17. Tess #2
He held his phone toward her. A wall of alerts covered the screen, but the text was too small to read from where she stood. She took one step around the chair, then stopped herself.
“Put it down and explain.”
Sully lowered the phone. “You sure?”
Her temper sparked. “You burst into my office, threw your keys at my payroll, knocked half my invoices onto the floor, and turned on a television I haven’t touched since football season started. Yes, Sully. Explain.”
His mouth pulled tight.
For the first time since she had met him, he seemed short on words.
The television threw shifting light across the desk. A stage, suits, and camera glare flashed across the screen, but Tess forced her attention back to Sully before her mind could fill in the rest.
Miami.
Her mind supplied the location before she could stop it.
The Honors broadcast.
Camden was there.
Of course he was there.
He had climbed into the SUV that morning and left Heron Point behind.
Marcus had opened the door, and Camden had gotten inside.
Whatever Sully had found on his phone could only be another headline, another campaign stunt, another reminder that the boatyard had been a temporary stop before the league reclaimed its quarterback.
Tess reached for the fallen invoice nearest her shoe.
Sully held up a hand.
“Leave it.”
She stopped, hesitating before she touched the paper.
“Sully—”
“Leave the damn receipt.”
She straightened.
The screen changed again behind him. A roar swelled from the television, then dropped under a commentator’s strained voice.
Tess folded her arms. “If this is some red-carpet clip of him and Chloe, turn it off.”
“It isn’t.”
“I’m not interested in watching him sell another campaign.”
“He isn’t selling anything.”
Tess let her arms fall.
For a moment, neither of them moved. The air conditioner rattled beneath the window, fighting the damp air Sully had let inside. One receipt shifted near the doorway when the unit kicked on.
Tess stared at him.
“What did he do?”
Sully looked toward the television, then back at her.
“It’s Ford.”
She pressed a fist against her thigh.
“What about him?”
Sully raised the remote toward the screen.
“That idiot quarterback is on national television right now, and it looks like he’s about to go completely off script.”
Tess shoved backward from the desk, and the chair tipped over behind her with a crack that cut through the television noise. She left it on the floor. She took two steps into the wash of the screen while Sully raised the remote.
“Turn it up.”
“It’s already there.”
On the screen, Camden stood at the center podium beneath a bank of stage lights.
Chloe reached toward the microphone with her practiced smile fixed for the cameras, but Camden stepped into her path and took the space himself.
The presenter stood beside an untouched trophy, his expression gone blank as the arena noise broke into confused pockets.
A commentator’s voice climbed over the crowd.
“We appear to have an unscheduled deviation at the podium. Control room, prepare sponsor graphics—”
Tess braced both hands against the desk.
This was not a launch stunt.
Camden stared into the main camera, ignoring Chloe entirely.
“This chemistry everybody keeps selling between Chloe and me is a billion-dollar fraud. I have a wife.”
The office disappeared beneath the words.
Tess kept her eyes on the screen. Chloe grabbed at the back of his jacket, but he stayed at the microphone.
“Tess has been my wife for three years. Loyal to me while I let the rest of the world pretend she didn’t exist.”
Sully lowered the remote.
Tess gripped the edge of the desk. “He’s saying it on air.”
“Yeah.”
Camden was supposed to walk those lights with Chloe. Accept the trophy. Smile for the executives. Give Marcus the image he had demanded at Heron Point.
Instead, the trophy still sat in someone else’s hands.
“They don’t get to turn my wife into another campaign asset.”
Tess searched the screen for the trap.
There had to be one.
A campaign pivot. A redemption angle. Some new version of the same machine that turned private damage into profitable footage.
But Camden gave them nothing they could use to find her. No marina. No road. No address. He claimed his wife without handing the cameras a map.
The crowd had gone quiet.
Then he leaned closer to the microphone.
“I am retiring from professional football, effective tonight. My roster spot is open. The endorsements can go with it.”
Tess stared at him.
The words refused to arrange themselves into anything sensible.
That morning, Marcus had opened the SUV door and Camden had climbed inside. She had watched the convoy leave and told herself she finally understood the limit of his devotion.
Yet there he stood in Miami, throwing away the one thing she had believed he would protect before everything else.
“He isn’t trying to save the campaign,” she said.
Sully’s gaze remained on the television. “No. He’s cutting himself loose from it.”
Onscreen, Chloe reached for him again. Camden stepped away from her and turned back toward the camera.
“I’m standing with my family now.”
Tess eased her grip on the desk.
The chair was still on its side. Papers still covered the floor. Her spreadsheet waited behind her, a cursor blinking in an empty payroll cell.
None of it pulled her attention away.
“The luxury suites,” she said. “I thought he went straight back to them.”
Sully looked at her, then toward the television.
“He went back to burn the place down.”
Tess turned toward the screen again.
Sully lifted one hand.
“Keep listening.”
The stage vanished.
A flat holding graphic filled the screen, blue bands and sponsor text replacing Camden at the podium. Tess waited for the sound to disappear with the picture.
It didn’t.
Voices carried through the speakers from somewhere beyond the stage, stripped of the polished cadence that had ruled the broadcast minutes earlier.
Tess released the desk.
“Why can we still hear them?”
Sully lowered the remote. “Feed’s still open.”
She crossed the office, reached the wall beside the overturned chair, and turned back. Papers lay across the floor where Sully had knocked them loose. Tess stepped around one without bending for it.
Camden’s voice came through first.
“The footwear CEO needs someone to blame by morning. My retirement is obvious. But the campaign didn’t collapse tonight. It started bleeding the second those rehab photos turned the partnership into a circus.”
Chloe answered before the last word had faded.
“You begged me to lean into it. You told me the engagement numbers were flat unless people thought we were sleeping together.”
Tess stopped near the desk.
The lap photo.
That rehab-room picture had been the first crack. Chloe between his knees. Camden smiling into the camera while Tess sat in a clinic parking lot with their baby’s first sonogram tucked inside her purse.
The speakers distorted as voices overlapped.
“You sent photographers to O’Malley’s.”
Tess went entirely still.
O’Malley’s.
Not some random restaurant Marcus had selected for a sponsor dinner. Not a place the paparazzi happened to find.
Photographers had been sent there.
Sully glanced at her. Tess pressed her hand over her mouth and stared at the holding graphic.
Marcus’s voice pushed through the speakers.
“Because a secret wife turns into a scandal. Scandals turn into questions. Questions destroy positioning.”
Her hand dropped.
The office seemed smaller with every word coming through that cheap television.
The marriage.
Marcus had planned it.
Before Camden had ever sat in that booth, his father had already decided the marriage was a threat to the campaign.
“You were sitting on the biggest endorsement window of your career, and she was about to walk into it and ruin the illusion.”
Tess looked down at the scattered receipts. The anniversary dinner returned in pieces she had spent months trying not to touch: the cold steak, the voicemail, the phone rattling across the counter, Chloe’s mouth against Camden’s cheek beneath O’Malley’s neon sign.
That night had not simply gone wrong.
Someone had built it.
Marcus’s voice came through again.
“I bought out O’Malley’s on your anniversary because I needed her gone.”
Tess stared at the television.
Sully said nothing.
The words needed no help.
Marcus had bought the room. Marcus had brought the cameras. Marcus had chosen their anniversary and the one place that belonged to her and Camden before the league, before the endorsements, before anybody knew his name.
But Camden had still gone.
He had still lied to her about film review. He had still sat in that booth and let Chloe touch him. Marcus had built the trap, but Camden had walked straight into it.
That truth remained.
So did the one unfolding through the speakers now.
Camden had gone back to Miami knowing exactly who he was walking toward. He had stepped onto the broadcast, destroyed the showmance, abandoned his career, and somehow kept the microphone live long enough for Marcus to confess to the thing that had driven Tess down I-95.
“This wasn’t an accident,” she said.
“No,” Sully replied.
“He got them talking.”