5. Violet
FIVE
VIOLET
I dialed my mother's number from the only restroom on the forty-seventh floor with full-door stalls, which made it the safest place in the building for the conversation I was about to endure.
Simon would never walk in, and the rest of the executive suite sat deserted.
I stood at the sink a moment before locking the stall, meeting my own reflection and listening to the dead quiet of the floor.
Today was my mother's birthday.
I'd been awake since five that morning. After I got back from the board meeting the night before, I'd dropped into my reading chair and stared at the wall, the laptop and the notebook both within reach and both untouched.
The image of the V.M. Ashby slide was still burned onto the back of my eyelids, and my mother's birthday reminder blinked on my phone.
Both heavy things had lived inside me overnight, side by side.
When I woke at dawn, a quiet dread was already blooming in my chest, the same one I'd dragged into every phone call home for years.
It wasn't a question of love. I did love her.
But loving my mother and talking to my mother had become two different things, and I'd never found a way to make them fit together.
I'd been so far inside my own head that I'd walked out of my apartment without slipping the leather notebook into my tote.
I'd scribbled in it on the subway to bleed off the nerves, and when I stepped off the train, I didn't bother to tuck it away.
I carried it open through the main lobby, into the elevator, and across the floor to my desk, setting it down without a second thought.
Then I marched to the bathroom, locked the stall, and dialed her number.
She answered on the second ring.
"Happy birthday, Mom."
"Oh, sweetheart." Her breath went long and slow through the receiver. "Thank you for remembering."
She always said that. Thank you for remembering. As if the problem with our relationship had ever been my memory.
We spent a minute on nothing. The crisp weather in Cleveland.
The state of her garden. Xavier had sent a huge bouquet, arrived right at eight in the morning, and she'd cried a little because he was so thoughtful.
The fact that he'd remembered, despite everything he had going on at the hospital, had brought her to tears. She made sure to say it twice.
"He has so much on his plate, Vi. So much. And he still remembers."
"That's really nice, Mom."
"Sweetheart," she began, her voice dropping into a quieter, slower register where each word landed like a placed stone.
She didn't lead the ambush with now or listen or I need to talk to you.
She just used sweetheart, and I'd learned to fear that tone before I was ten.
"Your father and I were talking about you last night. "
I squeezed my eyes shut.
"We were on the phone with Anne from the country club. Her daughter Camille—you remember Camille, don't you?—just made associate at McKinsey. She's only twenty-eight. Anne wouldn't stop talking about Camille's career, and naturally your father and I got to talking about yours."
I didn't say a word.
"We've been making some calls on your behalf.
Your father knows the dean over at Case Western.
There might be space opening up in their night program for a paralegal certificate.
He says paralegals are practically pre-law now.
Half the people who go on to law school take that exact route first. It's a real path.
A proper name at the end of it." She paused to let the logic settle.
"Your brother also mentioned there's administrative work opening up at the hospital. An executive administrative track. Real options, with a title. Something we could put on a Christmas card."
My chest pulled tight. "Mom—"
"Be honest with me, sweetheart." Her voice softened into that unhurried register that was impossible to argue with, because it refused to admit there was an argument. "Were you ever happy with your GPA?"
I pressed my forehead against the cold metal of the stall door.
"Because nobody's hiring someone with a GPA like that for anything real.
We've been making these calls, your father and I, and frankly, we're a little surprised the Beckett job has lasted as long as it has.
Two years as a basic assistant, Vi. Two years.
That position should've been a brief stepping stone, not your final station.
We just don't want you to wake up at thirty-five and realize you've spent your life making coffee for a man. "
I stayed quiet.
"We love you, Vi. We're only saying these things because we love you."
I knew she was telling the truth. That was the sad root of the whole thing. She wasn't a cruel woman, and she didn't say these things because she wanted to make me feel like I wasn't enough.
She said them because she believed the distance between where I was and where I should be was a gap she could help me close, if only I'd listen.
She'd built her own career brick by brick, raised two successful children, and followed a proper path her whole life.
She believed in titles. She believed a mother's love was best spent pointing out the better road.
She loved me. I knew that in my bones. The problem was she loved me the same way she improved everything else in her life, by hunting down what fell short and working to fix it. And I'd spent ten years being the broken thing she was trying to repair.
That was the truth as my mother told it, the one she believed in and liked to repeat.
But here's mine: I wasn't a renovation project.
I wasn't a defective product she could return for a newer model.
I wasn't makeup she could blend into a more flattering version of herself.
I was her daughter, and I had my own life, my own dreams, and a clear idea of what I wanted to do with the time I'd been given.
What I wanted didn't look impressive on a Christmas card, didn't come with an elite title at the end of my name, and broke the rigid vocabulary she'd built for what a daughter of hers was supposed to be.
I wasn't unable to be like her. I'd chosen not to be.
But in her language, that choice and a flat inability were the same sentence.
I wanted to tell her the truth. I wanted to scream it into the receiver: Mom, I have five million loyal readers.
I make more in book royalties than Xavier makes cutting people open at the hospital.
I'm one of the biggest, most sought-after writers in my genre in the country, and you don't even know my pen name.
My GPA was a 3.6. That's not low. It's just a hair under Xavier's, and Xavier set the impossible floor for what gets called real in this family.
I've spent ten years pretending that ridiculous floor is where the ground is.
The strange part was that Xavier had never once held that floor over me himself.
He'd just stood on it, quiet, while our mother did the measuring.
I'd never figured out whether his silence was a kindness or a different kind of distance, and I'd stopped trying to tell the difference years ago.
I wanted to tell her, calmly and plainly, that the job at Beckett Media wasn't a pathetic stepping stone or a failure. It paid well, and the secret writing paid more. Together they'd funded my apartment, my independence, and four years of building something five million people showed up to read.
I'd never once touched the emergency money my parents kept pushing at me because they assumed I had to be struggling.
The only reason she stayed in the dark was that telling her meant explaining what I'd been doing, and explaining it meant saying the dirty words romance novelist in front of my father.
I hadn't yet found a version of myself brave enough to take that hit.
I wanted to let all of it out.
I said none of it.
"Mom, my meeting's starting. I have to go." The lie came smooth. "Happy birthday. I love you. I'll call you on Sunday."
"I love you too, sweetheart. Please, just think about the paralegal program."
I hung up.
I stood frozen inside the stall, my phone gripped tight, staring at the white tile grout in front of me.
I let myself think about the paralegal program for one second, and then I started to cry. Not a loud, dramatic breakdown. I'd never cried loud. I wept in silence, my free hand pressed hard against my mouth to muffle it, refusing to take up any space.
I didn't know how long I stood there shivering. Not long. I had a demanding job to get back to.
I pulled myself together and fixed my face. I ran cold water over my pulse points, dodging my puffy eyes, blotted my skin with paper towels, and studied my reflection in the mirror. I'd gotten terrifyingly good at hiding this over the years.
When I walked back to my desk, the leather notebook wasn't there.
I knew it was gone before my panicked brain caught up.
The empty space where it should have been was a shape my eye read in an instant.
My hands went to the top drawer before I'd decided to move—and tore through it.
Not there. Under my leather tote. Not there.
The rolling chair, under the desk, the stacked files on the side table. Gone.
I froze. My stomach pitched, like missing the last stair in the dark.
That notebook held the raw, unedited drafts of The Assistant.
Scenes I was mapping out, emotional beats I'd roughed in, embarrassing fragments of chapters that didn't exist yet.
Sure, the characters used fake names, Sandra and Nicholas, but I'd drawn Nicholas in such intimate detail on those pages that he was unmistakable.
I hadn't written Simon's name anywhere in the notebook.
I hadn't needed to. I'd caught the stubborn set of his jaw, the tight pull of it during hard conversations.
I'd written down how he gripped a silver pen through brutal board meetings, and his watch, not the brand, just the face and the way he ran his thumb over the crystal when he was deep in thought.
Anyone who'd spent more than a week on this floor would know whose wrist I'd been studying.
Those drafts had existed for weeks. They held intimate scenes I hadn't uploaded to the platform, chapters still taking shape, and the messy, undeniable arc of where the romance was heading.
I needed it back.
A coworker from marketing passed my desk, and I flagged her down.
"Hey, quick question." I fought to keep my voice light. "Did you see where my boss went this morning? Was he looking for me?"
She tapped her chin, thinking. "He came in early today. He was looking for you over at your desk."
I swallowed a sharp spike of panic. "Thanks." I let it out as she kept walking.
I all but fled to the kitchenette. I made Simon's morning coffee on muscle alone, pitch black, single shot of espresso, while my brain chewed on the one detail that mattered.
The male lead in The Assistant looked like Simon Beckett. That was the disaster. I'd swapped the name and moved his corporate job to a different industry, but none of that mattered next to the likeness itself.
The physical description I'd sketched in that stolen notebook was detailed enough that anyone who knew Simon would place him on the spot. His sharp jaw. His gray eyes. The watch, drawn so close it might as well have been a photograph.
I'd written those passages during the first week of Book Three, back when I was still telling myself the detail was strictly needed for the prose.
It wasn't needed for the prose. It was there because I'd been sitting three feet from his office door for two years, and I'd learned his face by heart, without ever meaning to, in the corner of every working day.
When I finally sat down to write a male lead worth wanting, his was the only face my imagination could reach for.
I brewed myself a cup too. I needed something warm to steady my shaking hands.
I walked the long stretch to his office. The heavy door was closed.
I knocked twice.
"Come in." His voice came muffled through the wood.
I pushed the door open.
He sat at his large desk, leaning back in his leather chair, my soft-leather notebook open in his lap.
He didn't look up when I came in.
I made myself cross the room and set his black coffee on the far corner of his desk. Gripping my own mug with both hands like a lifeline, I stood there and waited for the execution.
He turned a page, slow. He read in silence. Then he lifted his eyes to mine.
"Did you write this?" His tone gave away nothing.
My heart pounded so hard I was sure he could hear it. His sharp jaw was set, his gray eyes steady on mine.
"Yeah." My voice shook. "I wrote it."
He dropped the closed notebook onto the polished desk.
"It's impressive." His expression stayed maddeningly hard to read.
I pressed my lips together and said nothing.
"Do you read a lot of books?" He picked up his coffee mug.
"I work at a publishing company. Of course I read books."
He pointed a warning finger at me. "Don't be smart with me." The corner of his mouth twitched up into a smirk. "If that's the case, do you happen to know Ashby?"
My pulse spiked into my throat. I swallowed hard.
"I know of her."
"Have you read her work?"
"I've read two of her books, actually." I made myself hold his gaze. "They're really good."
He smiled then, set his coffee down, and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the desk.
"So you know the online serialized world," he said. "Can you do me a huge favor?"
"What favor?" I pressed my lips into a thin line.
"I need you to find V.M. Ashby."
My palms went damp against my mug. I gripped the ceramic with both hands, swallowed once to clear the knot in my throat, and stared back at him.
"I know you'll point out that the strategy team's already looking for her," he went on, blind to the collapse happening inside me. "But there's no harm in you joining the search quietly, from the inside. If you can find her, I'd appreciate it."
"Why?"
He leaned back in his chair. His eyes flicked to the side of the room, then snapped back to mine. "It's personal. Just know it matters to me." He held my gaze. "So, will you do it?"
I parted my lips, at a loss.
"I'll give you a huge bonus for this." He wouldn't look away. "I'll give you anything you want, Violet, if you find her for me."