I walked toward the hallway. His bedroom door stood half open, and I stopped.
No. I told myself.
That was the sane thought. The thought of a woman with any remaining loyalty to self-preservation would obey.
Then I thought of Katherine. Not the fall itself. Not the moment her hand slipped. Katherine standing in my cottage bedroom years earlier with my stolen passport in her hand, finally holding proof that I had betrayed her long before the proposal, long before Thad, long before the terrace. She had searched because anger made her brave enough to look where love had trained her not to.
I stepped into Vincent’s bedroom.
It looked exactly like him. Dark wood. Black sheets pulled tight. Heavy curtains open to the rain. No clutter. No photographs. No objects that suggested childhood, family or any weakness at all. Even his bed looked disciplined.
I checked the obvious places first. Desk drawers, shelves and the wardrobe, but turned up with nothing.
Then I saw the drawer beside the bed. It was closed, but not fully. A thin line of shadow showed at the edge.
My pulse slowed. That was always how it happened before a bad decision.
I opened the drawer.
At first, there was nothing unusual. A book. A pen. A watch box. Then a small black leather case tucked beneath a folded tie with his initials on it. My fingers hovered over it. I lifted it out. The case was old, the leather soft at the edges, not decorative enough to be meaningless. I unfastened it carefully.
Inside was a phone, but it was not Vincent’s. It was not a burner either because I knew that phone.
For one second, my mind refused to arrange the information properly. Pale case with a crack near the lower corner. Small Bellamont crest sticker Katherine had placed there ironically because she said institutional branding was only tolerable when mocked. Faint smear of dried rain damage beneath the screen.
Katherine’s phone.
The phone had fallen on the terrace. I remembered the sharp clatter when she pulled it out to expose me. I remembered it sliding away when her body slipped backwards over the ledge. I remembered my hands closing around her wrist. I remembered looking at her face and seeing the realization of my ultimate betrayal arrive in her eyes.
If Katherine’s phone were here, Vincent would have been there. On the terrace. After. Or maybe even before.
My hand tightened around the leather case.
No.
No, no, no.
Vincent knew.
He didn’t have to guess or suspect it or circle the truth with those beautiful, awful questions. He knew I had let go. He knew Katherine had not simply slipped beyond saving while she ended her own life.
He had stood close enough to collect what she dropped and kept it like a fucking relic.
My breath came in slowly. I sat on the edge of his bed because my legs had gone weak, but I refused to collapse in his bedroom.
The phone was dead, of course. I had heard the crack very clearly. There was no saving it. It did not need to work. Its existence was enough.
Katherine’s last living proof of my betrayal. In Vincent’s room.
I opened the case further and saw something folded beneath the phone. A photocopy of Katherine’s proposal notes.
My stomach twisted. He had kept them together. The phone and the work. The fall and the theft. Katherine’s death and Katherine’s mind. Everything I had taken from her, curated neatly in a drawer by the man who told me he wanted to see me thrive.
I heard his voice from the study, low and still behind the closed door.
I stared at the phone until my vision blurred. The memory rose so violently I almost gagged. Katherine’s hand slipping mine, and her face below the ledge after I let go.
I had let go because saving her would have ended everything I had built. The guilt still lived in me, quiet and heavy, but the end had justified the means. I had survived. That was the only rule that ever mattered.
