Page 141 of Saint Céline
At first, I thought there had been a mistake, but not emotionally. I thought about it logically.
Mistakes happened. Files failed to upload. Names disappeared from lists. Administrative systems were built by people, and people were generally unreliable. I refreshed the page twice. Then three times. I checked my email. I checked the application portal. I checked the draft folder where I had saved my own final submission.
Submitted.
Confirmed.
Time-stamped.
I was not there.
Céline was.
For several minutes, I sat perfectly still.
The library moved around me. Students whispered, chairs scraped softly, someone laughed near the windows, rain tapped against the glass with tedious persistence. The world continued in the vulgar way it always did when something irreversible happened privately.
Then I clicked her name.
The proposal title appeared beneath it.
Adaptive Cellular Response Under Chronic Environmental Stress.
My body went cold before my mind accepted what I was seeing.
No.That was the first thought. I needed one second where it might still be impossible.
Then the document preview loaded.
My abstract. My structure. My citations. My phrasing with just enough words changed to make the theft feel intimate rather than lazy. My work. Her name.
Céline Martin.
I do not remember closing the laptop.
I remember walking.
I must have left the library. I must have crossed campus in the rain without an umbrella. I must have passed people who knew me, perhaps even people who said my name. I remember none of them. I remember only the sound of blood in my ears and the strange clarity of understanding that settled over me with each step.
She had taken Thad.
She had taken my friends.
She had taken my clothes, my house, my family’s protection, my invented story, my academic labour, my place in rooms where I should have belonged without needing to charm anyone.
And now she had taken Moreau too. That was what made it all unbearable.
The world kept handing her things after she stole enough of me to become someone it wanted.
I went to the cottage first.
It was not a plan. It was instinct. If Céline had stolen from me, then I would find something of hers to destroy. Something real. Something hidden under the silk and perfume and borrowed labels. I wanted evidence. I wanted dirt. I wanted one ugly, undeniable thing I could hold up to the light and say, there, this is what she really is.
My mother would have called the staff cottage quaint.
I had always hated that word.
It meant small, but charming enough that no one felt guilty.
