Page 145 of Saint Céline
I stared at her.
“There it is, the real you.SelenaMartin.” I whispered.
“No, you don’t get to act like I’m the villain for saying it.” She stepped closer now, and for once, all the softness was gone. “You had everything, Katherine. The house, the parents, the money, the name, the school. You had a future waiting for you before you even knew what a future was.”
“And you had me.”
“I had your leftovers.”
I slapped her.
The sound cracked across the terrace, swallowed almost instantly by the wind. Her face turned with it.
For one second, neither of us moved. Then she looked back at me slowly, rain on her cheeks, eyes bright with something that frightened me because it was not only anger.
“You think I should have been grateful forever,” she said.
“You should have been honest once.”
“You wanted me close enough to need you and small enough to stay beneath you.”
“That is not true.”
“It is.” Her voice broke on the word, then steadied. “You liked me better when I was Selena in the cottage. When I needed your dresses and your homework and your family’s permission to exist. The second people wanted Céline without you standing beside me; you hated me.”
I wanted to deny it. I couldn’t.
The worst truths are the ones you can only fight by becoming uglier.
“So what?” I said. “You became Céline because I let you. You think any of those people would have looked at you twice if they knew what you were?”
Her face went still. There. I had found the wound.
I pressed harder because pain had made me stupid.
“Trailer trash in designer hand-me-downs,” I said. “That’s all you were when you came here. That’s all you are underneath.”
The second I said it, I knew I had gone too far. It was unforgivable.
Céline stared at me with a face I had never seen before. Not hurt. Not anger. But the absence of any emotion at all.
Like something inside her had stepped back and closed a door.
“I loved you,” she said quietly.
The words should have softened me, but they didn’t. Because I loved her too, and look what that had made of us.
“No,” I said. “You used me.”
“And you owned me.”
“I protected you.”
“You collected me.”
“Imadeyou.”
Céline laughed then, soft and devastating.
