Chapter 25 #2
“You say that like it’s comforting.”
“It should be.”
She looked at me through the mirror for a second too long.
“It is for you.”
The words landed quietly. I lowered the lipstick.
“Katherine.”
“Never mind.” She blinked, then looked away.
Before I could answer, Anya burst into the bathroom and declared that a boy from her economics class had called her exotic, and she needed either legal counsel or a drink. We chose the drink.
Downstairs, Thad found me almost immediately.
He moved through crowds easily, older than most of the first-years and aware of the effect that had.
He kissed Sophia’s cheek, laughed when Anya accused him of dressing like a trust fund in human form, and greeted Katherine politely enough that no one could call it dismissive. Then his hand found mine.
“Dance with me,” he said.
I glanced at Katherine. She was looking at the bar.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
Katherine lifted one shoulder. “Go.”
So I went.
The dance floor was crowded and warm, bodies moving beneath blue and violet light.
Thad pulled me against him with easy confidence, one hand at my waist, the other sliding over my back as the music thickened around us.
He smelled like cologne, champagne, and rain-damp wool.
When he leaned down to kiss me, people around us looked and then looked away, smiling because Céline Martin and Thad Rodriguez made sense as a picture.
With Thad, I became more believable. Not loved more deeply, perhaps, but placed more securely.
He anchored the performance in a future that other people understood.
His hand on my waist said she belongs in this world.
His family name beside mine made the lie feel less like theft and more like destiny.
I danced with him because I wanted that. I danced with him because Katherine was watching and because part of me, uglier than I wanted to face, needed her to see that I had been chosen by someone she wanted first.
I did not hear what she said to Sophia and Anya. Not then. I learned it much later. They told me in pieces, never all at once. Sophia was first, careful and pale over coffee in our dorm kitchen. Then Anya, angrier, less polished, because secrets made her itch.
That night, while Thad’s hands were on my waist and I was laughing into his mouth beneath the lights, Katherine stood near the bar with Sophia and Anya and watched me like I had done something unforgivable by being happy without asking for her permission first.
“She’s not really my cousin,” Katherine said.
Sophia turned toward her slowly. “What?”
Anya, who had been stirring a drink with the tiny plastic straw like she wanted to murder it, looked up.
Katherine did not look at either of them. She kept her eyes on the dance floor.
“Céline,” she said. “That’s not even her name.”
Sophia went still. Anya stopped stirring.
According to Sophia, Katherine said it calmly at first, almost academically, as if she were correcting a misconception in class.
My real name was Selena Martin. My mother worked for the Montgomerys.
We lived in the staff cottage on the estate.
The cousin story had been invented years ago so I could attend Bellamont Academy without everyone knowing I was the housekeeper’s daughter.
“She’s not who she says she is,” Katherine said.
The sentence should have ended me. It didn’t. Because Sophia Kwon had looked at Katherine Montgomery with all the cold, polished judgment generations of wealth had trained into her bones and asked, “And why are you telling us this now?”
Katherine finally looked away from me then. “I thought you should know.”
“No, you didn’t.” Anya laughed once, not kindly.
Katherine’s face tightened. Sophia’s voice stayed calm.
“Did Céline hurt someone?”
Katherine’s mouth parted. “No.”
“Did she steal from us?”
Katherine flinched slightly, though none of them understood why at the time.
“No.”
“Did she lie because she wanted to be cruel to us?”
Katherine’s eyes shone with something too complicated to call simple anger.
“She lies because people let her!”
“That is possibly the richest sentence anyone has ever said in this room.” Anya stared at her.
Sophia glanced toward me on the dance floor. Then back at Katherine.
“She is our friend.”
“She was mine first,” Katherine said.
There it was. Not an accusation. Not a kind revelation. This was about ownership.
Anya’s expression changed after that. The amusement vanished completely. “That’s disgusting,” she said.
Katherine looked at her, startled. Anya continued, voice low enough not to carry past them. “You’re telling us something that could ruin her because you’re jealous she’s dancing with a boy who barely knows you exist.”
Katherine went white. Sophia said nothing for a moment. Then she set her untouched drink down on the bar.
“We won’t tell anyone,” she said.
Relief flickered across Katherine’s face before Sophia finished. “But not for you.”
I can still imagine that silence. Even though I was not there for it.
Even though downstairs, under the lights, I was laughing while Thad spun me once and pulled me back in, completely unaware that the two girls who would become my safest place were deciding in that moment whether my lie made me unforgivable.
Anya told me later that Katherine looked as if Sophia had slapped her.
Maybe that would have been kinder.
When I returned from the dance floor, flushed and breathless with Thad’s hand still loosely linked through mine, the atmosphere around the bar had changed.
I felt it immediately. Sophia looked normal, which meant nothing because Sophia could look normal at funerals, investor dinners, and probably natural disasters.
Anya was smiling too brightly, which meant something had offended her deeply and she had not yet chosen a socially acceptable weapon.
Katherine stood between them with her arms folded, face pale and closed.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Katherine said too quickly.
Anya looked at her. Sophia picked up her drink.
Thad leaned down near my ear. “Everything okay?”
I glanced between the three girls, irritation prickling under my skin. “Apparently.”
Katherine would not meet my eyes. For the rest of the night, Sophia stayed close to me, trying not to be obvious.
But whenever Katherine drifted near, Sophia inserted herself into the conversation smoothly.
Anya became more direct. She pulled me to dance twice, took my phone to photograph us, and at one point rested her chin dramatically on my shoulder while announcing to Thad that if he hurt me, she would have his family vineyard audited.
Thad and I laughed. Katherine did not.
At the time, I thought she was upset about Thad.
That was true. I just did not know it was not the only thing.
After that night, something shifted between all of us.
Not with me, Sophia and Anya. With Katherine.
The girls were still polite to her. Sophia would never be anything else in public.
Anya could be cutting, but even she understood loyalty required restraint when the person being protected had not yet been told there was something to protect her from.
But they stopped making space for Katherine automatically.
When we went to lunch, Anya no longer moved her bag to save the fourth chair unless I asked.
When Sophia planned movie nights, the invitation went to me first, and Katherine’s inclusion became something I had to add rather than something assumed.
In our suite, their voices softened when Katherine entered, not from guilt, exactly, but from the wary discomfort of people who had seen what a lonely girl could do with a secret.
Katherine noticed too. One evening in November, she stood at my bedroom doorway while Sophia and Anya argued in the kitchen about whether instant ramen could be improved with truffle oil.
“You’re busy,” Katherine said.
I looked up from my desk. She held my biology notes in one hand, already corrected.
“No, come in.”
Her gaze moved past me toward the kitchen, where Anya laughed at something Sophia said. For a moment, the longing on Katherine’s face was so naked it made my chest ache. Then it disappeared.
“I just brought these.”
She placed the notes on my desk but did not sit on my bed like she usually did.
“Stay,” I said.
“I have work.”
“You always have work.”
“So do you,” she replied, looking at the notes.
“That’s why I have you.” I smiled weakly.
The joke landed wrong. I knew it before her face changed. For a second, Katherine looked as if I had taken something soft and pressed on it deliberately. Then she smiled.
“It’s fine.”
I hated that phrase. By then, it was becoming one of the languages we used most fluently. She left a few minutes later. I found Sophia standing in the kitchen afterwards, watching the door close behind Katherine with an expression I could not read.
“What?” I asked.
Sophia looked at me. For one second, I thought she might tell me. She almost did. I know that now. Instead, she only said, “Be careful with her.”
I laughed because I did not understand.
“With Katherine? She’s harmless.”
Anya, sitting on the counter with ramen in one hand, went very still. Sophia’s face softened in a way that made me uncomfortable.
“No,” she said quietly. “She isn’t.”
I should have asked what she meant. I should have forced the truth into the room before it grew teeth.
But Thad texted me then, asking if I wanted to come over, and Katherine’s corrected notes sat on my desk waiting to make me better than I was, and Sophia and Anya were still there, still mine, still choosing me in ways I did not yet know how to deserve.
So I ignored the warning.