4. Simon #2
Everyone except Violet. She'd come back from the memorial service, dropped a crisp briefing folder on my desk, and treated me like a working man with a company to run.
She only said Elena's name when the business needed it.
She never once tensed up standing near me.
It was the most grounding thing anyone did for me during that stretch, and she likely had no idea she was doing it at all.
"I'll call you tomorrow, Dad." I ended the call before he could push.
I wouldn't call tomorrow. He knew it as well as I did. That polite fiction had run on a loop between us for years.
I closed the unread reports, set the laptop on the nightstand, and switched off the bedside lamp.
Some time later, lying flat in the dark, I heard a noise.
It came from down the hall, faint, muffled by the drywall. I lay still and held my breath, and then it came again.
A burst of laughter.
I shot straight up in bed.
I threw off the covers and padded barefoot into the chilly hallway, stopping in front of Olivia's closed door. A thin yellow sliver of light spilled out underneath it. I raised my knuckles to knock, then stalled, my fist hovering.
She'd been barricaded in that room for months on end.
The therapist had told me to let her come out on her own terms, when she was ready.
But the sound on the other side of the painted wood wasn't grief.
It had slipped past whatever she'd been holding in place for months.
I hadn't heard my niece laugh in eight long months.
I rapped my knuckles three times against the wood and waited a beat. When no protest came, I turned the brass handle and eased the door open.
Olivia sat cross-legged in the middle of her mattress, a lit tablet propped against her thigh. She snapped her head up at me, and her expression went flat.
"It's late." I kept my voice easy. "Why aren't you asleep?"
She dropped her gaze back to the glowing screen. "I was just reading a book."
"What's the story about?" I leaned against the doorframe.
She looked back up, openly suspicious. "Aren't you going to order me to turn the screen off and go to sleep?"
"You have nothing scheduled tomorrow. You can sleep in."
She let out a small, startled sound, and the corner of her mouth twitched up into the start of a smile. "Okay." She patted the empty stretch of duvet beside her.
I crossed the messy room and took a careful seat on the edge of her bed.
"The plot's about a hardcore fan and a famous idol." She found her place on the page.
I shot her a baffled look. "What's an idol?"
She slapped a dramatic hand over her own face. "Oh my god. You're so old."
"I'm not even thirty-five yet."
"Keyword being yet. You're heading there fast." She held the tablet up like an exhibit.
"An idol is basically a huge Asian pop singer.
They have these terrifyingly big, dedicated fan bases.
So this book's about a fan who's obsessed with one idol.
She figures he doesn't even know she breathes, but then, through a crazy accident, she lands a job working for his management company.
The female lead is so cute. She tries to learn Korean just for him.
She's terrible at it, but she keeps trying anyway. It's the sweetest thing."
I laughed, already invested in the ridiculous made-up drama despite myself.
"Mom always used to complain that internet fan fiction wasn't real literature." Olivia's tone went wistful. "She was so wrong about that."
I nodded. Elena had believed in old-school, traditional romance, books that had survived agents and editors and a few rounds of someone telling the writer no. A real book, she'd say, earned its spot on the shelf. She'd told Olivia as much more than once.
"There's nothing wrong with enjoying either one," I said.
"I know that now. And the crazy part is, this author writes both.
She writes wildly popular fan fiction, but also traditional, original romance.
The fan fiction's what she's most famous for online.
She writes so well it's practically poetry.
She writes about love and somehow makes it feel like something you could hold, real and worth wanting.
" Olivia pulled a knee up to her chest, balancing the tablet against it. "I can't wait to fall in love someday."
I stared at her. Her dark eyes were bright and lit up, and she leaned forward, her words tumbling out faster and with more heat than they had in months.
"Love isn't all that great, kid, you know." I couldn't help myself.
She whipped her head around to glare at me, her mouth dropping open. "Oh my god, Uncle Simon, you seriously had to ruin the moment and say that!"
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." I laughed and threw both hands up in surrender. "Tell me the name of this brilliant author."
"Her pen name's V.M. Ashby," she said, proud.
My whole body went still.
It was the name from Devika's slide. Five million rabid followers, dropping serialized chapters every Sunday at midnight, legal identity a blank. And here, in my house, was Olivia, propped up on her pillows at one in the morning, reading her work.
"You're a big fan, then." I fought to keep my voice level.
"Of course I am! She actually answers comment threads sometimes.
She takes the time to talk to her readers.
She wrote this deeply personal post last month about dealing with grief, and it was so well put that everyone on the platform was sharing it.
" Olivia's hands fluttered as she spoke, the tablet resting against her drawn-up knee.
"She writes like she understands the ugly things in life. Like she's lived through them."
She kept talking, and I sat back and listened.
She read me an angsty passage out loud. I asked questions about the plot, and she kept going, summarizing character arcs and wild fan theories.
Somewhere in the blur of the night, I lay back on the mattress and let my eyes close for what I figured was a minute.
I woke to a pale wash of morning light through the blinds and a vicious crick stabbing at my neck.
Olivia was sound asleep on the mattress beside me, the dead tablet face-down on the wrinkled duvet, her dark hair fanned across her face.
For eight months, I'd wanted a single night where she was just safely there, and I was allowed to be there alongside her. Last night, because of a made-up online book, I'd finally gotten it.
I peeled myself off the bed slow, pulling the heavy duvet up over her shoulder. I clicked off the lamp and slipped back down the hall to my own bedroom.
I had to find V.M. Ashby.
It wasn't for Devika's pitch deck anymore.
It wasn't for the projected launch metrics or the corporate revenue.
I needed to find her for the raw, hungry look on Olivia's face when she'd whispered, she writes like she really understands things.
For the sound of laughter coming through the drywall.
For giving me back this one good night with my niece.
I didn't fall back asleep.
Later that morning, I walked into the Beckett Media tower in a sharp, dark purple suit, my eyes gritty and heavy from the sleep I hadn't gotten. I stepped off the private elevator and glanced down the long corridor toward the executive assistant station.
The desk was empty.
I scanned the area, confused. No trench coat draped over the back of the chair, no steaming mug of coffee waiting on my side of the desk, no printed briefing folder squared away in its usual spot.
Violet was always here before me. I couldn't recall the last morning her station had sat empty when I arrived.
Frowning, I looked down at the clean surface of the desk.
Her soft-leather notebook sat right there, left open. The page facing the ceiling was packed with frantic handwriting.
I stopped where I stood.
She practically lived in that notebook. I'd caught her writing in it at her desk in the early mornings, often through her lunch hour.
Her pen always flew in a bizarre shorthand, and she had a habit of angling the cover toward her chest the second she heard the elevator chime.
I'd watched her snap it shut and shove it into a drawer more times than I could count. I'd never read a single word of it.
I rationalized hard. The daily schedule might be jotted in there. The Beatrice Holm call list. The revised strategy-team agenda.
I also thought, caught somewhere between honesty and a flat-out invasion of privacy, that I wanted to know what she wrote.
"Mr. Beckett," a crisp voice cut in.
I flinched and spun around. A woman marched toward me down the carpeted hall.
She was short, neat, and carried the stiff, combative bearing of an HR rep who'd learned to walk into rooms that were never glad to see her.
Her face was vaguely familiar in the unhelpful way of the thousands of faces in this building. Seen, filed, never placed.
"I'm Alice, from Human Resources," she said. "The head of the department needs your final confirmation on a few urgent items."
"Of course." I turned back toward my office door. "Come right through."
In one quick motion, I snatched the leather notebook off the desk.