The investigator had done great work. Birth records. Old addresses. Police calls from years ago. Employment records. Debt filings. A photograph taken outside a liquor store in Portland, the man in it older than he should have looked, face softened by alcohol and resentment, still carrying enough of Selena in the bones around his eyes to make the resemblance unpleasant.
Daniel Martin.Her father.
I had looked at the photograph once when the file arrived, then put it away. Now I took it out and studied it properly. He was not impressive at all, which irritated me. Monsters should at least have the decency to look worthy of the fear they created. Daniel Martin looked ordinary. Poorly shaved. Heavy around the mouth. The sort of man who probably smelled of cigarettes and old beer, who believed the world had cheated him. And yet this was the man who had helped make Selena Martin fluent in fear before she was old enough to name it.
I turned the page. The investigator’s notes were neat. Current location uncertain but likely within Maine. Occasional sightings in Portland and Bangor. Known to contact formeracquaintances for money. History of unstable employment. Alcohol dependency suspected. No active restraining order found. Possible awareness of ex-wife and daughter’s relocation unknown.
Possible awareness.
That could change.
I sat at my desk with the file open beneath the lamp. For the first time that night, the restlessness quieted.
If Daniel Martin found her, Céline would panic. She would try to manage it herself first because that was what she did. She would hide it from Sophia and Anya for as long as possible. She would not tell her mother unless forced, because her mother had already survived him once. She would assess every hallway, every locked door, every walk back from campus in the rain. She would need safety. And after Thad, after the file, after the proposal, after everything I had broken and stripped from her, she would understand exactly what I could provide.
Security. Silence. Money. Rooms with locks no one else could open. A man more dangerous than the one she feared. She would come to me. I would make myself the only logical answer.
My phone sat beside the file. For a long moment, I did not touch it. There were lines even I recognized. That was perhaps the funniest part. I knew exactly what I was about to do. I knew the cruelty of it, the arrogance, the vulgarity of using an old terror to create a new dependence. I knew she would hate me if she discovered it.
No.Whenshe discovered it. Céline was too intelligent not to find out eventually. But later was not now. And when later came, I would deal with the consequences.
I picked up the phone and called the number my investigator had marked as most likely to reach him. It rang five times. Six. Then a rough male voice answered, suspicious and already irritated.
“Who’s this?”
I looked at Daniel Martin’s photograph beneath the lamplight.
Then I smiled.
“Mr. Martin,” I said. “I believe we should talk about your daughter.”
25
Selena (Past)
Bellamont University made my reinvention feel almost respectable.
At the Academy, Céline had been a story Katherine and I told well enough that people eventually stopped questioning it. At the university, she became something closer to official. My student ID said Céline Martin. My dorm assignment said Céline Martin. My class schedule, tuition portal, email address, and welcome packet all bore the name as if it had always belonged to me. Selena existed only in places paperwork had not touched.
In my mother’s mouth. In the staff cottage. In the old sketchbooks I kept hidden beneath sweaters Katherine no longer wanted.
The morning I moved into the dorm, my mother cried quietly while folding the last of my clothes into a suitcase that had once belonged to Mrs. Montgomery. “It’s not like I’m going far,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “It’s fifteen minutes.”
My mother smiled without looking at me. “I know.”
“I’ll still come back.”
“I know that too.”
But her hands slowed over a cream blouse with pearl buttons, and for a second the silence between us became too full to ignore. Most of the clothes were not mine in any meaningful way. Katherine had given me almost everything. Dresses, cardigans, coats, shoes, scarves, even the silk robe folded at the bottom of the suitcase because she said dorm bathrooms were depressing and I should not let communal living destroy my standards. My mother knew where all of it came from. She knew how much of me had been assembled from things Katherine no longer needed.
“Mom,” I said softly.
She looked up.
I wanted to say something honest. I wanted to tell her that I was scared Bellamont would eventually notice the fraud underneath. I wanted to admit that I still felt like a little girl holding a Porsche key too tightly in the Montgomery driveway, realizing that the same object could be impossible for one person and disposable for another.
Instead, I smiled. “I’ll call every day.”
