CHAPTER FIVE
By the third day of Brielle living in the guest wing, the mansion no longer felt like Camille's, and Brielle had stopped pretending otherwise.
Camille noticed it in small things first—a different hand towel folded in the downstairs powder room, the housekeeper deferring to Brielle's opinion on flowers before Camille had even given hers, the temperature of the pool changed without anyone asking her preference.
It was less an invasion than a slow tide, water finding every low place in a house Camille had spent two decades furnishing, decorating, and defending as hers.
There was more. The seating chart Camille had spent a week perfecting, sponsors balanced against league officials balanced against old friends who'd actually earned a seat near the head table, was rearranged overnight, Brielle's name inserted two seats from Grant's, closer than the commissioner's wife.
The orchids Camille had ordered for the entry hall, her favorite, the ones that reminded her of the bouquet from her own wedding, were replaced with white roses that looked, Camille realized with a slow, cold understanding, exactly like the kind a bride carried.
By the time Brielle started running the staff meetings herself, correcting the caterer, redirecting the florist, speaking to the household staff with the easy authority of a woman who expected to still be giving orders in this house next year, Camille had stopped being surprised.
She had started, instead, taking notes—literal ones, dates and details recorded in a notebook she kept in her handbag now, because Martin had told her nothing was too small to document, and Brielle's steady creep into the role of lady of the house was, if nothing else, a useful pattern to have on record.
She found Brielle on the fourth day standing in the marital dressing room, Camille's jewelry case open on the vanity, diamonds and heirlooms spread across the velvet.
"Can I help you with something?" Camille asked, from the doorway.
Brielle didn't startle. That told Camille everything about how safe Brielle felt in this house. "Grant wanted me to pull a few pieces. For a historical display, at the party. Show off the family jewels, that sort of thing."
"Did he."
Camille crossed the room slowly and picked up a bracelet Brielle had set aside, turning it over. "Interesting, that he'd send you to do it instead of asking me himself."
"He's busy." Brielle's smile didn't waver. "Someone has to help him. God knows he can't keep track of everything on his own."
"No," Camille agreed. "He's always needed someone to run things behind him while he takes the credit in front of the cameras. I did it for twenty-two years." She let that sit. "I see you've picked up the position."
Brielle's chin lifted, some brittle defiance rising to meet the challenge. "At least I make him happy."
"Do you?" Camille's eyes dropped, deliberate, to Brielle's ankle, bare today, but the memory of the diamond chain sat between them regardless.
"Is that what wearing another woman's wedding-night lingerie felt like?
Happy? Or did it feel like putting on a coat that had already been worn, still warm from somebody else's shoulders? "
For the first time since Camille had known her, Brielle looked genuinely rattled, color rising high on her cheeks. "Grant's been unhappy for years. He deserves a woman who actually excites him, not someone who—"
"Not someone who built the thing you're currently redecorating?" Camille finished, and something in her voice made Brielle actually take a step back.
That was when Grant appeared in the doorway, drawn by voices he clearly hadn't expected to hear raised in his house. "What is going on in here?"
"Brielle was cataloguing the family jewels," Camille said evenly. "For the historical display. Your idea, I understand."
Grant's eyes moved between them, calculating.
He stepped fully into the room and closed the door behind him, his voice dropping into the register he used when he wanted to be obeyed rather than heard.
"Whatever this is, Camille, it ends now.
You are not going to create a scandal that damages this franchise five days before the biggest night of my career. "
"Your franchise?" Camille said the words back to him like she was testing their weight for the first time. "You keep saying that. Your franchise, your career, your night. I'd love to understand when exactly it stopped being ours."
Something flickered across Grant's face, the first real uncertainty Camille had seen in him in weeks, there and then buried again beneath practiced authority. "This isn't the time."
"No," Camille said, and walked past him out of the room. "It never is, with you."
The photographs surfaced the following night, posted to a Miami gossip account with forty thousand followers: Camille and Adrian leaving the youth centre together, captured from a car at the far end of the lot, the angle suggestive in a way the actual moment hadn't been.
Grant found Camille in her bedroom that night, phone in hand, face dark with a fury that had nothing to do with concern for her.
He'd clearly seen the photographs already; someone on his team monitored those accounts the way other people monitored stock prices, and he'd come straight upstairs without bothering to knock.
"Is this what you've been doing? Sneaking around with Reiner while I'm planning this party?"
"I went to the youth centre to look at old footage," Camille said, and didn't bother keeping the ice out of her voice. "You'd know that if you'd asked instead of assumed."
Grant crossed the room fast enough that she didn't have time to step back. His hand closed around her wrist, tighter than it needed to be. "You belong beside me until I decide otherwise. Do you understand that?"
Camille looked down at his hand, up at his face. Something in her had gone perfectly, dangerously calm. "Let go of my wrist, Grant. And hear me clearly, because I will only say this once. You will never touch me like that again."
Something in his grip must have registered the change in her, because he released her, uncertain for the second time that day, and stepped back like he'd touched something hotter than he expected.
Two days after that came the luncheon, a Tempests Foundation fundraiser Camille had organized months earlier, back when organizing things for Grant's benefit had still felt like love instead of labor.
She'd almost canceled her attendance. She went anyway, because she refused to let anyone in Miami believe she was hiding.
Camille was mid-conversation with a sponsor's wife when Vanessa Stevens crossed the room in a fury of blond hair and camera-ready outrage, a full glass of rosé already tipping toward Camille's chest before anyone could react.
It hit her collar, soaked down the front of her cream silk dress.
The room went silent except for the click of a dozen phones.
"You think you can just take him?" Vanessa's voice carried, pitched for the cameras she clearly knew were there. "Adrian was mine. You had a husband. You had everything, and you still wanted more."
"I didn't take anything," Camille said, quiet and level even as rosé dripped from her chin, because she'd learned how to be watched. "Maybe you should ask yourself why he left."
Adrian arrived before Vanessa could answer, moving through the crowd with the authority of a man who'd spent a career walking onto courts full of people screaming at him, cutting through the room like the crowd simply parted for him out of old habit. He didn't raise his voice.
"Vanessa. We are over. We have been over for eight months. This ends today." He turned, offered Camille his jacket, and led her out past forty phones still filming, past Vanessa's ragged breathing, past a room that would be talking about nothing else by morning.
Miami would have its scandal by sunset. By the time Camille got home, changed out of the ruined silk, and sat down to a dinner she didn't eat, three different gossip accounts had already run the footage, cut a dozen ways, captioned with theories about the Holloway marriage that ranged from unkind to accurate.
Grant texted, a single line demanding she control the narrative before the party, as if narrative were a light switch and she'd simply forgotten to flip it.
Camille didn't answer him either. She was getting good at silence, and better every day at choosing exactly who it was aimed at.
Miami would talk about Vanessa Stevens and a glass of rosé for a week, maybe two, and then it would move on to something else, the way it always did.
She intended for it to be the wrong scandal, for now. The real one was only two nights away, and she was not going to let anyone spend her ammunition early.