Chapter 36
Selena
I walked across campus with my coat buttoned to my throat and the bloody handkerchief locked safely inside Vincent’s apartment, tucked into the drawer beside my bed like a second, quieter heart.
Every step felt borrowed. Every building looked both familiar and entirely foreign, as though the university had shifted slightly while I slept and now all its old angles pointed accusingly toward me.
Vincent found me near the cliffs, just beyond the entrance to Westgrave Hall.
I stood at the iron railing above the water, watching the ocean hurl itself against the rocks below in dark, violent bursts.
Blackwater looked exactly as it always had—grey sky, grey sea, wet stone, old money rotting tastefully beneath ivy.
I had once believed this place was beautiful.
Maybe it still was. Maybe beautiful things could also be unbearable.
He stopped beside me, not close enough to touch.
“You missed lab,” he said.
“I quit.”
I kept my eyes on the water.
“I’m not going back. Not to the lab. Not to bioscience. Not to your department or Katherine’s proposal or any of it.”
Rain misted softly over my hair and coat—not enough to be called weather, only enough for Blackwater to remind me it still had hands. Vincent remained silent.
“Good,” he finally said.
I turned to him sharply. He looked almost amused.
“You’re supposed to argue.”
“Why would I do that?” He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
“You blackmailed me into that lab,” I said. “You used Katherine’s work to keep me there.”
“Oh, I did do that, didn’t I?”
“And now you’re fine with me walking away?”
“I wanted you close,” he said quietly. “I never wanted you trapped inside her life forever.”
Something in my chest tightened. I hated him for naming the exact thing I had not been brave enough to admit to myself.
Katherine’s proposal had stopped feeling like a ladder long ago.
It had become a room I had locked myself inside because leaving it meant confessing I had never truly wanted to be there.
I had wanted the door. The prestige. Professor Moreau’s attention.
Bellamont’s approval. I had wanted everyone to believe Céline Martin had earned her place in a world built to reject girls like Selena. But I had never wanted the work itself.
Katherine had.
And she was dead.
I looked back at the water. “I don’t want to keep surviving inside her mind.”
Vincent did not answer immediately. When he did, his voice was quieter than the rain. “Then don’t.”
I laughed once, softly. “Is it that easy?”
“No.”
At least he did not lie.
I pushed my hands deeper into my coat pockets.
My fingers brushed my phone, the edge of my keys, the folded tissue Sophia had pressed into my palm that morning because she said I looked like someone who might need it.
“I don’t know what to do now,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken the truth aloud.
Vincent looked out at the sea with me. “You know exactly what you want to do. You simply do not know how to want it without apologizing.”
The words moved through me slowly.
Art.
The thought arrived almost shyly, which felt absurd after everything else inside me had arrived like a blade.
Sketchbooks hidden beneath sweaters. Margins filled with faces no one else ever saw.
Miss Astoria asleep in impossible positions.
My mother’s hands folding sheets. Katherine’s profile drawn with merciless honesty.
Every true thing I had ever created had been made in secret, as though beauty were an indulgence girls like me could only steal in the narrow spaces between survival.
“I can’t stay here,” I said.
“No.”
The answer came too quickly. I looked at him.
“No?”
“Your reputation is damaged,” he said. “Not destroyed—not yet. But damaged enough that the administration will keep watching, and you cannot live beneath that kind of attention forever.”
“You sound very calm about ruining my life.”
“I am calm because it is not the life you wanted.”
“It was still mine.”
“Yes,” he said. “And I am sorry for that.”
The apology was so quiet I almost missed it. Vincent Moreau did not offer sorry easily. Perhaps he barely believed in the word. But there it stood between us in the mist, with nowhere left to hide.
I looked away first. “What are you offering?”
“France.”
I turned to him slowly. “France? Do you see the irony?”
“Yes. That’s why I chose it.”
“You want me to run away to France with you?”
“No.”
I blinked. For once, he had surprised me.
Vincent’s gaze remained on the water. “I want you to go where Céline Martin can die quietly, and Selena Martin can decide whether she wants to live.”
The cliff wind moved between us.
“And you?”
His mouth curved faintly, but there was no triumph in it. “I’ll follow.”
“You would leave Bellamont, your lab, your reputation—for me?”
He looked at me then. “My reputation has always bored me.”
“Your family? I doubt they would approve of you running off to France with your student.”
“My family has waited years for me to become a scandal. It would be generous of me to finally give them satisfaction.”
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. Vincent watched my face as though the sound mattered more than anything else.
“What would I do in France?” I asked, though the answer had already begun to take shape inside me.
“Study art.”
“I don’t even have a proper portfolio.”
“You do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You have sketchbooks full of work you refuse to treat seriously because taking yourself seriously would make failure possible.”
I stared at him. “You are unbearable. I hate when you’re right.”
“No,” he said softly. “You hate that I know you better than you know yourself.”
The sea struck the rocks below again, white foam shattering against black stone. For a moment I let myself imagine it—not Bellamont, not Blackwater, not the terrace or Katherine’s rain or Daniel’s voice on the phone.
France. A studio filled with light. My mother in a kitchen that finally belonged to her.
Miss Astoria sleeping in a sunlit window, pretending she had personally conquered Europe.
Sophia and Anya visiting, complaining about the furniture.
Vincent somewhere nearby, not owning me, not saving me, simply there.
The want was so sharp it frightened me.
“What about Katherine?” I asked.
Vincent’s expression changed—not because he had forgotten her, but because neither of us ever would.
“What about her?”
“I don’t get to simply leave.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t. You will carry her. You already do. I’ll keep working on her proposal too.”
My throat tightened. “I don’t know how to make that enough.”
“It won’t be.”
I closed my eyes. The mist settled on my lashes. That was the closest thing to absolution either of us deserved—not forgiveness, not peace, not some clean moral ending where Katherine’s ghost stepped aside because I had suffered enough. It would never be enough. I would carry her anyway.
When I opened my eyes, Vincent was still watching me.
“What name would you use in France?” he asked.
I understood without needing an explanation.
For years, names had been rooms I entered depending on who waited inside them.
Selena was poverty and fear and my mother’s tired hands, Daniel’s voice, the staff cottage, the girl who wanted too much and knew better than to ask.
Céline was silk and lies and Bellamont, Thad’s hand on my waist, Katherine’s corrections, everyone’s admiration, Katherine’s death. Both were mine.
I looked out at Blackwater one last time. “Selena,” I said.
Vincent’s face softened in that terrible, almost reverent way that made me want to hurt him and touch him at the same time.
“Selena,” he repeated.
This time I did not flinch.
* * *
My mother did not cry when I told her. That was how I knew she had been expecting something to break eventually.
She sat across from me in the cottage kitchen, hands folded around a cup of tea she had not touched.
The little room looked exactly as it always had—narrow, warm, painfully clean.
Outside the window, the Montgomery estate stretched green and silver beneath the rain, the main house half-hidden by mist. I had spent years staring at that house as though wanting hard enough could turn it into destiny.
Now it looked only like a place where my mother had been tired for too long.
“France,” she said.
“Yes.”
“With Professor Moreau.”
I looked down at my hands. “Vincent.”
“And this is what you want?”
I had lied to her thousands of times—small, pretty, necessary lies about where clothes came from, where I had been, what I wanted, why I was tired, why Katherine’s death had shattered me in ways grief alone could never explain. This time I did not want to lie.
“I think so,” I said.
“Are you safe with him?”
The question should have been simple. It wasn’t.
No, because Vincent had arranged Daniel’s return.
Yes, because Daniel would never return.
No, because Vincent knew every terrible thing I had done.
Yes, because he had placed his own terrible thing in my hands and called it trust.
No, because he was dangerous.
Yes, because I was too.
“I don’t know how to answer that in a way that sounds normal,” I said.
My mother’s mouth trembled. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed—a small, tired sound. “Normal has not done much for us.”
That almost broke me. I reached across the table and took her hand. Her fingers were warm and rough from years of work that had kept both of us alive.
“Come with me.”
She looked at me.
“Not in the same apartment,” I added quickly. “Not with us. Unless you want to. But near me. France. Anywhere. You don’t have to stay here. You don’t have to work for them anymore.”
Her eyes filled, as though the possibility had arrived too gently to be trusted. “Selena.”
“I mean it.”
“With what money?”
“Mine,” I said. Then, because that was not entirely true yet, I added, “His. For now. Mine later.”