Page 113 of Saint Céline
I nearly threw the phone into the stacks. Instead, I typed.
Céline :What is the most important question?
The dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then finally:
Vincent:Why did Katherine choose that hypothesis?
I looked back at the proposal. Cells do not merely endure stress; under repeated pressure, they learn to organize survival around it. The sentence sat there, quiet and devastating. For the first time, I wondered whether Katherine had been writing only about cells. My throat tightened. Another message came.
Vincent:Ask that, and you might understand the work.
I hated him. I hated that he was right. I closed the laptop slowly and sat in the darkening library with the rain sliding down the windows, Katherine’s sentence glowing faintly on the screen until it vanished. Then I opened the document again and typed one question at the top.
Why did Katherine write this?
I had no answer for Katherine’s state of mind.
I sat there a little longer, fingers tracing the edge of the laptop, thinking about the sketchbook I used to keep hidden under my bed back in the cottage. Pages filled with quick drawings of the cliffs, of Miss Astoria sleeping in sunbeams, of my mother’s hands folding laundry. Poor girls like me could not afford to be artists. We needed something practical.
Something that would open doors instead of closing them. Biology had seemed safe then. Stable. The kind of future that would make my mother stop worrying about rent and groceries and whether the next gust of wind would blow everything away.
Now it felt like the heaviest cage I had ever stepped into willingly.
I packed my things and walked back through the rain toward the dorm, Katherine’s words still echoing in my head and the taste of Vincent’s blood still faint on my tongue.
24
Vincent
I had read her question document three times before I finally reached my apartment from work.
The pages were messy and defensive, full of gaps she should have been ashamed to show anyone. She had written down basic terms beside question marks, copied phrases from Katherine’s proposal into the margins, and made small notes to herself in language so blunt it made me smile.
Look this up properly. Ask what pathway actually means here. Don’t ask him this, he’ll be smug.
That last one had been underlined twice.
The rain followed me from Westgrave to the garage and then into the elevator, clinging to my coat and darkening the cuffs of my sleeves. Blackwater had a talent for making weather feel deeply depressing. I always hated the perpetual rain; it was rare to get a single sunny day.
My apartment sat on the top floor of an old converted building near the cliffs, close enough to Bellamont that I could see the highest towers from the east-facing windows when the weather was clear. It had been built for some shipping family before shipping families became donors and donors became plaques on university walls. Now the building housed professors, visiting fellows, and the occasional divorced financier who wanted ocean views without enduring conversation with actual neighbours.
I had chosen it because it was quiet; that had once been enough.
The apartment opened into a long living room with dark wood floors, tall windows, and shelves built into the walls from floor to ceiling. The furniture was expensive but not decorative, selected for usefulness, proportion, and the absence of unnecessary softness. A black leather sofa faced the fireplace. A long table near the window held stacks of papers, two open books, and the laptop where Céline’s document still glowed faintly in the shared folder.
It should have felt peaceful. Instead, when I removed my coat and hung it beside the door, the apartment felt wrong. Nothing had been moved or touched or warmed. No ridiculous white cat screamed in the hallway. No damp coat lay over the back of a chair because its owner had been too angry to hang it properly. No expensive perfume lingered beneath the colder scent of rain. No girl stood in the middle of the room pretending she had not come because she wanted to, eyes sharp with fury and mouth still remembering mine.
The apartment was exactly as I had left it. And for the first time in years, that irritated me.
I loosened my tie and walked to the windows. Beyond the glass, Blackwater disappeared into rain and darkness; the harbour lights blurred below, Bellamont’s silhouette barelyvisible through the storm. Somewhere on campus, Céline was probably walking back to her dorm with her laptop pressed against her side, Katherine’s work lodged somewhere under her ribs where it would not let her rest.
Why did Katherine write this?
A better question than she knew.
I had expected shame to make her defensive. It had.
I had expected humiliation to sharpen her. It did.
