Chapter 28 #2
Mistakes happened. Files failed to upload.
Names disappeared from lists. Administrative systems were built by people, and people were generally unreliable.
I refreshed the page twice. Then three times.
I checked my email. I checked the application portal.
I checked the draft folder where I had saved my own final submission.
Submitted.
Confirmed.
Time-stamped.
I was not there.
Céline was.
For several minutes, I sat perfectly still.
The library moved around me. Students whispered, chairs scraped softly, someone laughed near the windows, rain tapped against the glass with tedious persistence. The world continued in the vulgar way it always did when something irreversible happened privately.
Then I clicked her name.
The proposal title appeared beneath it.
Adaptive Cellular Response Under Chronic Environmental Stress.
My body went cold before my mind accepted what I was seeing.
No. That was the first thought. I needed one second where it might still be impossible.
Then the document preview loaded.
My abstract. My structure. My citations. My phrasing with just enough words changed to make the theft feel intimate rather than lazy. My work. Her name.
Céline Martin.
I do not remember closing the laptop.
I remember walking.
I must have left the library. I must have crossed campus in the rain without an umbrella.
I must have passed people who knew me, perhaps even people who said my name.
I remember none of them. I remember only the sound of blood in my ears and the strange clarity of understanding that settled over me with each step.
She had taken Thad.
She had taken my friends.
She had taken my clothes, my house, my family’s protection, my invented story, my academic labour, my place in rooms where I should have belonged without needing to charm anyone.
And now she had taken Moreau too. That was what made it all unbearable.
The world kept handing her things after she stole enough of me to become someone it wanted.
I went to the cottage first.
It was not a plan. It was instinct. If Céline had stolen from me, then I would find something of hers to destroy.
Something real. Something hidden under the silk and perfume and borrowed labels.
I wanted evidence. I wanted dirt. I wanted one ugly, undeniable thing I could hold up to the light and say, there, this is what she really is.
My mother would have called the staff cottage quaint.
I had always hated that word.
It meant small, but charming enough that no one felt guilty.
The door was unlocked. Mira was working at the main house, and Céline was on campus, smiling somewhere under a name I had given her.
I stepped inside and stood in the quiet little living room that had once felt like a second home because Céline was in it.
The air smelled faintly of laundry detergent, old wood, and the cheap vanilla candles she pretended not to like.
Her bedroom was neat.
Books stacked beside the bed. Clothes arranged by colour. Makeup lined along the dresser. Sketchbooks were hidden poorly beneath sweaters because Céline never truly believed anyone would look where poverty had trained her to hide things.
I opened drawers. I am not proud of that, but pride was not the point anymore.
I searched through papers, notebooks, old receipts, school forms, anything that might prove she was still Selena beneath the careful construction.
I found drawings. Dozens of them. The cliffs.
Miss Astoria curled in sunlight. Mira’s hands folding towels.
Thad’s profile sketched with too much attention.
My own face, once, unfinished and faintly unkind.
That one made me pause.
She had drawn me with my head turned slightly away, mouth parted as if I were about to say something corrective. It was a good drawing. Better than good. She had seen me in it more clearly than most people ever had. I hated that.
Then my foot caught the floorboard beneath her bed. The sound was small. A familiar creak.
I looked down.
For one second, I was fifteen again, standing in my room before Switzerland, crying because my passport had vanished and my parents were disappointed in the way they always were when inconvenience interrupted their day.
I remembered Selena standing in the doorway with wide, innocent eyes.
I remembered her saying she hadn’t seen it.
I remembered the shame of being treated like I had misplaced something essential because I was careless, spoiled, irresponsible.
I knelt slowly.
The floorboard lifted with almost no resistance.
Inside, wrapped in an old scarf, was a passport.
My passport.
Expired now. Useless. A small navy booklet that had sat beneath Selena’s bed for years while I blamed myself for losing it. While my parents blamed me. While she watched me cry and said nothing.
I held it in my hands and felt something inside me go very, very quiet.
That was the moment I stopped loving her.
Or maybe that is a lie.
Maybe love does not stop at moments like that. Maybe it only curdles into something so poisonous it can no longer recognize itself.
I left the cottage with the passport in my coat pocket and the proposal open on my phone.
By the time I reached campus, the rain had worsened.
The paths shone under the storm lamps, and students moved quickly between buildings, heads lowered, umbrellas tilting in the wind.
I found Céline outside Westgrave Hall, speaking to Wendy Chen beneath the archway.
She was wearing the cream coat Mrs. Montgomery bought her after she said winter in Blackwater made her look dead.
Her hair was pinned loosely back. She looked pale and beautiful and tired enough that anyone else might have mistaken her for weak and fragile.
I knew better.
“Selena.”
She went still.
Wendy looked between us uncertainly. “Céline?”
“Go,” I said.
Wendy blinked.
Céline turned toward her with a smile too quick to be real. “It’s fine. I’ll see you later.”
Wendy hesitated, then left.
Céline waited until she was out of earshot.
“What are you doing?” Her voice was low.
I stepped closer and pulled the passport from my coat.
Her face changed.
I had seen every version of her face for eleven years, I could see her face turn from guilt into surprise, even when she tried to control her features.
“You found it,” she said, with a smile.
I almost laughed.
“You kept it under your bed.”
“Katherine—”
“You watched me cry.”
She swallowed. “I was fifteen.”
“So was I.”
The words landed between us with a force neither of us could soften.
Rain moved down her hair, clinging to the edges of her face. Around us, students passed under umbrellas, glancing once and then away.
Céline noticed the glances.
“Not here,” she said.
“I don’t care.”
“I do.”
“Of course you do.”
Her eyes flashed. “Katherine.”
“Don’t.” My voice cracked, and I hated that too. “Don’t say my name like you’re trying to calm me down.”
A student slowed near the entrance.
Céline’s hand closed around my wrist.
“Come with me.”
I tried to pull away. “Don’t touch me.”
She leaned closer, voice tight. “If you want to destroy me, at least have the dignity not to do it in front of half the department.”
The audacity of that almost stole my breath.
Dignity. From her.
Still, I let her pull me up the stairwell, away from the corridor, away from the students, away from every witness except the rain and whatever version of God Bellamont had buried beneath all its stone.
The terrace doors opened with a hard metal sound.
The roof terrace above Westgrave was technically closed during storms, but the latch had been loose for months.
Céline knew that. Everyone knew that. It was where students smoked during parties and kissed people they would avoid in daylight.
The stone was slick with rain, the low ledge dark and wet beneath the storm.
The wind hit us immediately. The air was cold, salted, and violent.
Céline released my wrist and turned to me.
“What do you want?”
The question was so ugly because she genuinely did not know.
I stared at her.
My best friend. My invention. The girl I had loved so much I had built a life around keeping her close, and hated so much I wanted to rip that life apart with my teeth.
“What do I want?” I repeated.
She flinched at my tone.
“You stole my proposal.”
Her face went white.
There it was. No denial first. No performance. Just plain old fear.
Then Céline returned, fast and polished and insulting.
“I didn’t steal it.”
I laughed. The sound came out wrong, almost broken.
“You submitted my work under your name.”
“I changed it.”
“You changed three words!”
“I needed—”
“You needed?” I stepped closer. “You needed my clothes. You needed my school. You needed my name for you. You needed my notes, my help, my friends, my boyfriend, my entire life apparently, and now you needed my proposal too?”
“Thad was not your boyfriend.”
The fact that she said that, of all things, nearly made me scream.
“No,” I said, voice shaking. “He was just the first thing I wanted that wanted you instead.”
I saw her face turn with guilt, but I didn’t care.
“You think I don’t know what I did?” she asked.
“I think you know exactly what you do. That’s the problem.”
Her eyes filled, but she did not cry.
Céline rarely cried when it mattered. She became sharper instead, prettier in the cruelest possible way.
“You had everything,” she said.
The words came out low and dangerous.
I stared at her.
“There it is, the real you. Selena Martin.” I whispered.
“No, you don’t get to act like I’m the villain for saying it.” She stepped closer now, and for once, all the softness was gone. “You had everything, Katherine. The house, the parents, the money, the name, the school. You had a future waiting for you before you even knew what a future was.”
“And you had me.”
“I had your leftovers.”
I slapped her.
The sound cracked across the terrace, swallowed almost instantly by the wind. Her face turned with it.