The Vows We Never Said

Chapter Ten

They met in the old drafting room, well after the rest of the house had gone dark. Theo's suggestion, once Nora told him it needed to be somewhere Camille wouldn't think to look. He'd raised an eyebrow at that, a question he didn't voice, and she'd simply set the folder down on the dusty table between them and let it speak for itself.

He read it standing up. She noticed the way he couldn't seem to make himself sit while absorbing it, like some part of him understood that sitting down meant accepting this as something permanent rather than a problem he could still outrun.

The photograph stopped him first. The wedding announcement, second. The reorganization filing, buried in the business section of a four-year-old newspaper, seemed to be what finally broke something loose in his chest, because he set the folder down with a hand that wasn't entirely steady and didn't say anything for a long time.

"Theo."

"Give me a minute."

She gave him several. The clock on the wall, an old brass thing with hands slightly crooked, another relic nobody had bothered to fix, ticked through nearly two full minutes of silence before he spoke again.

"I did this," he said finally. "Not the embezzlement. I mean I built the exact conditions that let this happen. Distracted, grieving, so eager to believe I'd finally made a safe choice after the last one blew up in my face that I never once looked closely at the woman I was choosing." His voice had gone rough, stripped of every polished edge she'd watched him wear since she arrived. "My grandmother tried to tell me. You tried to tell me. I had every opportunity to look, and I chose not to, because looking meant admitting I might have made another catastrophic decision, and I genuinely don't think I could have survived believing that about myself twice."

"You're not the one who did this to you, Theo."

"I let it happen."

"There's a difference between being deceived by someone who's clearly done this before, professionally, with practice, and being complicit in your own ruin." Nora stepped closer, close enough now that she could see the exhaustion carved into the lines around his eyes, six years and several sleepless nights compressed into one expression. "Priya said the last one didn't believe her either. That's not a coincidence, Theo. That's a woman who's very good at what she does."

"That doesn't make me feel less like an idiot."

"Good. Feel like an i***t for one night. Then get up tomorrow and fix it." She held his gaze, steady, refusing to let him collapse into the kind of self-punishment that would waste the time they didn't have. "You have until Thursday. That's not nothing. That's enough time to stop this before it finishes happening, if you're willing to actually move instead of just sitting with how badly it hurts to have been wrong."

Something shifted behind his eyes, grief giving way, slowly, to something with more edge to it.

"I want to confront her tonight," he said.

"Don't."

"Nora, she's been."

"I know what she's been doing. That's exactly why you can't confront her tonight." Nora tapped the folder between them. "The moment she knows you're onto her, she accelerates everything, moves the money somewhere you can't trace, and calls her father and tells him to finish early instead of waiting for Thursday. Right now, she thinks she's still winning. That's the only advantage we have."

He exhaled, long and slow, and she watched him make the calculation, watched the same mind that had once run away from a hard truth in six minutes now forcing itself to sit with one considerably longer.

"So what do we do instead?"

"We let Thursday happen." Nora sat on the edge of the drafting table, the old wood creaking under her weight. "We let her think everything's proceeding exactly as planned. And we use the time between now and then to build something airtight enough that when it finally comes out, there's no explanation smooth enough to talk her way past it."

"You sound like you already have a plan."

"I have the beginning of one. Your grandmother has the rest of it, probably, if we ask her properly instead of letting her drip it out to us one conversation at a time." Something almost like a smile pulled at the corner of Nora's mouth, the first genuine one in days. "Between the three of us, we might actually be able to end this the way it should have ended a long time before it got this far."

Theo looked at her for a long moment, really looked, in a way he hadn't quite managed since she'd pulled through the gates six days earlier, and something in his expression settled into place, steadier than she'd seen it since she arrived.

"Six years ago," he said quietly, "I made a decision by myself, in six minutes, because I thought that was what strength looked like. I'm done doing that."

"Good."

"I mean it, Nora. Whatever happens with Camille, whatever happens with us, after I'm done deciding things alone and calling it protection." He reached out, slow enough that she had every chance to step back and didn't, and let his hand settle against the side of her face like he was testing whether the gesture was still his to make. "I should have said that six years ago. I'm saying it now."

She didn't pull away. Didn't lean in either, not fully; just stood there in the old drafting room, six years of unfinished business narrowing down to the small distance between his hand and her face, and let herself, for one suspended moment, feel exactly how much that distance still mattered.

Then, from somewhere down the hall, a door opened softly, unhurriedly, but close enough that they both went still at the sound.

Footsteps. Familiar ones.

"Camille," Theo breathed, already stepping back, already reaching for the folder to sweep it out of sight.

They were fast enough.