My Rival Co-CEOS

Chapter 13

Victor's invitation arrives Tuesday morning through his assistant — a woman whose emails read like diplomatic cables and whose sign-offs carry the unspoken weight of a patriarch who frames commands as suggestions.

Janise: Family weekend at the estate. Both couples. Saturday through Sunday. Attendance appreciated.

Appreciated the way gravity is appreciated. Optional in theory, non-negotiable in practice.

Now it is Friday evening and Theo is running me through talking points in the back of the town car like a coach prepping a boxer between rounds.

"Victor's estate lawyers will be there Saturday afternoon," he says.

His knee is angled toward mine, his voice carrying the clipped efficiency of a man who has already rehearsed this briefing in his head three times before delivering it aloud.

"They'll want to observe the family dynamic. Nothing formal, nothing direct — just proximity. The kind of watching that looks like small talk but operates like a deposition."

"So smile, touch your arm, laugh at your jokes." I tick the items on my fingers. "The usual performance metrics."

"You make it sound transactional."

"You literally handed me a timeline and a backstory, Theo. There's a spreadsheet."

The corner of his mouth lifts — that almost-smile I've been collecting like pressed flowers from a garden I don't own.

"Fair point. But Friday night is just dinner. Low stakes. We arrive, we settle in, we remind everyone we're solid."

I nod. My eyes track the darkening tree line through the window, and my mind — my traitorous, ungovernable mind — slides back to fluorescent lighting and the mechanical groan of an elevator stalling between floors.

Are you happy, Wren?

Julian's voice, stripped of its usual weaponry, asking a question so simple it dismantled every fortification I'd spent three years constructing.

I blink it away. Fold it down. Tuck it into the pocket where I store the things that don't belong in the back of Theo Bracken's town car.

We arrive at dusk. The estate glows amber through the hedgerows, and Julian's car is already parked in the circular drive — a matte black thing that looks less like transportation and more like a statement of intent.

Inside, the foyer carries the familiar hush of old money settling in for the evening. Julian leans against the drawing room doorframe with a glass of bourbon, his posture looser on estate grounds than I've ever seen it in the city — shoulders dropped, jaw relaxed, the coiled energy he carries through Bracken Enterprises temporarily unwound.

Camille stands beside him examining a painting with the quiet focus of a woman who evaluates art for a living. Her luggage, visible through the open door of their guest suite down the hall, is minimal and expensive — a single leather weekender and a garment bag, nothing more.

Dinner is civil. Victor presides from the head of the table, thinner than last month, his questions sharper than his appetite. I perform. Theo performs. Julian watches us perform with the patient amusement of a man enjoying a play he's already read the script for.

Saturday afternoon, Victor summons both grandsons to the library for a meeting with his estate lawyers. Theo squeezes my hand before he goes — brief, reassuring, the touch of a man who assumes proximity is the same as presence.

The pool terrace stretches empty and sun-drenched before me. I claim a lounger, close my eyes, and try to remember a version of my life where weekends involved laundry and bad thriller novels instead of performing domesticity for a dying patriarch's legal team.

"Do you mind if I sit?"

I open my eyes. Camille Arnaud stands at the foot of the adjacent lounger in a white linen coverup, her dark hair gathered loosely at her nape, sunglasses pushed onto her forehead.

Up close and without the chandelier dramatics of a gala entrance, she is still devastating — but the devastation is quieter, lived-in, the beauty of a woman who stopped performing for rooms a long time ago.

I expect the careful hostility of a woman staking territory. What I get is a warm, unhurried smile and the scent of jasmine sunscreen as she settles onto the cushion beside me.

"The estate is unbearable in July," she says, stretching her legs with the ease of someone who has spent many summers on these grounds. "Victor refuses to upgrade the east wing cooling because he considers discomfort a character-building exercise. I used to hide in the wine cellar during afternoons like this. Twelve degrees cooler, and the Bordeaux selection is extraordinary."

I laugh before I can calibrate the response. "I considered sleeping in the garden last time. The fan in my room operates on pure spite."

"The one that wobbles?" Her eyes brighten with recognition. "I had that room for two summers. I reported it to the housekeeper four times, and each time she nodded like I'd told her the weather and did absolutely nothing."

The shared grievance lands between us like a bridge neither of us planned to build.

I study her profile while she reaches for her water glass — the effortless jaw, the espresso-dark eyes I memorized from Instagram at two in the morning — and the woman beside me bears so little resemblance to the threat I constructed in my head that the dissonance makes my chest ache.

"Your work is in art consulting, isn't it?" I ask, because surface feels safer than depth and I need to understand her before I can decide what to do with her presence.

"Post-war European, mostly. Acquisitions for private collectors and institutional buyers."

She tilts her head toward the painting visible through the terrace doors — a Rothko that probably cost more than my apartment building.

"Victor bought that at auction in 2011. Overpaid by thirty percent because the dealer knew he'd never admit he couldn't tell a Rothko from a Richter. I authenticated it for him afterward. That's how I met the family."

"Through Victor. Not through Theo."

"Through Victor." She confirms it without flinching, and the specificity rearranges a timeline I thought I understood. "Theo came after. The way most things in this family come after Victor decides the order."

She speaks French to a staff member who brings fresh towels, the words flowing with the natural cadence of a woman who doesn't switch languages for effect but because the language chose her first. The housekeeper responds in kind, and Camille's smile carries a warmth that extends to everyone in her radius without apparent calculation.

The silence that follows is comfortable in a way that alarms me. I came prepared for a rival and found a woman I could have been friends with in a life less complicated than this one.

"Can I ask you a personal question?" I say, because the afternoon heat has dissolved my usual caution and she is sitting close enough that honesty feels less dangerous than performance.

"Of course."

"What happened between you and Theo?"

She doesn't stiffen. Doesn't deflect. She looks out at the pool where light moves in slow, restless patterns across the surface, and when she speaks, her voice carries the tender familiarity of a woman who knew a man without his armor — who touched the unguarded version and loved him there.

"We wanted different futures," she says. "Theo wanted a partner who fit the architecture of his life — the company, the legacy, the role his grandfather designed for him before he was old enough to choose it for himself. I wanted a partner who could exist outside of it."

She pauses, choosing her next words with care that tells me she has thought about this more than once.

"He is a good man, Wren. A genuinely good man who has spent his whole life earning approval from people who should have given it freely. I couldn't be the person who asked him to stop earning and start living. He wasn't ready to hear it from me."

The generosity in her voice makes my ribs tighten. No bitterness, no possessiveness, no undercurrent of a woman who still wants what she left behind.

"I hope you give him what I couldn't," she says, and she turns to look at me with eyes so clear and so kind that I feel the weight of every lie I've told in this house press against my sternum like a hand.

She isn't threatened by me. She has already made peace with Theo. I am the one still at war.

That evening, I walk the east corridor toward my room, my bare feet silent on the cool marble. The terrace doors are open a crack, and through the glass I see them.

Theo and Camille. Standing three feet apart on the flagstone, not touching, not arguing — just talking. Her hands rest at her sides. His are in his pockets. The posture of two people who share a history that requires no performance to navigate.

Camille says a word I can't hear. Theo's mouth softens into a smile I have never earned — unguarded, nostalgic, the expression of a man standing in a room he thought he'd locked forever and finding the furniture exactly where he left it.

I stand in the dark hallway and watch the man I love smile at the woman who left him with an ease he has never once shown me, and the feeling that fills my chest isn't jealousy.

It is the quiet, devastating recognition of a woman realizing she is a stranger in a story that started long before she arrived.