“No, come in.”
Her gaze moved past me toward the kitchen, where Anya laughed at something Sophia said. For a moment, the longing on Katherine’s face was so naked it made my chest ache. Then it disappeared.
“I just brought these.”
She placed the notes on my desk but did not sit on my bed like she usually did.
“Stay,” I said.
“I have work.”
“You always have work.”
“So do you,” she replied, looking at the notes.
“That’s why I have you.” I smiled weakly.
The joke landed wrong. I knew it before her face changed. For a second, Katherine looked as if I had taken something soft and pressed on it deliberately. Then she smiled.
“It’s fine.”
I hated that phrase. By then, it was becoming one of the languages we used most fluently. She left a few minutes later. I found Sophia standing in the kitchen afterwards, watching the door close behind Katherine with an expression I could not read.
“What?” I asked.
Sophia looked at me. For one second, I thought she might tell me. She almost did. I know that now. Instead, she only said, “Be careful with her.”
I laughed because I did not understand.
“With Katherine? She’s harmless.”
Anya, sitting on the counter with ramen in one hand, went very still. Sophia’s face softened in a way that made me uncomfortable.
“No,” she said quietly. “She isn’t.”
I should have asked what she meant. I should have forced the truth into the room before it grew teeth. But Thad texted me then, asking if I wanted to come over, and Katherine’s corrected notes sat on my desk waiting to make me better than I was, and Sophia and Anya were still there, still mine, still choosing me in ways I did not yet know how to deserve.
So I ignored the warning.
26
Céline
The first call came while Miss Astoria was trying to drown herself in my water glass.
She had shoved her whole face into the glass on my nightstand and was pawing at it with the offended determination of a widow discovering betrayal in a will. I pulled the glass away before she could tip it over.
“Stop that,” I muttered.
Miss Astoria glared at me, water dripping from her whiskers.
“You have a bowl.”
She sneezed once, loudly, as if the suggestion itself insulted her.
I was lying on my bed with my laptop balanced against my thighs, Katherine’s proposal open on one side of the screen and my own scattered notes on the other. The document looked slightly less humiliating now. Still messy, still full of questionsI hated needing to ask, but less like evidence of fraud. The question I had typed at the top stared back at me.
Why did Katherine write this?
