Chapter 28 #3
For one second, neither of us moved. Then she looked back at me slowly, rain on her cheeks, eyes bright with something that frightened me because it was not only anger.
“You think I should have been grateful forever,” she said.
“You should have been honest once.”
“You wanted me close enough to need you and small enough to stay beneath you.”
“That is not true.”
“It is.” Her voice broke on the word, then steadied. “You liked me better when I was Selena in the cottage. When I needed your dresses and your homework and your family’s permission to exist. The second people wanted Céline without you standing beside me; you hated me.”
I wanted to deny it. I couldn’t.
The worst truths are the ones you can only fight by becoming uglier.
“So what?” I said. “You became Céline because I let you. You think any of those people would have looked at you twice if they knew what you were?”
Her face went still. There. I had found the wound.
I pressed harder because pain had made me stupid.
“Trailer trash in designer hand-me-downs,” I said. “That’s all you were when you came here. That’s all you are underneath.”
The second I said it, I knew I had gone too far. It was unforgivable.
Céline stared at me with a face I had never seen before. Not hurt. Not anger. But the absence of any emotion at all.
Like something inside her had stepped back and closed a door.
“I loved you,” she said quietly.
The words should have softened me, but they didn’t. Because I loved her too, and look what that had made of us.
“No,” I said. “You used me.”
“And you owned me.”
“I protected you.”
“You collected me.”
“I made you.”
Céline laughed then, soft and devastating.
“No,” she said. “You named me. There’s a difference. I am exactly who I was meant to be.”
The rain fell harder.
Water ran beneath my shoes. My hair stuck to my face. The passport in my coat pocket pressed against my ribs like evidence of every year I had misunderstood the shape of my own grief.
I pulled out my phone.
Céline’s eyes dropped to it immediately.
“What are you doing?”
“What I should have done years ago.”
“Katherine.”
I opened the email app with shaking fingers.
Dean Waverly.
Professor Moreau.
The academic integrity office.
I did not know who should receive it first, only that someone would. Someone would see the proposal. Someone would see the passport. Someone would see Selena Martin underneath Céline, and finally, finally, the world would stop rewarding her for theft.
Céline moved toward me.
I stepped back.
“Don’t.”
“Give me the phone.”
“No.”
“Katherine.”
“I said no.”
Her face twisted. “Please.”
The word should have mattered to me. It almost did.
Then I remembered being fifteen and crying while she stood in my doorway with my passport hidden under her bed.
I remembered Thad’s hands on her waist.
I remembered Sophia and Anya looking at me like I was disgusting for telling the truth.
I remembered Moreau choosing her name over mine.
“No,” I said. “I’m done protecting you.”
“I’ll lose everything.”
“Yes, that’s the point.” The satisfaction that moved through me then was so clean it scared me, but not enough to stop.
“You don’t mean that,” she said.
“I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You have no idea what I mean anymore.”
“I know you.”
“You know what you needed me to be.”
Her face crumpled for half a second before she caught it.
And because I was cruel now, because she had made me cruel or because I had always been capable of it and only needed the right wound, I said, “I hope they expel you. I hope Thad finds out. I hope your mother knows exactly what you became inside that house.”
Céline’s eyes went flat.
“My mother has nothing to do with this.”
“She has everything to do with this. She raised you.”
“Katherine. Stop.”
“She cleaned our floors while you learned to pretend you belonged on them.”
“Stop.”
“And now look at you. Wearing my clothes, submitting my work, sleeping with the boy I wanted, standing here acting like you are the injured party because poor Selena Martin never had enough.”
She moved to shove me, and my heel slipped while I tried to dodge.
At first, I thought I would catch myself. That is the strange thing. Catastrophe begins with denial. A small, stupid certainty that the body will fix what the mind has not yet understood.
My shoe slid on the rain-slick stone. My hip struck the low ledge behind me. The world tilted violently, sky and terrace and Céline’s white face spinning in one impossible movement.
Then I was over. For one suspended second, there was no falling.
Only air.
Only my hand scraping against wet stone.
Only Céline screaming my name.
But she caught me.
Her hand closed around my wrist so tightly that pain shot up my arm.
The phone fell from my other hand and clattered somewhere above us. My body slammed against the outside of the ledge, shoulder striking stone, legs hanging over nothing. The drop below opened black and wet and endless, the courtyard stones far beneath us shining under rain.
I couldn’t breathe.
“Céline,” I gasped.
She was on her stomach over the ledge, both hands around my wrist now, face twisted with panic.
“I’ve got you,” she said.
Her voice was frantic.
For one second, hope arrived so violently it hurt.
She had me.
She had me.
I looked up at her through rain and terror, and for that one second, everything else vanished. The proposal. Thad. The passport. The years of love and resentment tangled too tightly to separate. She was crying now, openly, hair falling around her face, arms shaking as she tried to pull me up.
“Don’t let go,” I said.
“I won’t.”
She meant it. I know she meant it then. That is the part that matters.
For one brief, shining second, Selena loved me enough to save me.
Then she looked at me. Really looked. And I saw the thought arrive.
A small shift first. Her eyes moved from my face to the terrace behind her, where my phone lay somewhere in the rain. Then back to me. Her breathing changed. Her grip tightened once, painfully, her body and mind fighting over a decision to make.
If I lived, I would ruin her.
Not maybe. Not someday. Immediately.
I saw her see it.
The horrifying clarity of it passed between us without either of us speaking.
My life meant the end of hers as she knew it.
My death meant silence. Sympathy. More attention from grief.
Another tragedy, Bellamont would soften with flowers and official statements.
Katherine Montgomery, brilliant and lonely, gone before anyone knew how much she carried.
And Céline would survive. She had always been good at that.
“No,” I whispered.
Her face broke, but not into cruelty. That would have been easier.
It broke into sorrow. Into apology. Into something so tender and terrible that I understood before her fingers moved.
“Selena,” I said.
Her mouth trembled. The rain blurred her face. Or maybe I was crying. I could not tell anymore. For a moment, I thought she might still pull me up. Then her grip loosened.
Terror tore through me.
“No!”
She was sobbing now, but silently, which was somehow worse. Her lips formed words I could barely hear over the rain and wind.
I’m sorry.
Then she let go, and the world dropped away.
For one second, I saw her above me, pale against the storm, one hand still reaching over the ledge as if some part of her had changed its mind too late.
Then there was only rain, air, and stone rushing up from below.
And the last thing I understood before everything ended was that even in death, I had not been chosen.
I had only become the thing she could not afford to keep.