Page 197 of Saint Céline
“That is not the same thing.”
“It was to them.”
I pressed both hands against the counter’s edge. Katherine’s last words to her mother had been Vincent’s. Not Katherine’s. Not even mine. His. Somehow, that felt worse than the handkerchief.
“You had no right.”
“No.”
“She deserved…”
I stopped. I no longer knew what Katherine deserved. Justice? Truth? A life? I had taken one of those. Vincent had taken the other.
“She deserved to be understood,” I said finally.
Vincent watched me.
“Yes, perhaps.”
“And you made her into a lonely, dead girl…”
He shrugged.
“And what about the police?” I asked.
“Money. Pressure. Institutional preference.” He said it without pride. “No one wanted a Montgomery death investigated as anything other than a tragedy. They wanted a note. They had one. They wanted witnesses to grief. They had you. They wanted a tidy scene and a motive. I provided both.”
I swallowed.
“And Wendy? I always wondered why she never told anybody I was with Katherine at the time she died.”
His expression changed slightly.
“I gave her what she wanted.”
“A place in your lab.”
“Yes. Read the acceptance email again. She was never selected. I added her name in later in exchange for silence.”
I laughed once. It sounded hollow. “People really are evil, huh? She betrayed Katherine for some prestige.”
I thought of Wendy watching me in the lab with quiet concern. Wendy whisperingare you okay.Wendy’s pale face in the courtyard when Daniel called me Selena. How many lives had been quietly rearranged around my survival without me knowing? How much of my life had Vincent altered before I even realized he was inside it?
“You have been protecting me since that night,” I said.
“Yes, my love. Since then and forever.”
It was absurd. Sick, maybe. But I felt too much for him to see it.
Katherine had made me into Céline because she needed me close enough to need her. Thad had wanted Céline because she looked right beside him. Sophia and Anya loved me, but even their love belonged partly to the version I had built well enough to deserve them.
Vincent had seen the worst of me first. Not after the charm. Not after the grief. He had seen me choose myself over Katherine’s life, and instead of turning away, he had stepped into the rain and made the choice final.
He had not loved the mask. He had loved the broken parts of me.
I did not know what that made me. I did not know what that meant for us. But it made something in me feel seen so completely that the feeling was almost unbearable.
I walked to the bedside drawer and took out the box with the handkerchief. Vincent watched me. I held it against my chest—not like a sentimental thing, but like a weapon. Like a vow.
