the same careful, unreadable expression he wore the very first day I met him in this office, and something in my chest goes cold in a way that has nothing to do with Isabella or Julien or any of the noise in this room.

“You knew,” I whisper. “You knew about my father’s last deal before I ever walked in here. Before any of this. Before Paris.”

“Camille,let me explain.”

“How long,” I say, my voice shaking now. “How long have you known the truth?”

He does not answer right away, and in the silence that follows, I already know the answer is going to break something between us that I am not sure we can fix.