Page 175 of Saint Céline
But Vincent knew.
He had been there. He had collected what she dropped and kept it as evidence. He had always known.
Every moment with him rearranged itself in my head. His first look at me after the funeral. His interest. His questions. The proposal file. The way he said Katherine’s name. The way he looked at me when I told him he did not know the worst thing I was capable of. He had been watching me survive a secret he already held in his hand.
I put the phone back into the case with shaking fingers. Then I stopped.
No.
If I put it back, nothing would change. If I confronted him, he could lie. If I ran, he could expose me. If I stayed, he owned the truth and would hold it over me. No door led out cleanly. There had not been one on the terrace either.
That was the thing about survival. People liked to imagine it arrived as a noble instinct, but mine never had. Mine arrived cold. Practical. Quiet. It stepped into a room, assessed the threat, and asked what could be sacrificed. Katherine. Thad. My name. My body. My shame. Now Vincent.
I stood. My hands had stopped shaking.
I returned the phone and the photocopy exactly as I found them. The case went back beneath the tie. The drawer closed to the same thin shadow, not fully shut.
Then I left his room.
In the hallway, Miss Astoria sat waiting for me.
“What?” I whispered.
She blinked.
I went into my room and locked the door. I stood in the center of the room, listening to the faint sounds of a normal morning.
I opened the bedside drawer. The prescription bottle sat beside my lipstick and a hair clip, small and ordinary and suddenly transformed by usefulness.
My fingers closed around it. The pills rattled softly. A delicate little sound. Not enough to kill a man by itself, probably. But enough to make a beginning. Enough to make him weak. Enough to make a deliberate choice possible.
I sat on the edge of the bed with the bottle in my palm and thought of dinner. Not last night’s leftovers. Another dinner. One I prepared. One where I smiled properly and acted softer than I felt. One where Vincent looked at me and believed, because he wanted to, that the fear had turned into surrender.
I knew, distantly, that this should have horrified me, but it did not.
What horrified me was how calm I felt.
On the terrace, I had let Katherine fall because she was going to destroy the life I had built. Vincent could do worse. He could destroy the person I had become afterwards. He had Katherine’s phone. He had the proposal. He had my father. He had me in his apartment, behind his locks, breathing his air, sleeping in a room he had prepared before I agreed to enter it.
And I had a small bottle in my hand. A kitchen. A man arrogant enough to believe being loved by a monster meant he was safe from her.
Miss Astoria scratched softly at the door.
I looked toward it.
“I know, I love him too, but it needs to be done,” I whispered.
The sound of my own voice steadied me.
I placed the bottle into the inner pocket of my bag and zipped it closed.
Then I unlocked the door and walked back into the living room.
Vincent was still in the study, and the apartment looked beautiful in the grey morning light. Too beautiful. A prettier cage.
I went to the kitchen and picked up my coffee. It had gone cold, but I drank it anyway.
Then I opened my phone and searched for dinner recipes with hands that did not shake at all.
