Chapter 23 #2
Not the main floor where everyone pretended to study while hoping to be seen. I went to the upper level, to the quiet biology stacks where no one went unless they had an exam or a personality disorder. I found a table near the window, opened my laptop, and pulled up the proposal file.
Adaptive Cellular Response Under Chronic Environmental Stress.
by Céline Martin.
I stared at it with increased determination.
Then I opened a blank document beside it.
For years, Katherine had made things sound like me.
No. That was not true. For years, Katherine had made me sound like someone better.
Smarter. Cleaner. Worthy of the rooms I entered.
The proposal was hers. I could not change that.
No amount of editing would make the content mine.
But Vincent had made one mistake when he cornered me with that file.
He thought shame would make me obedient.
Shame had done many things to me over the years, but it had never made me lose focus on the end goal.
I reread the methods section slowly. It was elegant, precise, almost painfully Katherine. I could hear her in the restraint of it. No unnecessary flourish. No decorative confidence. Just a clean scientific discipline created by a brilliant mind. My throat tightened.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. The words vanished between the shelves.
Then I began making notes. Not pretending to understand.
Actually trying. It was humiliating at first. I had to look up terminology I should already know.
I reread the same paragraph six times and still had to draw the process out like a child.
I watched three videos on repair pathway plasticity with the sound low and captions on because I did not trust myself to absorb anything by reading alone.
I made a separate document titled “Questions I need to ask Vincent”, then filled half a page before realizing the title was stupid because I would rather die than ask him half of them.
After an hour, the work stopped looking like a wall and started looking like a locked door. That was better. Doors could be opened.
By eight o’clock, the sky outside had gone dark, and the library lamps reflected warmly against the rain-covered windows. My coffee had gone cold. My eyes burned. My notes were messy and imperfect and mine.
My phone buzzed with a text from Sophia.
Sophia: are you alive?
I typed back slowly.
Céline : physically
Sophia: spiritually?
Céline : legally uncertain
Sophia: come home. miss astoria is screaming at your bedroom door and anya is negotiating with her like a hostage mediator
A laugh escaped me quietly. I began gathering my things. Then my phone buzzed again. This time it was Vincent.
Vincent: Your questions document is missing the most important one.
My gaze snapped to the laptop. The document was open. Questions I need to ask Vincent. I looked around the library immediately, but the biology stacks were empty except for a student asleep three tables away with one cheek pressed against an open textbook.
My phone buzzed again.
Vincent: You left document sharing enabled on the lab folder.
I stared at the message. Then at the laptop. Then back at the message with embarrassment.
Céline : Stop reading my private notes.
His reply came almost immediately.
Vincent: Stop storing them in shared folders, then. I can’t help but look.
I nearly threw the phone into the stacks. Instead, I typed.
Céline : What is the most important question?
The dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then finally:
Vincent: Why did Katherine choose that hypothesis?
I looked back at the proposal. Cells do not merely endure stress; under repeated pressure, they learn to organize survival around it.
The sentence sat there, quiet and devastating.
For the first time, I wondered whether Katherine had been writing only about cells.
My throat tightened. Another message came.
Vincent: Ask that, and you might understand the work.
I hated him. I hated that he was right. I closed the laptop slowly and sat in the darkening library with the rain sliding down the windows, Katherine’s sentence glowing faintly on the screen until it vanished. Then I opened the document again and typed one question at the top.
Why did Katherine write this?
I had no answer for Katherine’s state of mind.
I sat there a little longer, fingers tracing the edge of the laptop, thinking about the sketchbook I used to keep hidden under my bed back in the cottage.
Pages filled with quick drawings of the cliffs, of Miss Astoria sleeping in sunbeams, of my mother’s hands folding laundry.
Poor girls like me could not afford to be artists. We needed something practical.
Something that would open doors instead of closing them. Biology had seemed safe then. Stable. The kind of future that would make my mother stop worrying about rent and groceries and whether the next gust of wind would blow everything away.
Now it felt like the heaviest cage I had ever stepped into willingly.
I packed my things and walked back through the rain toward the dorm, Katherine’s words still echoing in my head and the taste of Vincent’s blood still faint on my tongue.