Page 189 of Saint Céline
“No.” I dropped my hand. “Say it.”
His eyes darkened. For the first time, I thought he might refuse me, not out of cruelty but because the words would strip the act of whatever elegance he had wrapped around it.
“I covered her mouth and nose with my handkerchief,” he said.
Silence swallowed the room whole.
My mind rejected the image at first. Then built it anyway: white linen, cold rain, Katherine’s wide eyes, Vincent’s hand perfectly steady while I was somewhere above or inside or already running, already saved by the very thing I had done.
I stepped back from him. The movement was pure instinct, and he let me.
That made the silence worse. He did not chase. He did not reach for me. He did not try to fold himself into something forgivable. He simply stood there with his shirt open, hair still mussed from my hands, face calm and utterly ruined by truth.
“Did you keep it? I need proof,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Of course you did.”
The admission should have disgusted me. It did. But disgust was no longer clean between us. Nothing was.
“Show me.”
“What?”
“I said show me.”
“Céline.”
“No.” My voice steadied. “You do not get to hand me this and then hide the evidence like some private treasure. Show me.”
He watched me for a while. Then he walked past me through the destroyed dining room toward his bedroom. I followed. My body still ached. My knees felt unsteady. There was sauce smeared across the floor and broken glass near the chair, but I stepped around it all with careful dignity.
Vincent opened the drawer beside his bed—the same drawer. Katherine’s phone lay there in its leather case. The sight of it sent the old coldness sliding through me again.
Beneath a folded black cloth rested a small flat box.
He took it out and offered it to me.
I did not accept it immediately. My fingers hovered over the lid. Then I opened it.
The handkerchief lay folded inside. White once. Not white now. Rain, time and Katherine’s blood had turned the stains a rusted brown that spread through the fabric in uneven shadows.His initials were stitched in one corner—V.M.—small, elegant, obscene.
For a second, I could not breathe.
It was ridiculous how ordinary it looked. Katherine’s last breath had ended against something that might have been tucked into a dinner jacket.
My hand shook when I touched it. The fabric was impossibly soft. That small, ordinary detail nearly made me sick.
I looked up at him.
“You kept this beside your bed?”
“Yes.”
“Like a souvenir.”
“A memento.”
