Chapter 36 #2
My mother’s face changed—pride and concern and old survival instincts moving across it at once. “I don’t want you dependent on a man.”
“I know.”
“Especially not a man like him.”
I looked at her sharply. She smiled sadly. “You think I do not see things because I am quiet.”
The shame that moved through me was old and deserved. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Everything. Katherine. Céline. The years I let her clean other people’s floors while I learned how to look as though I had never seen a mop.
The fact that I had wanted Mrs. Montgomery’s approval with more hunger than I had ever wanted justice for my own mother.
The fact that Daniel was dead and some part of me felt relieved.
The fact that I had become someone she might not recognize if she knew the whole truth.
“I don’t know,” I said.
My mother squeezed my hand. “Then don’t apologize until you do.”
I laughed through something that felt dangerously close to tears. She looked past me toward the main house. “I used to think if I worked hard enough here, you would get far away from what we ran from.”
“I did.”
“No,” she said softly. “You got close to another kind of cage.”
I looked down. The silence that followed was gentle and unbearable.
Then she said, “But maybe France will be different.”
My breath caught. “Is that a yes?”
“It is a maybe.”
I held her hand tighter. “That’s enough.”
* * *
Sophia and Anya found me packing three days later and reacted exactly as I expected. Sophia stood in the doorway of Vincent’s guest room, silent for so long I thought she might actually choose murder as her opening statement. Anya did not bother with silence.
“France?” she said. “France? You’re just casually fleeing to France like a depressed heiress in a gothic novel?”
Miss Astoria, curled inside my open suitcase, meowed in agreement.
Anya pointed at her. “Do not support this.”
“She’s coming too,” I said.
“Obviously she’s coming too. That cat has the soul of a duchess and the morals of a landlord.”
Sophia stepped into the room slowly. “You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
“With him.”
I folded one of my sweaters. “With myself.”
Sophia ignored the distinction. “And school?”
“I’m withdrawing.”
Anya sat down hard on the bed, as though her legs had given out.
“Oh.”
That was the first time she sounded truly sad.
I stopped folding. The room softened around us, and suddenly I was painfully aware that leaving Blackwater did not only mean leaving the rain and the rumours and the life I had built badly.
It meant leaving them—the girls who had chosen me before I deserved it, who had kept my secret when Katherine tried to turn it into a weapon, who had locked doors for me, sat with me through panic, inspected Vincent’s apartment like a hostile embassy, and loved me in ways that never asked to own me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Anya looked up sharply. “No.”
I blinked.
“No,” she repeated. “You do not get to make that face. I am devastated and angry, but I am not another reason you have to stay somewhere that is eating you alive.”
Sophia’s expression cracked just enough for me to see the grief beneath the poise.
“She’s right.”
Anya sniffed. “I usually am.”
I laughed. Then I cried—not beautifully, not quietly enough to preserve dignity.
I sat on the edge of the bed beside Anya and cried into my hands.
Anya wrapped herself around me at once, dramatic and warm, muttering that if Vincent hurt me in Europe, she would weaponize international law.
Sophia sat on my other side and took my hand, her thumb moving once over my knuckles in silent comfort.
For a long time, none of us spoke. Miss Astoria climbed out of the suitcase and settled across all three of our laps like she had decided grief was best managed by shared weight.
Eventually, Sophia asked, “Does he make you happy?”
I looked toward the doorway. Vincent was not there. He had left deliberately when they arrived, giving us privacy because he understood some rooms could not belong to him.
“I think so,” I said.
Anya lifted her head. “Wrong answer?”
I wiped my face. “He makes me feel seen.”
Sophia’s fingers tightened around mine. “Then go.”
* * *
The day we left Blackwater, it rained as usual. The town had the theatrical instincts of a grieving widow and the climate of a punishment. Rain silvered the roads, darkened the stone walls of Bellamont, and slid down the windows of Vincent’s car as we drove past Westgrave Hall for the last time.
I looked at the terrace one final time. The ledge was barely visible from the road—a dark line beneath the grey sky.
From below, it looked harmless. Almost delicate.
Just another architectural detail on a university that had survived too many secrets to be impressed by mine.
I thought I would feel Katherine there. I didn’t.
Maybe ghosts did not stay where they died.
Maybe they followed the living because the living were the ones who owed them.
Katherine was in the suitcase beside me, in the cream blouse I still could not bring myself to give away, in the proposal I had left behind, in the part of my mind that would always understand survival as something bought with another girl’s silence.
She would come with me, giving me grief and pain for the rest of my life.
That was fair.
My mother sat in the back seat with Miss Astoria’s carrier on her lap. The cat had screamed for twenty minutes, then fallen asleep mid-complaint. My mother kept one hand on top of the carrier and looked out at the rain with a face I could not quite read.
“You’re quiet,” I said.
She smiled faintly. “I am thinking.”
“About?”
“Sunlight.”
I looked at her. Her smile grew. “I have not lived somewhere sunny in a long time.”
Something inside me loosened.
Vincent drove beside me, one hand on the wheel, calm as ever. He wore a dark coat and white shirt, no tie. The absence of formality made him look almost human. His eyes flicked briefly to mine.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie.”
His mouth curved. “You look relieved.”
I looked out the window. Blackwater blurred past in grey streaks. “I feel guilty about that.”
“I know.”
“You’re not going to tell me I shouldn’t?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“You should feel what you feel,” he said. “Then decide what it means later.”
I glanced at him. That was almost healthy. Suspicious.
“Did you read that in a book?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“My love, I have been called many things, but emotionally well-read is not one of them.”
My mother made a small sound from the back seat. I turned. She was smiling.I finally felt at peace.