Chapter 21
Selena (Past)
Céline Martin had become easier to believe than Selena ever was by graduation.
She had better clothes, better posture, better manners, and a better answer for almost every question.
She knew how to accept compliments without looking hungry for them.
She knew how to laugh softly when boys tried too hard.
She knew how to look surprised when people wanted her somewhere, even when she had spent years learning exactly how to become the sort of girl people invited.
Selena still existed, of course. She was there in the staff cottage, barefoot in the kitchen, while my mother carefully ironed my expensive silk graduation dress.
She was there in the way I checked price tags before remembering I no longer had to, because almost everything in my wardrobe had once belonged to Katherine.
She was there in the relief I felt every time a sweater had a brand label visible enough to prove it was real.
Katherine had told me many times that actual rich people did not wear obvious logos. “Visible labels are for people who want strangers to know they spent money,” she said, lying across my bed while I tried on a Gucci cardigan she had decided she hated. “It’s embarrassing.”
I looked at myself in the mirror and adjusted the sleeve so the small embroidered designer mark showed at my wrist. “Maybe I want strangers to know.”
“Why?” She frowned.
Because otherwise they might forget. Because without proof, someone might look too closely and see the girl underneath. Because old money could afford invisibility, but girls like me needed receipts.
I did not say any of that.
I only shrugged and told her the cardigan looked plain without it.
My closet was almost entirely Katherine’s castoffs.
Dresses she had worn twice and abandoned because the neckline annoyed her.
Blouses she said made her look too fat. Coats that still smelled faintly like her perfume when I first brought them back to the cottage.
Shoes that pinched her feet but fit mine perfectly.
My mother knew. She never said the clothes were not mine, but sometimes when she folded them after laundry, her hands slowed over the fabric. I could feel the silence in those moments, the careful grief of a mother watching her daughter become beautiful inside someone else’s discarded life.
The morning of graduation, she zipped me into a pale green dress Katherine had given me the week before.
The fabric skimmed my waist and fell cleanly around my legs.
It was simple and elegant. I had paired it with a thin gold belt that carried a small logo on the buckle, just visible enough to calm something anxious inside me.
My mother noticed it immediately. She said nothing at first. She only smoothed the skirt with both hands, then stepped back and looked at me.
“You look beautiful,” she said.
I smiled at her through the mirror. “You always say that.”
“Because it is always true.”
Her voice was warm, but her eyes were wet. I turned around before the look could settle too deeply inside me. “Don’t cry. You’ll make me cry, and then Katherine will accuse me of ruining the aesthetic.”
My mother laughed softly and reached up to fix one strand of my hair. “She is proud of you too, you know.”
“Katherine?”
“No.” Her fingers stilled briefly near my temple. “Me.”
Something in my chest tightened. “I know.”
She looked like she wanted to say more. Maybe that she was proud of the real Selena and not this faux version she now sees.
Maybe that she missed the girl who used to wear thrift-store jeans and draw in the margins of grocery receipts.
Maybe that she understood why I had needed to become someone else but still wished the world had not made that necessary. Instead, she kissed my forehead.
“Come. We should not be late.”
* * *
Bellamont Academy’s graduation took place on the east lawn beneath white tents that looked too delicate for the wind coming off the water.
Fortunately, it was a rare sunny day. Parents filled rows of chairs in linen suits and summer dresses, their faces shaded by sunglasses and expensive hats.
The stage had been arranged in front of the old stone building with the Bellamont crest hanging behind the podium, and everything smelled like fresh flowers, damp grass, and coastal air.
Katherine sat beside me in her white graduation dress, hair pinned neatly back, looking bored enough to suggest she was above ceremony but nervous enough that her fingers kept worrying the edge of her program.
“You’re going to crease that,” I whispered.
She looked at me sideways, and for a moment her expression softened. “We did it, Céline. We made it.”
I looked out over the lawn and found my mother standing near the back with some of the staff, hands clasped tightly in front of her, smiling at me like she had survived something too.
Mrs. Montgomery sat in the front row beside Mr. Montgomery, already dabbing lightly beneath her eyes, though Katherine had not even crossed the stage yet.
Behind them, families murmured and cameras flashed, and the entire world seemed arranged around the idea that we had become exactly who we were supposed to be.
“We did,” I said.
Katherine smiled, small and private.
When they called my name, they used Céline Martin.
No one hesitated. No one looked confused, except my mom, who seemed to brush it off as a mistake.
No one remembered that the name had once been an invention whispered over biology notes and borrowed clothes.
The applause rose soft and polite as I crossed the stage.
I took the diploma folder from the headmaster, smiled for the photograph, then looked briefly toward the audience.
My mother was crying now. Mrs. Montgomery was clapping.
Mr. Montgomery nodded once with satisfaction.
I felt as if I had actually earned everything. Not academically. Katherine and I both knew better than that. But socially, maybe. I had survived Bellamont. I had become beloved inside it. I had made a story powerful enough that even the people who helped write it now believed in it.
Then Katherine’s name was called.
Katherine Anne Montgomery.
The applause was quieter. Not disrespectful, but just a lot smaller.
People respected Katherine. Teachers admired her.
Everyone knew she was brilliant. But admiration did not fill the air the way affection did, and as she crossed the stage with stiff shoulders and a face too serious for the moment, I felt a familiar ache beneath my ribs. I clapped harder than anyone.
She looked embarrassed when she returned to her seat. “Stop,” she muttered.
“I’m proud of you.”
“You’re so loud.” She rolled her eyes.
“You’re welcome.”
* * *
After the ceremony, the Montgomerys hosted a private lunch at the estate. White flowers filled the dining room. Champagne waited on the sideboard, though Katherine and I were only eighteen, which meant everyone pretended the mimosas were mostly orange juice.
Mrs. Montgomery kissed my cheek three times and told me I looked radiant.
Mr. Montgomery congratulated me on my acceptance to Bellamont University with the same tone he used when approving a well-written invoice.
Both Katherine and I had been accepted. Though there was no doubt that Katherine would have.
For her, Bellamont University had never felt like a question, only the next room in a house her family already owned.
Her parents had attended, her grandparents had donated to it, and at least three buildings on campus had names connected distantly enough to the Montgomerys that no one mentioned it outright.
For me, acceptance should have felt impossible. It didn’t. Not by then, and that frightened me a little. Because once you became used to doors opening, it was very hard to remember they had ever been locked.
* * *
The Porsche arrived after dessert. A silver one, low and gleaming and absurdly beautiful, pulled into the circular drive with a red ribbon tied across the hood as if it were a toy instead of a machine worth a thousand times more than everything my mother and I owned when we first came to Blackwater.
Katherine stared at it through the foyer window. “What is that?”
Mr. Montgomery smiled looking pleased with himself.
“Your graduation gift.”
Mrs. Montgomery touched Katherine’s shoulder. “Surprise!”
For a second, Katherine looked genuinely speechless. Then she frowned.
“I’m a terrible driver.”
Mr. Montgomery laughed as though she had made a charming joke.
“She’ll learn,” he said.
Katherine looked at me with mild panic.
“I hit the mailbox last month.”
“You grazed it,” Mrs. Montgomery corrected gently.
“The mailbox is still crooked.”
“The mailbox was in the wrong place; it’s not your fault, sweetheart.”
I stood beside them in the foyer, smiling because everyone else was smiling, but inside me, something had gone very dim.
A Porsche. For graduation. A super expensive car because their daughter had finished high school. Because this was what happened to girls like Katherine when they completed things everyone had always expected them to complete.
She walked outside with the rest of us, looking both pleased and deeply uncertain. The driver handed Mr. Montgomery the keys, and Mr. Montgomery handed them to Katherine. She held them for approximately ten seconds before turning to me.
“Here,” she said.
“What?” I blinked.
She dropped the keys into my hand without ceremony.
“You drive better than I do.”
The metal was warm from her palm. Heavy. I stared down at the Porsche emblem on the key fob.
“Katherine…”
“What? You can use it if you want. I probably won’t.”
Mrs. Montgomery laughed softly. “Sweetheart, maybe learn before giving it away.”
“I’m not giving it away,” Katherine said, already distracted as Miss Astoria wandered near the doorway and meowed indignantly at being excluded. “I’m just saying Céline can drive it when she wants.”