Page 102 of Saint Céline
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Two weeks later, Thad asked me out properly. Dinner in town. A car was sent to the estate. Flowers were delivered to the cottage because he thought that was romantic and did not understand what it meant for my mother to receive a bouquet worth more than our weekly groceries.
Katherine found the flowers before I did. She stood in the cottage doorway holding the card between two fingers.
“You’re going?”
I looked at the white roses, then at her.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I can say no.”
“You won’t.”
The hurt had become quieter now. More controlled. More dangerous in its patience.
“I don’t want this to ruin us,” I said.
Katherine looked at me for a long time.
Then she smiled. Soft, brief and completely false.
“It won’t.”
And because I needed to believe her, I did.
That was how Thad Rodriguez became my boyfriend. I did not love him, and Katherine forgave me publicly, but Céline Martin had learned by eighteen that wanting things was easier if you stopped asking who they had belonged to first.
22
Vincent
Thad Rodriguez came to my office the next morning.
His coat was cashmere, the watch old enough to signal inheritance rather than recent purchase, and the shoes carried the soft, polished finish of leather maintained by someone who had never had to maintain it himself. Everything about him was expensive. That was never the issue. The issue was that anger made him obvious. Some men grew more dangerous when wounded. Thad Rodriguez grew younger. He stood outside my office door with rain darkening the shoulders of his coat and humiliation sitting plainly across his face, trying very hard to look like a man in control of a conversation he had not yet begun.
I almost pitied him.
“Professor Moreau,” he said.
I looked up from the lab report I had been reviewing.
“Mr. Rodriguez.”
His jaw tightened at the calmness of my voice. He had probably expected surprise, guilt, perhaps some flicker of recognition that would give him something to use. Unfortunately for him, I had spent most of my life watching men like his father turn discomfort into leverage. Thad had inherited the confidence but not the technique.
“Do you have a minute?”
“No, but I suspect you’re going to take one anyway.”
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. Men like Thad always preferred privacy when they feared losing publicly.
He glanced around my office with poorly concealed irritation. The bookshelves lined with first editions, the antique microscope models, the framed publications from journals that had published my work when I was still in my early twenties, the rain-streaked window overlooking the cliffs. I wondered what he saw. Probably arrogance. Maybe a threat. Maybe simply another man’s room in which Céline had begun to exist without him.
“You need to stay away from her,” he said.
