Page 138 of Saint Céline
And yet somehow, somewhere along the way, I had become the side character in a story about my housekeeper’s daughter.
Everyone loved Céline.
They loved the dresses I gave her, the accent I invented, the confidence I helped polish, the little social tricks I watched her perfect until they became instinct. They loved her mystery because I had built the lie vague enough to survive curiosity. They loved her charm because I had given her the room to practice it. They loved her softness, her wit, her perfectly timed laughter, the way she made people feel chosen when all she was really doing was reading their weaknesses faster than they could hide them.
I knew that about her.
I knew everything about her.
That should have made me powerful.
Instead, it made me irrelevant.
By the time we were at Bellamont University, everyone had accepted the shape of us. Céline was the beautiful one, the effortless one, the one people invited first. I was the brilliant cousin who came with her, the strange one, the difficult one, the girl who corrected people too often and never knew how to soften a sentence before it cut someone.
Sophia and Anya were supposed to be different.
I thought they would see it.
Sophia had the kind of poise that usually came with discernment. Anya had enough suspicion in her to distrust anything too pretty. I thought if I told them the truth, they would understand what Céline had done. How deeply the deception went. How much of her was borrowed. How much of me she had consumed and worn beautifully enough that everyone applauded the finished product.
Instead, they looked at me like I was cruel.
They chose her.
Everyone always did.
After that night at the Harbour Club, I stopped pretending not to resent them.
Sophia with her calm little judgments and her voice that never rose because girls like her could afford quiet disapproval. Anya, with her theatrical loyalty, as if protecting Céline from consequence, made her noble instead of stupid. They thought I betrayed Céline by telling the truth. They never asked what it was like to watch someone lie for years and be loved more for every lie.
They never asked what it was like to be useful until you became irrelevant.
Céline noticed something had changed, of course. She asked questions sometimes, but not the right ones. She was very good at sensing tension and very bad at following it when the truth might cost her something.
That was Céline’s true gift.
Not beauty.
Not charm.
Self-preservation.
She could look at a room and know exactly what to do to survive it. But when survival required ignorance, she could become ignorant beautifully.
I still helped her.
That was the sickest part.
Even after Thad. Even after Sophia and Anya. Even after she kept drifting farther away from me and calling it growth, I still corrected her notes. I still rewrote her clumsy paragraphs. I still explained cellular mechanisms while she stared at diagrams with the exhausted confusion of someone who had chosen a future by how secure it looked from the outside.
She should have studied art.
I told her that once.
She laughed like I had said something childish.
“Poor girls don’t become artists, Katherine.”
