Page 142 of Saint Céline
The door was unlocked. Mira was working at the main house, and Céline was on campus, smiling somewhere under a name I had given her. I stepped inside and stood in the quiet little living room that had once felt like a second home because Céline was in it. The air smelled faintly of laundry detergent, old wood, and the cheap vanilla candles she pretended not to like.
Her bedroom was neat.
Books stacked beside the bed. Clothes arranged by colour. Makeup lined along the dresser. Sketchbooks were hidden poorly beneath sweaters because Céline never truly believed anyone would look where poverty had trained her to hide things.
I opened drawers. I am not proud of that, but pride was not the point anymore.
I searched through papers, notebooks, old receipts, school forms, anything that might prove she was still Selena beneath the careful construction. I found drawings. Dozens of them. The cliffs. Miss Astoria curled in sunlight. Mira’s hands folding towels. Thad’s profile sketched with too much attention. My own face, once, unfinished and faintly unkind.
That one made me pause.
She had drawn me with my head turned slightly away, mouth parted as if I were about to say something corrective. It was a good drawing. Better than good. She had seen me in it more clearly than most people ever had. I hated that.
Then my foot caught the floorboard beneath her bed. The sound was small. A familiar creak.
I looked down.
For one second, I was fifteen again, standing in my room before Switzerland, crying because my passport had vanished and my parents were disappointed in the way they always were when inconvenience interrupted their day. I remembered Selena standing in the doorway with wide, innocent eyes. I remembered her saying she hadn’t seen it. I remembered the shame of being treated like I had misplaced something essential because I was careless, spoiled, irresponsible.
I knelt slowly.
The floorboard lifted with almost no resistance.
Inside, wrapped in an old scarf, was a passport.
My passport.
Expired now. Useless. A small navy booklet that had sat beneath Selena’s bed for years while I blamed myself for losing it. While my parents blamed me. While she watched me cry and said nothing.
I held it in my hands and felt something inside me go very, very quiet.
That was the moment I stopped loving her.
Or maybe that is a lie.
Maybe love does not stop at moments like that. Maybe it only curdles into something so poisonous it can no longer recognize itself.
I left the cottage with the passport in my coat pocket and the proposal open on my phone.
By the time I reached campus, the rain had worsened.
The paths shone under the storm lamps, and students moved quickly between buildings, heads lowered, umbrellas tilting in the wind. I found Céline outside Westgrave Hall, speaking to Wendy Chen beneath the archway. She was wearing the cream coat Mrs. Montgomery bought her after she said winter in Blackwater made her look dead. Her hair was pinned loosely back. She looked pale and beautiful and tired enough that anyone else might have mistaken her for weak and fragile.
I knew better.
“Selena.”
She went still.
Wendy looked between us uncertainly. “Céline?”
“Go,” I said.
Wendy blinked.
Céline turned toward her with a smile too quick to be real. “It’s fine. I’ll see you later.”
Wendy hesitated, then left.
