“No,” she said. “Younamedme. 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.
