The Vows We Never Said

Chapter Eleven

Theo swept the folder off the table and into the nearest desk drawer in a single motion, closing it just as the door opened.

Camille stood in the doorway in a silk robe, hair loose around her shoulders in a way Nora had never seen, softer, almost human, which somehow made the sight of her more unsettling than less. Her eyes moved across the room slowly: Theo standing too straight beside the desk, Nora perched on the edge of the drafting table, and the old brass clock ticking through a silence that had gone very loud very fast.

"There you are." Camille's voice carried none of the warmth from dinner, though her smile arrived anyway, precise as ever. "I woke up and you weren't in bed. I got worried."

"Couldn't sleep," Theo said. "Came to look over some old site plans. Nora happened to still be here going over the garden layout."

"At midnight."

"Landscape work doesn't keep business hours," Nora said, keeping her voice as level as she could manage, reaching for the same calm she'd use pitching a difficult client. "I wanted to finalize the water feature placement before the surveyors come Thursday."

Something flickered across Camille's face at the mention of Thursday, brief and controlled, but Nora caught it, the same way she'd caught it at dinner three nights earlier.

"Thursday's rather busy already," Camille said. "My father's visiting."

"So I heard." Nora held her gaze, steady, refusing to look away first. "Small house. News travels."

For a moment, nobody moved. The clock ticked. Somewhere outside, the wind picked up off the water, rattling the old windowpanes in their frames.

Then Camille's smile widened, and she crossed the room toward Theo with the easy, practiced grace of a woman who had never once doubted her own performance.

"Come back to bed," she said, sliding a hand along his arm, proprietary in a way that made Nora's jaw tighten despite every reason she had to expect it. "You look exhausted. All this garden business can wait until morning."

Theo glanced at Nora one brief, loaded look communicating something neither of them could say out loud with Camille standing three feet away and let himself be steered toward the door.

"Goodnight, Nora," Camille said, pausing in the doorway, her eyes doing one final sweep of the room the desk, the drawer, the space where the folder had been sitting only ninety seconds earlier. "Do lock up when you're finished. We can't have anything important going missing before Thursday."

The words landed with more weight than the sentence should have carried, and Nora understood, watching Camille disappear down the hallway with her hand still curled around Theo's arm, that whatever had just happened, it hadn't been an accident.

She sat alone in the drafting room for a long moment after the door clicked shut, replaying every second of the last five minutes. Camille hadn't seen the folder. Nora was almost certain of that. But almost certain wasn't the same as certain, and the pointed comment about "anything important going missing" felt less like idle conversation and more like a woman testing the waters, gauging a reaction, and filing away whatever she found for later use.

Her phone buzzed. Theo.

She doesn't know. I don't think. But she's suspicious of something. We need to be more careful.

Nora typed back, thumb hovering over the screen for a moment before she committed to the words.

Or she already knows exactly what we're doing, and she's letting us think we still have the advantage.

The reply took longer than she expected.

If that's true, we're not just racing Thursday anymore. We're racing whatever she decides to do before it.

Nora looked at the drawer where the folder now sat, hidden but not nearly hidden enough, and felt the fragile plan they'd built only hours earlier begin to feel considerably less solid than it had when Theo first agreed to it.

Two days. That was what stood between them and whatever Camille had spent over a year quietly building toward and for the first time since the boathouse, Nora wasn't sure two days was going to be enough.