Chapter Nine: The Woman Who Decided

Three months later, Camille asked for a meeting.

Isabella agreed. They sat in a coffee shop on Wells Street. Camille had lost weight. The wrong kind. She was not wearing makeup.

“Thanks for coming,” Camille said.

“I didn’t know if you would.”

“I didn’t know either.”

Camille talked. She admitted she had known about Angela’s timeline. She admitted she had let Daniel hurt Isabella because she wanted him at the end. She apologized.

Isabella listened.

When Camille was done, Isabella leaned forward.

“You took my life, Camille. You and Daniel and Angela. You took it, and you held it underwater until it drowned. And for a long time, I believed that was the end. I believed I had been given one life, and you had ended it.”

“But then—for reasons that have nothing to do with you and everything to do with me standing on a sidewalk on the worst night of my life and deciding to do something about it—I got my life back.”

“It is not the life I would have built. It is strange. It has things in it I do not understand yet. But it is mine. And it is better than the life I was going to have with Daniel.”

“I am more of a person now than I was at my engagement party. And I will tell you the worst possible thing I could say to you as someone who used to love you: I should thank you. But I’m not going to. You don’t get to be a character in my redemption story. You do not get to be the reason I became stronger.”

“But if I were being completely honest—I would say that the thing you did to me broke my life open and made me find out what was inside of it. And what was inside was bigger than what I was building with him.”

“That is true. I am telling you that because you asked for the truth. And I am the person now who can tell you that without shaking.”

Camille was crying.

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me.”

“I won’t.”

Isabella stood up. She did not hug her. She did not look back.

She walked out into the cold, crossed the street, and got into the car where Matteo was waiting.

She looked through the window at Camille sitting alone at a corner table, crying into her hands.

“Home,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”