Page 83 of Saint Céline
“No, you don’t.” My voice stayed quiet, which was the only reason it did not shake. “You think because I’m not like your little lab prodigies, I couldn’t have written something good.”
“No,” he said. “I think you couldn’t have written this regardless.”
The cruelty of it landed so precisely that I almost flinched.
“You arrogant son of a bitch.” I spit out, my anger getting the better of me.
“There you are. The real you, I want to see more of it.”
“Don’t test me.”
He ignored that.
“Your previous reports are good when someone has clearly helped you, and careless when they haven’t. Your classroom answers are socially intelligent but rarely technically deep. Your methods section here has patience you do not possess. Your literature review cites work you struggled to discuss last week when I asked you about it directly.”
My mouth went dry.
He had asked about it casually. I remembered. One question near the incubators, while Julian looked for labels and Wendy cleaned a bench. A paper I had supposedly cited. A technique I had supposedly understood.
I had answered around it. I thought I had done it well. Apparently not.
“That proves nothing.”
“No,” he agreed. “Not alone.”
My stomach dropped further.
He opened the file and removed a second sheet. It was not from my proposal. I recognized the handwriting immediately. Katherine’s. Not just because of the words. Because of the slant. The tight controlled pressure. The way she formed certain letters sharply enough to cut into the page.
I forgot how to move.
Professor Moreau watched me take it in.
“Where did you get that?”
He did not answer.
I stepped forward before I could stop myself and grabbed the paper from his hand. It was a photocopy. Just a page of notes, but enough. A draft fragment. The same phrasing. The same structure. Her annotations in the margins, cramped and brilliant and unmistakably hers.
My hands went cold.
Katherine must have submitted something to another professor once. Or left a draft in a shared system. Or maybe Vincent had gone looking after he started suspecting.
It did not matter.
He had it.
He knew.
The paper trembled once in my fingers before I made myself still.
“That’s not what you think it is.”
“Isn’t it?”
“She helped me.”
“I imagine she did.”
