Chapter 28
Katherine (Past)
I used to think Céline belonged to me because I had made her.
That sounds ugly now, and it sounded ugly even then, but back then I had enough pain to dress it up as something almost noble.
Loyalty. Investment. Friendship. Love.
I told myself I had saved her from the small, humiliating life she was born into, and because I had saved her, some part of her should have remained mine.
Not all of her. I was not unreasonable enough to think that.
Only the important parts. Her afternoons.
Her secrets. Her gratitude. The first version of every smile before she decided who else deserved it.
I had found her when she was still Selena Martin from the staff cottage, all sharp eyes and secondhand clothes and restless hands that were always drawing something in the margins of paper she was supposed to be using for homework.
I was the one who looked at her and saw potential.
I was the one who named her Céline, taught her which fork mattered, which shoes looked cheap, which girls to flatter, which boys to ignore until they begged for attention.
I was the one who corrected her essays until they sounded like someone raised around books instead of shouting.
I was the one who made Bellamont possible for her.
Then Bellamont chose her.
Not me.
Her.
It was humiliating in a way I could never explain without making myself sound monstrous.
I was Katherine Montgomery. I had the house, the name, the grades, the parents on donor boards, the kind of life girls like Selena learned to imitate by watching girls like me.
I should have been the center of the story.
I didn’t just need popularity in some shallow, desperate way, but that was the order of things.
The world had been arranged around girls like me long before either of us was born.
And yet somehow, somewhere along the way, I had become the side character in a story about my housekeeper’s daughter.
Everyone loved Céline.
They loved the dresses I gave her, the accent I invented, the confidence I helped polish, the little social tricks I watched her perfect until they became instinct.
They loved her mystery because I had built the lie vague enough to survive curiosity.
They loved her charm because I had given her the room to practice it.
They loved her softness, her wit, her perfectly timed laughter, the way she made people feel chosen when all she was really doing was reading their weaknesses faster than they could hide them.
I knew that about her.
I knew everything about her.
That should have made me powerful.
Instead, it made me irrelevant.
By the time we were at Bellamont University, everyone had accepted the shape of us.
Céline was the beautiful one, the effortless one, the one people invited first. I was the brilliant cousin who came with her, the strange one, the difficult one, the girl who corrected people too often and never knew how to soften a sentence before it cut someone.
Sophia and Anya were supposed to be different.
I thought they would see it.
Sophia had the kind of poise that usually came with discernment.
Anya had enough suspicion in her to distrust anything too pretty.
I thought if I told them the truth, they would understand what Céline had done.
How deeply the deception went. How much of her was borrowed.
How much of me she had consumed and worn beautifully enough that everyone applauded the finished product.
Instead, they looked at me like I was cruel.
They chose her.
Everyone always did.
After that night at the Harbour Club, I stopped pretending not to resent them.
Sophia with her calm little judgments and her voice that never rose because girls like her could afford quiet disapproval.
Anya, with her theatrical loyalty, as if protecting Céline from consequence, made her noble instead of stupid.
They thought I betrayed Céline by telling the truth.
They never asked what it was like to watch someone lie for years and be loved more for every lie.
They never asked what it was like to be useful until you became irrelevant.
Céline noticed something had changed, of course. She asked questions sometimes, but not the right ones. She was very good at sensing tension and very bad at following it when the truth might cost her something.
That was Céline’s true gift.
Not beauty.
Not charm.
Self-preservation.
She could look at a room and know exactly what to do to survive it. But when survival required ignorance, she could become ignorant beautifully.
I still helped her.
That was the sickest part.
Even after Thad. Even after Sophia and Anya.
Even after she kept drifting farther away from me and calling it growth, I still corrected her notes.
I still rewrote her clumsy paragraphs. I still explained cellular mechanisms while she stared at diagrams with the exhausted confusion of someone who had chosen a future by how secure it looked from the outside.
She should have studied art.
I told her that once.
She laughed like I had said something childish.
“Poor girls don’t become artists, Katherine.”
I hated her for saying that. It made me feel guilty for being born with the option to fail when I wanted.
So I helped her with bioscience because I did not know how to stop.
Because if she failed, then the whole structure we had built together would fail with her.
Because if Céline Martin collapsed, people might finally look underneath and see Selena, and somehow, despite everything, I still did not want that.
I wanted her exposed.
I wanted her punished.
I wanted her mine.
The contradictions lived inside me so long they it messed up my head.
Professor Moreau’s lab was supposed to be mine.
I had decided that before applications even opened.
Vincent Moreau was young enough to be mythologized and brilliant enough to deserve it.
The molecular biology department spoke about him with a particular kind of reverence, as if even the older professors resented needing his approval.
His research group was nearly impossible to enter.
He selected students like he was choosing organs for transplant, coldly, carefully, with no interest in anyone’s feelings.
I liked that.
I liked him before I knew him because he seemed like someone who would value the right things.
Precision. Discipline. A mind that did not need to be made palatable. He didn’t need the charm I would borrow from Céline in social situations.
For months, I worked on the proposal.
Not just for the credit, though I did. Not just because I wanted another line on my academic record, though I wanted that too. I worked on it because the idea became mine in a way few things had ever felt mine.
Adaptive cellular response under chronic environmental stress.
The phrase sounded clinical enough to be safe, but beneath it was something I could not stop thinking about.
Cells did not merely endure harm. Under enough repeated pressure, they reorganized around it. Survival became structure. Damage became instruction. I told myself it was science.
Mostly it was.
Sometimes, late at night in my room with Miss Astoria asleep in the chair and the house too quiet around me, I wondered whether I was writing about Céline. Then I dismissed the thought because sentimentality made bad research, and I was not ready to accept my obsession with Céline.
Céline saw the proposal before anyone else did.
She came to the estate one evening in a pink sweater that had once been mine, with her hair pinned back and Thad’s bracelet glittering on her wrist. She looked tired but expensive, which was her favourite kind of fragility.
I was at my desk with articles spread everywhere, notes arranged by theme, draft sections marked in different colours.
She hovered behind me longer than necessary.
“What is that?”
“My proposal for Moreau.”
Her gaze sharpened.
“Can I read?”
“No.”
Her mouth curved. “Why not?”
“Because you’ll say you understand it when you don’t.”
“That’s rude.”
“Come on Selena, we both know this is beyond your scope of abilities.”
She leaned against the edge of my desk, looking at the title page.
“Adaptive Cellular Response Under Chronic Environmental Stress,” she read aloud. “That sounds so sensational.”
“It’s not.”
“It absolutely is.”
I turned the paper face down.
Céline watched the movement.
For a second, something passed across her face that made my hand tighten around the page.
Hunger, maybe. Not for the science itself.
Céline did not hunger for methods sections or literature reviews or the satisfaction of a hypothesis structured cleanly enough to hold.
She hungered for what the proposal represented.
A door.
Another door with a nameplate she wanted to pry loose and carry away.
“You should apply too,” I said, because I was stupid enough to still believe generosity could cure my resentment.
She laughed. “To Moreau’s lab?”
“Why not?”
“Because he would see through me in thirty seconds.”
The honesty startled us both.
Then she smiled, and Céline returned so quickly I almost wondered if I had imagined Selena speaking at all.
“Besides,” she said lightly, “I’m not trying to suffer professionally.”
But she kept looking at the proposal.
I should have hidden it better.
Maybe part of me wanted to believe I did not need to.
* * *
I found out two weeks later.
Professor Moreau’s lab decisions were posted at noon.
I knew I would be selected.
That is not arrogance. It was just facts. My grades, my research experience, my recommendations, the proposal itself. There were very few things in my life I trusted without qualification, but my own competence was one of them.
I opened the email in the university library.
Accepted students were listed alphabetically.
Hart, Elias.
Martin, Céline.
Price, Julian.
No Montgomery.
At first, I thought there had been a mistake, but not emotionally. I thought about it logically.