10. What Camille Wanted
Ten
What Camille Wanted
Damian
I asked Camille to meet me for coffee, not because I had another plan to execute, but because I needed to understand something I’d been avoiding for weeks, something that sat underneath every other conversation we’d had since Elena left.
“I need to ask you something,” I said, once we were seated in the back corner of a café neither of us frequented, chosen deliberately for its distance from anyone who might recognize either of us, “and I need you to actually answer it instead of telling me what you think I want to hear.”
“Okay.” She wrapped both hands around her cup, wary in a way I wasn’t used to seeing from her, none of her usual easy confidence on display.
“Did you ever want more than friendship? From me?”
She was quiet for a long moment, long enough that the silence itself became an answer before she said a word. Long enough that I understood, before she said anything at all, that the honest answer wasn’t a simple no.
“I don’t think I ever wanted you, exactly,” she said finally, choosing her words with a care I rarely saw from her.
“Not romantically. I think I wanted to be the person who couldn’t be replaced.
The one who knew you before Elena, before the company, before any of it.
There’s a difference, even if it doesn’t look like one from the outside, even if it amounts to something just as damaging. ”
“That’s still not nothing, Camille.”
“I know.” She turned her cup slowly on the table, not meeting my eyes right away, something almost like shame crossing her expression.
“I think some part of me liked knowing I had something Elena couldn’t touch.
Twenty years of history. Access to a version of you she never got to know — you at twenty-two, you after your father died, you before any of this success.
I told myself that was just friendship. I’m not sure anymore that it was that simple, or that fair to either of you. ”
I sat with that, and with my own part in it, because I understood now that I’d let it be that simple for years — I’d let her occupy space I should have protected, because it was easier than examining why I never protected it, easier than asking myself what I was actually getting out of being needed by two women at once.
“I think I let you believe there was room for that,” I said, “because some part of me liked it too. Being needed by two people who each thought they mattered most. I never made you choose a smaller version of this friendship, because I never wanted to choose anything, honestly. I just wanted everyone comfortable, wanted to avoid the version of this conversation we’re having right now. ”
“That’s a very expensive kind of comfortable,” Camille said, with something like a rueful, honest smile, the first real levity either of us had managed in the conversation.
“Elena said something similar. Different words.”
“She’s usually right about you. Uncomfortably so.” Camille finally looked up, meeting my eyes directly for the first time since we’d sat down. “I don’t want to be the reason your marriage ends, Damian. I never wanted that, whatever it looked like from the outside.”
“You’re not the reason,” I said, and I meant it fully now, the way I hadn’t a month ago when I was still looking for somewhere else to put the blame.
“I am. You didn’t take anything from Elena that I didn’t hand you freely, over and over, without asking her first. That’s on me. Every part of it, start to finish.”
Camille nodded slowly, and something between us shifted — not a door slamming shut, but something quieter. A recalibration. The beginning of a friendship that might actually survive, once it stopped being asked to hold more than it should have, once it found its proper size again.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Whatever it takes,” I said. “Even if it takes longer than I want it to. Even if she chooses someone else at the end of it. I’d rather lose her having actually changed than keep her by pretending I already had.”
Camille studied me for a moment, something like genuine surprise crossing her face. “You’ve changed in the last month. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say something like that, not in twenty years of knowing you.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to sit with what I actually cost her,” I said. “I’m not in a hurry to skip past that part anymore, no matter how uncomfortable it gets.”