Katherine loved me. Truly. But love had never once required her to imagine my humiliation before speaking. People like Katherine did not think about labour unless it stopped being done. That was the privilege. Not money. Not houses. NotBellamont Academy. The privilege of believing care appeared naturally around you without wondering who exhausted themselves creating it.
I washed my hands slowly. Then I stripped her bed in silence. Katherine watched me pull off the soaked duvet cover.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “I do.”
She flinched. Good. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I wanted her to feel the shape of what she had said. For once.
Miss Astoria crept out from under the desk while I changed the sheets and rubbed against my ankle apologetically.
“At least someone in this room likes me,” I murmured.
Katherine’s face tightened. “That’s not fair.”
I tucked the clean sheet sharply beneath the mattress corner.
“No,” I agreed. “It isn’t.”
* * *
That night, after Katherine fell asleep at her desk halfway through studying, I carried Miss Astoria back to the cottage with me. My mother sat at the kitchen table, paying bills beneath the yellow light above the stove. She looked up when I entered, holding the cat. “Well,” she said softly. “You stole the rich girl’s cat at last.”
Miss Astoria immediately climbed into my lap when I sat down. I buried my fingers in her fur.
“She forgot to clean the litter box,” I said.
My mother’s expression shifted slightly.
“She’s a child.”
“So am I.” I retort.
Silence settled between us. Then my mother reached across the table and smoothed my hair back from my face the way she used to when I woke from nightmares.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “You are.”
13
Vincent
Blackwater had surrendered completely to the storm by seven in the evening. Rain hammered against the tall windows of my office with a relentless rhythm that blurred the cliffs beyond Westgrave Hall into long streaks of dark grey and churning white foam. Most of the students had already retreated indoors hours earlier, leaving the campus pathways below empty and glistening beneath the storm lamps, their slick stone surfaces reflecting broken fragments of gold light.
I liked Bellamont best in weather like this. Storms had a way of stripping away the careful performances people maintained during fairer days. Umbrellas collapsed. Mascara ran. Conversations shortened into something closer to instinct. Under enough pressure, everyone eventually became honest, even if only for a moment.
I sat alone at my desk, grading the latest round of lab evaluations while the building settled quietly around me.The radiator hissed intermittently beneath the windows, and somewhere down the hallway, a door shut with dull finality, followed by fading footsteps that echoed along the empty corridor. My coffee had gone cold nearly an hour ago, but I drank it anyway, the bitterness grounding me in the present while my mind wandered.
Julian Price’s reflection sat open in front of me, his analysis technically competent but emotionally exhausting in the way ambitious undergraduates often were. He had written several paragraphs about how today’s contamination event had reminded him that scientific excellence required humility.
Jesus Christ.
I crossed them out with a slow, deliberate stroke of my pen. The boy meant well. He always did. But good intentions rarely survived the kind of precision this work demanded.
Outside, thunder rolled low and heavy over the ocean. My thoughts drifted back toward the courtyard conversation from earlier that afternoon despite my best efforts to keep them focused on the evaluations.
Miss Astoria. Of course, the cat mattered to her. It should not have surprised me as much as it had, yet until today, I had unconsciously sorted Céline Martin into categories that left no room for uncomplicated tenderness: Performance. Survival. Manipulation. Intelligence. Hunger. Adaptation.
Not love. Certainly not the sort that attached itself quietly to an anxious white cat. And yet the second she spoke the name aloud in the courtyard, everything in her had shifted. Her posture softened. Her voice lost its careful calculation. Even her anger became cleaner somehow, less guarded, as if the animal represented the last remaining piece of her life that had never required her to perform.
