Chapter 32 #2
I ran my fingers over the box one more time.
The guilt about Katherine still sat there, heavy and quiet in the back of my mind.
But right now, standing in this kitchen with expensive art supplies and a man who saw the parts of me I had buried, I let myself imagine something new.
A version of my life where I did not have to keep performing every single day.
Where I could be both the girl who thrived and the girl who drew.
For the first time in years, it did not feel impossible.
His phone rang on the counter.
He glanced at the screen, then silenced it.
“Take it,” I said.
“It can wait.”
“Do not perform attentiveness for me. Just do your thing.”
His eyes lifted. Then he picked up the phone.
“I’ll be in the study.” He left with a smile.
“Try to eat something.”
“Try to stop giving orders.”
“Unlikely. I love taking care of your wellbeing too much.”
He walked down the hall and shut the study door behind him.
The apartment softened in his absence.
I should have gone back to my room. I should have opened Katherine’s proposal and forced myself through another paragraph.
Instead, I looked around the apartment and felt the familiar cold settle in my chest.
I stood at the counter with the coffee warm between my hands. Miss Astoria licked crumbs from the edge like a disgraced aristocrat who had decided the floor was beneath her. The study door stayed closed and muffled Vincent’s voice into something low and controlled that I could not quite make out.
You do not know the worst thing I am capable of.
I had said those words to him. He had looked at me like he almost did.
I set the coffee down.
Miss Astoria lifted her head.
“I am just looking,” I whispered.
She blinked at me, unimpressed.
I moved through the living room first, slowly, touching nothing.
The shelves held books arranged by size.
The side table held nothing but a single lamp.
The cabinet near the fireplace was closed and neat.
Everything was too clean, too deliberate.
Secrets could hide best in places where nothing looked hidden at all.
Vincent was not careless. If I found something, it was either because he wanted me to or because even monsters got tired enough to slip.
The study door remained closed. His voice continued behind it.
I walked toward the hallway. His bedroom door stood half open, and I stopped.
No. I told myself.
That was the sane thought. The thought of a woman with any remaining loyalty to self-preservation would obey.
Then I thought of Katherine. Not the fall itself.
Not the moment her hand slipped. Katherine standing in my cottage bedroom years earlier with my stolen passport in her hand, finally holding proof that I had betrayed her long before the proposal, long before Thad, long before the terrace.
She had searched because anger made her brave enough to look where love had trained her not to.
I stepped into Vincent’s bedroom.
It looked exactly like him. Dark wood. Black sheets pulled tight. Heavy curtains open to the rain. No clutter. No photographs. No objects that suggested childhood, family or any weakness at all. Even his bed looked disciplined.
I checked the obvious places first. Desk drawers, shelves and the wardrobe, but turned up with nothing.
Then I saw the drawer beside the bed. It was closed, but not fully. A thin line of shadow showed at the edge.
My pulse slowed. That was always how it happened before a bad decision.
I opened the drawer.
At first, there was nothing unusual. A book.
A pen. A watch box. Then a small black leather case tucked beneath a folded tie with his initials on it.
My fingers hovered over it. I lifted it out.
The case was old, the leather soft at the edges, not decorative enough to be meaningless. I unfastened it carefully.
Inside was a phone, but it was not Vincent’s. It was not a burner either because I knew that phone.
For one second, my mind refused to arrange the information properly.
Pale case with a crack near the lower corner.
Small Bellamont crest sticker Katherine had placed there ironically because she said institutional branding was only tolerable when mocked.
Faint smear of dried rain damage beneath the screen.
Katherine’s phone.
The phone had fallen on the terrace. I remembered the sharp clatter when she pulled it out to expose me.
I remembered it sliding away when her body slipped backwards over the ledge.
I remembered my hands closing around her wrist. I remembered looking at her face and seeing the realization of my ultimate betrayal arrive in her eyes.
If Katherine’s phone were here, Vincent would have been there. On the terrace. After. Or maybe even before.
My hand tightened around the leather case.
No.
No, no, no.
Vincent knew.
He didn’t have to guess or suspect it or circle the truth with those beautiful, awful questions. He knew I had let go. He knew Katherine had not simply slipped beyond saving while she ended her own life.
He had stood close enough to collect what she dropped and kept it like a fucking relic.
My breath came in slowly. I sat on the edge of his bed because my legs had gone weak, but I refused to collapse in his bedroom.
The phone was dead, of course. I had heard the crack very clearly. There was no saving it. It did not need to work. Its existence was enough.
Katherine’s last living proof of my betrayal. In Vincent’s room.
I opened the case further and saw something folded beneath the phone. A photocopy of Katherine’s proposal notes.
My stomach twisted. He had kept them together. The phone and the work. The fall and the theft. Katherine’s death and Katherine’s mind. Everything I had taken from her, curated neatly in a drawer by the man who told me he wanted to see me thrive.
I heard his voice from the study, low and still behind the closed door.
I stared at the phone until my vision blurred. The memory rose so violently I almost gagged. Katherine’s hand slipping mine, and her face below the ledge after I let go.
I had let go because saving her would have ended everything I had built. The guilt still lived in me, quiet and heavy, but the end had justified the means. I had survived. That was the only rule that ever mattered.
But Vincent knew.
He had been there. He had collected what she dropped and kept it as evidence. He had always known.
Every moment with him rearranged itself in my head.
His first look at me after the funeral. His interest. His questions.
The proposal file. The way he said Katherine’s name.
The way he looked at me when I told him he did not know the worst thing I was capable of.
He had been watching me survive a secret he already held in his hand.
I put the phone back into the case with shaking fingers. Then I stopped.
No.
If I put it back, nothing would change. If I confronted him, he could lie. If I ran, he could expose me. If I stayed, he owned the truth and would hold it over me. No door led out cleanly. There had not been one on the terrace either.
That was the thing about survival. People liked to imagine it arrived as a noble instinct, but mine never had. Mine arrived cold. Practical. Quiet. It stepped into a room, assessed the threat, and asked what could be sacrificed. Katherine. Thad. My name. My body. My shame. Now Vincent.
I stood. My hands had stopped shaking.
I returned the phone and the photocopy exactly as I found them. The case went back beneath the tie. The drawer closed to the same thin shadow, not fully shut.
Then I left his room.
In the hallway, Miss Astoria sat waiting for me.
“What?” I whispered.
She blinked.
I went into my room and locked the door. I stood in the center of the room, listening to the faint sounds of a normal morning.
I opened the bedside drawer. The prescription bottle sat beside my lipstick and a hair clip, small and ordinary and suddenly transformed by usefulness.
My fingers closed around it. The pills rattled softly. A delicate little sound. Not enough to kill a man by itself, probably. But enough to make a beginning. Enough to make him weak. Enough to make a deliberate choice possible.
I sat on the edge of the bed with the bottle in my palm and thought of dinner.
Not last night’s leftovers. Another dinner.
One I prepared. One where I smiled properly and acted softer than I felt.
One where Vincent looked at me and believed, because he wanted to, that the fear had turned into surrender.
I knew, distantly, that this should have horrified me, but it did not.
What horrified me was how calm I felt.
On the terrace, I had let Katherine fall because she was going to destroy the life I had built.
Vincent could do worse. He could destroy the person I had become afterwards.
He had Katherine’s phone. He had the proposal.
He had my father. He had me in his apartment, behind his locks, breathing his air, sleeping in a room he had prepared before I agreed to enter it.
And I had a small bottle in my hand. A kitchen. A man arrogant enough to believe being loved by a monster meant he was safe from her.
Miss Astoria scratched softly at the door.
I looked toward it.
“I know, I love him too, but it needs to be done,” I whispered.
The sound of my own voice steadied me.
I placed the bottle into the inner pocket of my bag and zipped it closed.
Then I unlocked the door and walked back into the living room.
Vincent was still in the study, and the apartment looked beautiful in the grey morning light. Too beautiful. A prettier cage.
I went to the kitchen and picked up my coffee. It had gone cold, but I drank it anyway.
Then I opened my phone and searched for dinner recipes with hands that did not shake at all.