Page 199 of Saint Céline
Selena
I walked across campus with my coat buttoned to my throat and the bloody handkerchief locked safely inside Vincent’s apartment, tucked into the drawer beside my bed like a second, quieter heart. Every step felt borrowed. Every building looked both familiar and entirely foreign, as though the university had shifted slightly while I slept and now all its old angles pointed accusingly toward me.
Vincent found me near the cliffs, just beyond the entrance to Westgrave Hall. I stood at the iron railing above the water, watching the ocean hurl itself against the rocks below in dark, violent bursts. Blackwater looked exactly as it always had—grey sky, grey sea, wet stone, old money rotting tastefully beneath ivy. I had once believed this place was beautiful. Maybe it still was. Maybe beautiful things could also be unbearable.
He stopped beside me, not close enough to touch.
“You missed lab,” he said.
“I quit.”
I kept my eyes on the water.
“I’m not going back. Not to the lab. Not to bioscience. Not to your department or Katherine’s proposal or any of it.”
Rain misted softly over my hair and coat—not enough to be called weather, only enough for Blackwater to remind me it still had hands. Vincent remained silent.
“Good,” he finally said.
I turned to him sharply. He looked almost amused.
“You’re supposed to argue.”
“Why would I do that?” He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
“You blackmailed me into that lab,” I said. “You used Katherine’s work to keep me there.”
“Oh, I did do that, didn’t I?”
“And now you’re fine with me walking away?”
“I wanted you close,” he said quietly. “I never wanted you trapped inside her life forever.”
Something in my chest tightened. I hated him for naming the exact thing I had not been brave enough to admit to myself. Katherine’s proposal had stopped feeling like a ladder long ago. It had become a room I had locked myself inside because leaving it meant confessing I had never truly wanted to be there. I had wanted the door. The prestige. Professor Moreau’s attention. Bellamont’s approval. I had wanted everyone to believe Céline Martin had earned her place in a world built to reject girls like Selena. But I had never wanted the work itself.
Katherine had.
And she was dead.
I looked back at the water. “I don’t want to keep surviving inside her mind.”
Vincent did not answer immediately. When he did, his voice was quieter than the rain. “Then don’t.”
I laughed once, softly. “Is it that easy?”
“No.”
At least he did not lie.
I pushed my hands deeper into my coat pockets. My fingers brushed my phone, the edge of my keys, the folded tissue Sophia had pressed into my palm that morning because she said I looked like someone who might need it. “I don’t know what to do now,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken the truth aloud.
Vincent looked out at the sea with me. “You know exactly what you want to do. You simply do not know how to want it without apologizing.”
The words moved through me slowly.
Art.
The thought arrived almost shyly, which felt absurd after everything else inside me had arrived like a blade. Sketchbooks hidden beneath sweaters. Margins filled with faces no one else ever saw. Miss Astoria asleep in impossible positions. My mother’s hands folding sheets. Katherine’s profile drawn with merciless honesty. Every true thing I had ever created had been made in secret, as though beauty were an indulgence girls like me could only steal in the narrow spaces between survival.
