Chapter 34 #2
When Katherine reached for her phone, I understood what she intended before Céline did. Not only had her hand moved quickly, but her face had shifted from rage to purpose. She had found the single action that might force the world back into alignment.
Céline saw it a heartbeat later.
She lunged, and Katherine stepped back.
The stone was slick.
It required almost nothing—a heel sliding, a hip striking the low ledge, a startled cry that belonged more to surprise than fear. Céline caught Katherine’s wrist before the fall could become final.
The phone clattered across the wet stone.
Katherine’s bag spilled near the ledge. Papers fanned out.
An old, dark passport. A sketchbook with a softened black cover, already swelling from rain.
The book fell open; pages fluttered against the stone.
Drawings blurred under water—a cat, hands folding cloth, Katherine’s own face half-finished and rendered with merciless accuracy.
Céline had drawn her well.
Katherine hung suspended above the courtyard. Céline lay flat against the stone, both hands locked around her wrist, rain streaming down her face. She was crying—ugly, genuine tears, her whole body straining with the effort of holding on.
For one suspended moment, I believed she would save her.
That would have been almost disappointing.
Then Katherine looked up, and Céline looked at her face.
And everything altered.
I watched the thought arrive, swift and complete.
In a single breath, Céline saw the entire future: Katherine rescued, Katherine speaking, Katherine exposing the stolen proposal, the passport, the false name, the years of careful fraud.
Bellamont turning against her. Thad leaving.
Sophia and Anya reconsidering their loyalty.
Her mother learning enough to look at her differently forever.
Céline Martin collapsing back into Selena from the staff cottage.
Then she saw the alternative.
Silence. Flowers. Sympathy. Grief shaped into whatever story the living required.
Céline’s hands tightened once around Katherine’s wrist.
She did not release her immediately. That detail matters. People prefer to believe evil arrives when feeling ceases. They are wrong. The worst choices are made when one feels everything and still chooses survival.
Katherine understood. I saw it bloom across her face.
“No,” she whispered. The word barely carried.
Céline’s mouth moved.
I’m sorry.
Her fingers loosened, and Katherine fell.
For a moment, there was only rain.
Céline remained draped over the ledge, one arm still reaching downward as though some animal part of her had changed its mind too late. Then she made a sound I had never heard from another human being and hope never to hear from her again—something torn raw from the deepest register of grief.
She scrambled backwards, stumbled upright, and looked around wildly.
I stepped deeper into the shadow so she did not see me.
Panic made her careless. She seized her own bag near the door, gathered a few loose papers, then noticed Katherine’s bag by the ledge.
For one frozen second, she hesitated. I watched the smaller, messier decision form.
She snatched up the sketchbook—recognizing it as hers—clutched it to her chest, and reached for the scattered papers.
Her hands shook too violently to collect them all.
Footsteps sounded somewhere below, and Céline ran.
She left the phone. She left the bag. She left far too much.
Careless with the first murder, I would tell her later, though at the time I still wondered whether murder was the accurate word.
I waited until the terrace door slammed behind her.
Then I dropped my cigarette, crushed it beneath my heel, and walked to the ledge.
The phone lay face-down in a thin river of rainwater. I picked it up. The case was pale, cracked at one corner, a Bellamont crest sticker peeling on the back. It had locked itself, naturally, but its value lay elsewhere. I slipped it into my coat pocket.
I gathered the bag next. The passport was inside—old, expired, damp.
A strange relic, given what I had just witnessed.
I replaced it carefully, then collected the loose pages I could reach.
Leftover sketches. Notes. Printed drafts.
The proposal itself, annotated in Katherine’s sharp, uncompromising hand.
I took those pages too.
Then I looked over the ledge.
Katherine lay below in the courtyard, half-shadowed by rain and stone. At that distance she already resembled a tableau arranged by tragedy—a pale shape on wet pavement, a girl transformed into a tragic event.
I descended at a leisurely pace. That may sound cruel, and perhaps it was.
But I already understood that the difference between seconds and minutes would matter less than what I chose to do once I reached her.
The courtyard was deserted. The storm had driven everyone indoors. Katherine lay twisted near the base of the wall, one arm bent at an unnatural angle, rain soaking through her dress. Blood had begun to pool beneath her head, diluted by water until it looked less dramatic than it should have.
She was still breathing, but barely.
Her eyes opened when I crouched beside her. Recognition moved across them slowly, like something surfacing through deep water.
“Professor…” she whispered.
Extraordinary, the dignity people attempt even while dying.
I studied her. She was in pain. Terrified. Bleeding into the rain. Still lucid enough to understand that my presence meant the story had gone wrong.
Her fingers twitched toward my coat.
“Help… Céline…”
I could have.
That is the only honest way to tell it. I could have called for help. I could have shouted. I could have pressed my hand to the wound and performed the ordinary moral gesture. She might still have died. Most likely would have.
Instead, I thought of Céline’s face above the ledge—utterly bare in the moment she understood herself. She had looked stunning. That face did not deserve to be hidden behind bars.
I had spent my life collecting fractures. Here was one split wide open by survival, monstrous and grieving and more alive than any person I had ever seen.
Katherine made a small, wet sound.
Rain struck my face.
I drew the embroidered handkerchief from my coat pocket—white linen, my initials stitched in one corner by a woman my mother once employed for pointless domestic refinements.
I had carried one for years because men like my father believed small rituals of gentility mattered even when their hands were filthy.
Katherine’s eyes followed the movement. For a single second, she understood exactly what was happening.
That understanding made the act intimate.
I placed the handkerchief over her mouth and nose and held it there.
Her body offered one last stubborn protest—a weak thrash, a sound swallowed by linen and rain. Her eyes remained locked on mine, wide with disbelief, as though even then she expected the world to honour what was supposed to happen to girls like her.
When her breathing stopped, the rain continued.
A life had ended beneath my hand, and the storm simply kept falling, indifferent and thorough.
I folded the handkerchief afterwards and returned it to my pocket.
I kept it.
Not as a memento of Katherine’s fracture.
As a memento of my own.
Because that was the night I stopped being merely curious about Céline Martin.
Curiosity has limits. Obsession does not.
I looked up toward the terrace. Empty now. The low ledge dark with rain.
Somewhere beyond Westgrave, Céline was probably running through campus with her sketchbook clutched to her chest, sobbing hard enough to make herself ill, already rehearsing the first careful layer of the lie that would save her.
She would call someone. Or not. She would return later, feigning shock.
She would let the word suicide settle around Katherine Montgomery—a lonely, brilliant, unstable girl. It would not strain belief.
I could help shape that story.
I had money. A name. Connections. A university that preferred tragedy to scandal. A police department that understood Bellamont’s donors mattered more than dead girls with complicated emotional histories.
By morning, Katherine would be remembered as lonely, brilliant, unstable.
By the end of the week, Céline would be devastated, helpful, saintly.
The story would hold because everyone would want it to.
I stood in the rain with Katherine’s phone in one pocket, her notes in another, her bag at my feet, and my father’s lesson moving through me like blood.
Do not admire damage.
I smiled then, though there was no humour in it.
Too late.
I had found something far more beautiful than broken porcelain.