Page 55 of Saint Céline
She said it gently, almost conversationally, as though handing off the practical, messy parts of caring for Miss Astoria was the most natural thing in the world.
Of course it was. That had been my mother’s job, and now it was mine again. Mrs. Montgomery’s affection stayed warm on the surface, but the line beneath it remained clear: some work belonged to people like me.
I focused on the cat because it was easier than looking anywhere else. Miss Astoria stretched across my lap more fully now, finally calming, her purring softer and steadier beneath my hands. She tucked her face more firmly against my stomach and closed her eyes with a heavy sigh, as though she had been holding her breath for weeks.
Mrs. Montgomery sat slowly in Katherine’s desk chair across the room. “She keeps scratching at the guest house door too, sometimes,” she continued softly. “Mira started leaving treats outside because she felt bad.”
“That sounds like my mother.” I smiled faintly despite myself.
Silence settled softly after that. Rain tapped against Katherine’s windows. The room remained exactly as she left it. Biology textbooks piled beside fashion magazines. A half-burned candle near the vanity. One of her cardigans draped carelessly over the desk chair as though she might walk back in looking for it any minute. Grief was strange.
Mrs. Montgomery folded her hands tightly together in her lap. “She fought with me the week before…” Her voice broke. I looked up immediately. “She said I was trying to control her life.” Mrs. Montgomery stared at the carpet. “I told her she was being dramatic.”
The guilt in her voice moved through the room like another living thing. “You didn’t know,” I said quietly. No one ever did.
Mrs. Montgomery laughed weakly through tears. “Parents always say that after, don’t they?”
I said nothing. Because there was no safe response. Miss Astoria stirred in her sleep and tucked her face more firmly against my stomach. Outside, thunder rolled low across Blackwater. Mrs. Montgomery wiped quietly beneath her eyes. Then, after a long silence, she asked softly, “Do you remember the summer you and Katherine tried building that greenhouse behind the guest house?”
I closed my eyes briefly. Of course, I remembered. Katherine had spent three weeks researching soil acidity while I carried bags of mulch in ninety-degree heat because she kept insisting we were “creating a sustainable ecosystem.”
“It collapsed in two days,” I said.
Mrs. Montgomery laughed softly. “Katherine blamed the wind.”
“She measured the angle of sunlight for a week and forgot that Maine has terrible weather.”
“That sounds like her.”
For one suspended moment, she was alive again. Not physically. But in the rhythm of shared memory. Mrs. Montgomery stood slowly from the desk chair. “You should take some things from your room too,” she said gently.
My chest tightened unexpectedly.
“I haven’t touched anything,” she added. “I thought maybe… someday…”
She never finished the sentence. She didn’t have to. Someday you might come back. The tragedy was that part of me still wanted to hear it. Unlike Katherine, I had chosen to live on campus rather than this house when I got accepted into university, desperate to leave Selena behind. But a part of me still longed for her anyway, the girl who used to stand at the cottage window and dream of belonging here.
I looked down at Miss Astoria sleeping heavily across my legs now, utterly exhausted from whatever grief animals experienced when people disappeared without explanation. “I’ll take good care of her,” I said quietly.
Mrs. Montgomery looked at me then with such raw affection that I almost couldn’t breathe. “I know you will, sweetheart.”
Miss Astoria purred once more in her sleep, warm and steady against me. Outside, the rain kept falling, steady and cold, while inside Katherine’s room, the past refused to let go. I stayed on the edge of the bed a little longer than I meant to, letting the cat’s weight anchor me while the house breathed quietly around us both.
Miss Astoria refused to let me put her down. The moment I stood from Katherine’s bed with the cat in my arms, she hooked both front paws deep into my sweater and clung harder, her blue eyes wide with the kind of desperate attachment that only animals and very small children displayed without any shame. Her whole body trembled against me, small and warm andinsistent, as though she had decided that if I moved even one step away she would simply refuse to exist without me there. Mrs. Montgomery noticed immediately, her tired eyes softening at the edges in a way that made the lines around them look deeper than they had a month ago.
“She thinks you’re leaving again,” she said quietly, the words settling heavily into my chest like something I had been trying not to name.
“I’m not,” I murmured, more to the cat than to anyone else, my voice low and steady even though my throat felt tight. Miss Astoria responded by climbing higher against my shoulder until her face pressed into the curve of my neck, her whiskers tickling my skin, and her purring vibrating straight through my collarbone.
I looked toward Katherine’s dresser while Mrs. Montgomery searched the closet for the old pale pink cat carrier, the one Katherine had insisted on buying because it matched the satin lining from the day Miss Astoria first arrived. Everything in the room remained painfully untouched.
A framed photograph from sophomore year still sat beside the mirror, Katherine in her Bellamont uniform standing beside me at the winter formal, both of us smiling too brightly beneath strings of white lights. She looked elegant even at sixteen, her dark blonde hair pinned neatly back, while I leaned into her side, wearing the dress Mrs. Montgomery had bought because Katherine insisted I couldn’t attend “looking economically distressed.”
At the time, I had laughed so hard that champagne nearly came out of my nose, the sound loud and real in a way that felt foreign now. The memory hurt strangely, not because it had been cruel but because it had been affectionate. That was always the problem with Katherine. She loved me genuinely enoughto confuse the damage, to hand me gifts wrapped in her own privilege without ever seeing the strings attached.
Mrs. Montgomery returned carrying the carrier, and Miss Astoria immediately made a low noise of betrayal deep in her throat.
“Oh, stop it,” I whispered, crouching beside the carrier and trying to ease her inside. The cat resisted with horrifying strength for something that barely weighed eight pounds, digging her claws into my sweater and flattening her ears.
