Page 185 of Saint Céline
The stone was slick.
It required almost nothing—a heel sliding, a hip striking the low ledge, a startled cry that belonged more to surprise than fear. Céline caught Katherine’s wrist before the fall could become final.
The phone clattered across the wet stone. Katherine’s bag spilled near the ledge. Papers fanned out. An old, dark passport. A sketchbook with a softened black cover, already swelling from rain. The book fell open; pages fluttered against the stone. Drawings blurred under water—a cat, hands folding cloth, Katherine’s own face half-finished and rendered with merciless accuracy.
Céline had drawn her well.
Katherine hung suspended above the courtyard. Céline lay flat against the stone, both hands locked around her wrist, rain streaming down her face. She was crying—ugly, genuine tears, her whole body straining with the effort of holding on.
For one suspended moment, I believed she would save her.
That would have been almost disappointing.
Then Katherine looked up, and Céline looked at her face.
And everything altered.
I watched the thought arrive, swift and complete. In a single breath, Céline saw the entire future: Katherine rescued, Katherine speaking, Katherine exposing the stolen proposal, the passport, the false name, the years of careful fraud. Bellamont turning against her. Thad leaving. Sophia and Anya reconsidering their loyalty. Her mother learning enough to look at her differently forever. Céline Martin collapsing back into Selena from the staff cottage.
Then she saw the alternative.
Silence. Flowers. Sympathy. Grief shaped into whatever story the living required.
Céline’s hands tightened once around Katherine’s wrist.
She did not release her immediately. That detail matters. People prefer to believe evil arrives when feeling ceases. They are wrong. The worst choices are made when one feels everything and still chooses survival.
Katherine understood. I saw it bloom across her face.
“No,” she whispered. The word barely carried.
Céline’s mouth moved.
I’m sorry.
Her fingers loosened, and Katherine fell.
For a moment, there was only rain.
Céline remained draped over the ledge, one arm still reaching downward as though some animal part of her had changed its mind too late. Then she made a sound I had never heard from another human being and hope never to hear from her again—something torn raw from the deepest register of grief.
She scrambled backwards, stumbled upright, and looked around wildly.
I stepped deeper into the shadow so she did not see me.
Panic made her careless. She seized her own bag near the door, gathered a few loose papers, then noticed Katherine’s bag by the ledge. For one frozen second, she hesitated. I watched the smaller, messier decision form. She snatched up the sketchbook—recognizing it as hers—clutched it to her chest, and reached for the scattered papers. Her hands shook too violently to collect them all.
Footsteps sounded somewhere below, and Céline ran.
She left the phone. She left the bag. She left far too much.
Careless with the first murder, I would tell her later, though at the time I still wondered whether murder was the accurate word.
I waited until the terrace door slammed behind her.
Then I dropped my cigarette, crushed it beneath my heel, and walked to the ledge.
The phone lay face-down in a thin river of rainwater. I picked it up. The case was pale, cracked at one corner, a Bellamont crest sticker peeling on the back. It had locked itself, naturally, but its value lay elsewhere. I slipped it into my coat pocket.
