Chapter 3 #2
Neither of them answered right away. The silence stretched soft between us until a knock sounded at the door. Sophia stood and opened it with her usual graceful poise.
A girl from my contemporary theory seminar stood in the hallway holding another bouquet, pink peonies this time, the expensive kind wrapped in crisp paper. Her eyes widened the moment she saw me behind Sophia.
“Oh, Céline. I’m so sorry to bother you. I just wanted to bring these by. We’re all thinking of you right now. The whole seminar group, I mean. If there’s anything we can do…”
Of me. Not Katherine. The thought slid through me fast and ugly, but I pushed it down and stood up.
“That’s very kind of you,” I said, taking the flowers. Their stems felt cool and damp in my hands. “Thank you. I appreciate it more than you know.”
The girl’s face softened with relief, as though my gratitude had finished some task for her. “She was lucky to have you as a friend. We all saw how close you two were. You’re handling this with so much grace.”
My fingers tightened around the stems.
“Yes,” I said softly. “I loved her very much.”
She nodded, eyes a little teary, and left. Sophia closed the door behind her with a quiet click.
I carried the peonies across the living room and set them on the low table beside the cold tea. Their petals looked too bright against the grey afternoon light coming through the tall windows. Anya watched me carefully.
“Do you want me to find a vase for those? Or I can put them in your room if you’d rather not see them every time you walk through here.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”
Moving felt easier than standing still, so I went downstairs to the kitchenette on the first floor of the residence hall.
The air smelled of old wood, laundry detergent, and the faint damp of rain-soaked wool from all the coats hanging by the door.
Students’ voices drifted from the common room, lowering when I passed, but I pretended not to notice.
I found a tall glass pitcher, filled it with water, and cut the stems at an angle the way my mother had taught me years ago in the Montgomery cottage.
Remove the lower leaves. Arrange the blooms so they look effortless. Katherine had once told me I made everything look effortless because I never let anyone see the work. She had meant it as a compliment. I think.
When I turned with the pitcher in both hands, Professor Vincent Moreau stood at the far end of the hallway.
For one second, the whole world narrowed to just him.
He was speaking to the residence director, smiling easily, one hand tucked into the pocket of his dark coat.
Whatever he said made her laugh out loud.
He had that effect on people, warmth without ever getting too close, attention that made you feel chosen for the length of a conversation and then left you wondering what you had actually said.
Then his eyes shifted and found mine. The smile stayed on his mouth, but the warmth drained away like someone had turned off a light behind his face.
My grip tightened around the pitcher until my knuckles ached.
The residence director said something else. He answered her without looking away from me. After a final polite nod, he started walking toward me slowly, as though we had planned to meet right there in the middle of the hallway.
“Miss Martin,” he said when he reached me, his voice low and smooth, the kind of voice that made students lean in closer during lectures.
“Professor.”
His gaze dropped briefly to the pink peonies. “More offerings from the well-wishers?”
“People are trying to be kind,” I said, keeping my tone even.
“They usually are.” He paused, studying my face the way he had at the funeral, like he could see straight through the careful mask I wore. “You withdrew your application for the lab.”
My pulse kicked hard once in my throat. “I did.”
“Why?”
I lifted my chin a fraction.
“Personal circumstances. I thought the email made that clear.”
He gave a small nod, pleasant as ever. “Yes. I read the email. Very polite. Very neat. But it told me nothing I didn’t already know.
” The hallway seemed quieter suddenly. A pair of girls walked behind him, whispering to each other, and both of them smiled shyly when they recognized him.
He returned the smile warmly, called one of them by name, then turned back to me and the warmth vanished again. “I chose to ignore it.”
I stared at him. The pitcher felt heavier in my hands, water sloshing lightly against the glass. “Excuse me?”
“I reviewed your proposal again this morning,” he went on, conversational, as if we were discussing the weather. “It’s excellent work. Too excellent to let an emotional decision get in the way of what the lab could gain from it.”
A cold feeling moved through me, sharp and low.
“I withdrew it. You can’t just decide to accept me after that.”
“I can,” he said simply. “I usually don’t let administrative preferences interfere with research I find interesting. And your proposal interests me, Céline. Or should I say… Selena? Grief does interesting things to people, doesn’t it? It makes them hide in plain sight.”
The way he said my other name sent something prickling across my skin, the same way it had at the funeral.
You hide under your grief beautifully, Céline.
I thought of Katherine hunched over that proposal, making it brilliant while I simply claimed it, and the guilt twisted tighter in my stomach. He knew something was off. I could feel it in the way his eyes held mine, patient and watchful, like he was waiting for the mask to slip.
“I’m not ready,” I said, quieter than I meant to. “There are other applicants who actually want the spot.”
“There are always other applicants.” He stepped aside slightly as another student passed, greeting her by name without breaking eye contact with me.
“But most people only say they don’t want something after they believe they’ve already lost it.
You’re not most people. You’re grieving, and it would be unfair to let that cost the lab a project of real value. ”
The words slid under my skin and stayed there. For a moment, the hallway, the flowers, the rain streaking the tall windows all seemed to sharpen around us. I remembered the funeral again, the way he had looked at me like he saw every careful performance I had given that day.
“I’m sorry if this causes any inconvenience,” I managed.
“It doesn’t.” His tone stayed pleasant, professorly. “Orientation for accepted students is Friday at four. My office is in Westgrave Hall, third floor. Don’t be late.”
He turned before I could answer, walking away with that easy stride, greeting two more students by name as he passed them. The flowers in the pitcher tilted. Water sloshed over my fingers and dripped onto the floor in small dark spots.
I stood there while the residence hall moved around me, voices and footsteps and the distant sound of rain.
Then I carried the peonies back upstairs, placed them on the table in our living room, and sat down on the edge of the sofa.
Sophia looked up immediately, her expression shifting to concern the moment she saw my face.
“What happened downstairs?” she asked carefully. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I stared at the pink blooms leaning toward the window, bright and out of place against the grey afternoon. “He ignored it,” I said. “My withdrawal. He just… ignored it.”
Anya frowned, closing her book with a quiet snap. “Ignored what exactly?”
“My email. I’m in the lab now, whether I want to be or not.”
Sophia’s face changed first, just slightly, worry flickering behind her calm eyes. “What do you mean? He can’t do that, can he? Not after you told him you needed space.”
I swallowed hard. “Apparently, he can. He said the work was too good to let me walk away from it. And the way he looked at me… it was like he knew… I don’t know, there’s something off about him.”
Rain slid down the glass beside my bedroom door. Somewhere below us, students laughed in the common room, soft and far away. I looked at my laptop, then at the flowers, then at my phone, where Thad’s message still waited like a small, safe door I could choose to walk through.
I should have felt trapped. The panic rose sharply and cold in my chest, mixed with the heavy guilt over Katherine and the proposal and everything I had pretended to be.
But beneath all of that, beneath the fear and the grief and the careful mask I wore every single day, there was something else I hated myself for recognizing.
The smallest thread of relief.