Page 201 of Saint Céline
“No, I don’t.”
“You have sketchbooks full of work you refuse to treat seriously because taking yourself seriously would make failure possible.”
I stared at him. “You are unbearable. I hate when you’re right.”
“No,” he said softly. “You hate that I know you better than you know yourself.”
The sea struck the rocks below again, white foam shattering against black stone. For a moment I let myself imagine it—not Bellamont, not Blackwater, not the terrace or Katherine’s rain or Daniel’s voice on the phone.
France. A studio filled with light. My mother in a kitchen that finally belonged to her. Miss Astoria sleeping in a sunlit window, pretending she had personally conquered Europe. Sophia and Anya visiting, complaining about the furniture. Vincent somewhere nearby, not owning me, not saving me, simplythere.
The want was so sharp it frightened me.
“What about Katherine?” I asked.
Vincent’s expression changed—not because he had forgotten her, but because neither of us ever would.
“What about her?”
“I don’t get to simply leave.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t. You will carry her. You already do. I’ll keep working on her proposal too.”
My throat tightened. “I don’t know how to make that enough.”
“It won’t be.”
I closed my eyes. The mist settled on my lashes. That was the closest thing to absolution either of us deserved—not forgiveness, not peace, not some clean moral ending where Katherine’s ghost stepped aside because I had suffered enough. It would never be enough. I would carry her anyway.
When I opened my eyes, Vincent was still watching me.
“What name would you use in France?” he asked.
I understood without needing an explanation. For years, names had been rooms I entered depending on who waited inside them. Selena was poverty and fear and my mother’s tired hands, Daniel’s voice, the staff cottage, the girl who wanted too much and knew better than to ask. Céline was silk and lies and Bellamont, Thad’s hand on my waist, Katherine’s corrections, everyone’s admiration, Katherine’s death. Both were mine.
I looked out at Blackwater one last time. “Selena,” I said.
Vincent’s face softened in that terrible, almost reverent way that made me want to hurt him and touch him at the same time.
“Selena,” he repeated.
This time I did not flinch.
* * *
My mother did not cry when I told her. That was how I knew she had been expecting something to break eventually. She sat across from me in the cottage kitchen, hands folded around a cup of tea she had not touched. The little room looked exactly as it always had—narrow, warm, painfully clean. Outside the window, the Montgomery estate stretched green and silver beneath the rain, the main house half-hidden by mist. I had spent years staring at that house as though wanting hard enough could turn it into destiny. Now it looked only like a place where my mother had been tired for too long.
“France,” she said.
“Yes.”
“With Professor Moreau.”
I looked down at my hands. “Vincent.”
“And this is what you want?”
I had lied to her thousands of times—small, pretty, necessary lies about where clothes came from, where I had been, what Iwanted, why I was tired, why Katherine’s death had shattered me in ways grief alone could never explain. This time I did not want to lie.
