I stood too quickly. My legs trembled.
“Tell me again,” I said.
His eyes stayed locked on mine.
“Katherine was alive when I reached her.”
I gripped the edge of the table.
“No.”
“She was dying,” he said, calm as ever. “But not dead.”
“No.”
The word came out smaller the second time, and I hated the sound of it. Hated him. Hated Katherine for refusing to die cleanly enough to keep my version of the story intact.
Vincent’s face shifted, just slightly. For one heartbeat, I saw the answer before he spoke it. He had expected my horror. He had perhaps even expected my disgust. What he had not expected was this particular wound—the wound of discovering I was less guilty than I had believed.
“I could have called for help,” he said.
My stomach turned over.
“Stop.”
“I didn’t.”
“Stop.”
“I ended it.”
Something inside me broke open so quietly I almost missed the fracture.
Katherine had been alive.
After the fall. After my fingers had loosened. After I had run through the rain, clutching my sketchbook to my chest, sobbing until I was sick behind a locked bathroom door in Westgrave Hall. While I was already becoming the girl who would mourn her, Katherine had still been breathing on wet stone.
My mouth filled with the taste of metal.
“She said your name,” Vincent said.
I looked up sharply.
The room snapped back into focus.
“What?”
His expression did not soften. That was mercy, perhaps—the only kind he knew how to give.
“She recognized me too.”
I pressed one hand over my mouth.
Vincent watched me the way he always watched—measuring, waiting, cataloguing the exact second my mask slipped.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“You know what I did.”
