Chapter 8 - Camellia's Confession
Two days later, the rain had cleared from Manhattan, replaced by a crisp, brilliant autumn afternoon that turned the leaves in Central Park into a canopy of crimson and burnt gold.
I sat in the corner booth of the Carlyle Hotel’s Gallery restaurant, a quiet, low-lit sanctuary where Wall Street secrets were traditionally traded over pots of lapsang souchong.
Across from me sat Camellia Brooks.
She looked unrecognizable from the glossy, radiant intern who had curled up in my window seat with Luke’s blazer across her lap four days ago. She wore no makeup. Her hair was pulled back in a hasty, messy ponytail. Her oversized gray sweater swallowed her slender frame, and her eyes were swollen and bloodshot.
On the table between us sat her iPhone and an external hard drive.
"Thank you for meeting me, Ms. Bennett," she whispered, her hands gripping a cup of chamomile tea as if it were the only warm object left on earth.
"You have ten minutes, Camellia," I said, my voice neutral, neither hostile nor kind. "My legal team advised me against speaking to you without a court stenographer present."
"I know," she choked out, a fresh tear escaping down her cheek. "I don't blame you. But I... I had to show you this. Before Luke’s lawyers try to make me the fall girl."
She pushed the hard drive across the table toward me.
"What is this?"
"It’s everything," Camellia said, her voice shaking with quiet, desperate urgency. "Every audio memo Luke sent me on WhatsApp. Every screen recording of him accessing your cloud drive from his home office in Tribeca while you were asleep. And... the emails he sent to a headhunter in London two weeks ago."
I narrowed my eyes. "London?"
Camellia nodded frantically. "Luke wasn't planning on staying at the firm, Clover. He was using the Meridian pitch as his audition tape. He had a private interview scheduled with an offshore hedge fund in Mayfair for next month. He told them he was bringing the sovereign risk architecture with him as his personal proprietary asset."
I stared at the drive.
Even now, after everything, the sheer depth of Luke’s treachery managed to uncover a new layer of calculated malice.
He hadn't just intended to steal the thirty-eight-million-dollar deal for his standing at our firm. He had intended to marry me, secure the legal umbrella of our marriage to shield his intellectual property claims, strip the code from my private servers, and then abandon the firm—and me—to take a multi-million-dollar partnership in London before the legal consequences caught up with him.
"And where did you fit into this grand design, Camellia?" I asked, my voice dangerously calm.
Camellia looked down at her lap, her cheeks burning with deep, burning shame.
"He told me he was going to take me with him," she whispered. "He told me that you were cold. That you were an emotionless machine who cared more about algorithms than human beings. He said... he said you were forcing him into a marriage he didn't want because of your family’s social connections, and that he needed someone who understood his vision."
She buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs.
"I was so stupid," she wept. "I was twenty-three, and I thought this brilliant, handsome Managing Director was falling in love with me. I thought I was special. But on the train... when he made you move... I saw the look on his face when you walked off."
She looked up at me, her eyes raw.
"He wasn't in love with me, Ms. Bennett. He was using me to humiliate you so you would feel insecure. He wanted to break your confidence before the pitch so you wouldn't question him taking the lead."
I looked at the girl.
The anger I had felt toward her on the train had completely evaporated. What was left was the cold, sober recognition of a predator’s methodology. Luke had targeted an ambitious, insecure young woman, inflated her ego with poison, and turned her into a weapon against the woman who was actually keeping him afloat.
"Why are you giving this to me instead of the firm's compliance committee?" I asked.
"Because the firm’s committee only cares about protecting the firm," Camellia said, wiping her face with a paper napkin. "They want to bury this. They want to fire Luke quietly, fire me quietly, and pretend the Meridian pitch was just an operational glitch so their stock price doesn't take a hit."
She pushed the drive closer to my hand.
"You built that code, Ms. Bennett. Luke was going to destroy your life and leave you with the wreckage. You deserve to be the one who finishes him."
I looked down at the hard drive for a long moment. Then, slowly, my fingers closed around the cold metal casing.
"Have you retained an independent defense attorney, Camellia?" I asked.
She shook her head miserably. "I can't afford one. My parents took out a second mortgage to pay for my master's degree. If I get disbarred or indicted by the SEC, I’ll never pay it back."
I picked up my phone, scrolled to a contact, and forwarded a digital business card to her number.
"Call Sarah Lin at WilmerHale," I said. "Tell her I sent you. She will represent you in the regulatory hearings. If you cooperate fully with the Department of Justice and hand over every byte of data on that drive, she will ensure you receive full immunity from criminal prosecution."
Camellia stared at her phone, then looked up at me with wide, disbelieving eyes. "You're... you're helping me? After what I did?"
"I'm not helping you, Camellia," I said, sliding out of the booth and standing tall. "I'm securing my star witness."
I slipped the hard drive into my trench coat pocket.
May you like
"Now go home, pack your bags, and stay away from Luke Hayes. When this storm breaks tomorrow morning, you don't want to be anywhere near the lightning."
***
