6. Simon
SIX
SIMON
Violet had excused herself an hour ago to think over the assignment.
I'd given her the space. The offer I'd made, anything she wanted, felt a little over the top in hindsight. I'd meant every word in the moment, but now, sitting at my desk with an hour to reconsider, I found myself running through the range of things she could ask for.
The company was off-limits. It was the joint legacy of Elena and me, the project our father had financed in a private study twelve years ago, a venture that had long outlasted the original idea. She couldn't have the company. She wouldn't ask for it. I was just being ridiculous.
My car, though, she could have. It was a machine. I could replace it.
I was still auditing my own assets when a sharp knock sounded at the door.
Violet stood on the threshold, her black dress neat, her dark curls falling over her shoulders. She held her chin high, her shoulders squared, the posture she took whenever she'd settled a matter in her head.
"I'll do it." She paused, her face going careful. "But I don't think it'll be easy."
The second half barely landed. I'd already let out a long breath of relief.
Beckett Media was in a high-stakes race to uncover Ashby's identity, Forsyth was circling like a shark, and our window was closing fast. Violet would bring everything she had to this.
I wasn't about to tell her how much it mattered, but the stakes were sky-high.
"Thank you, Violet." Gratitude weighed the words down.
She held my gaze for a long, searching moment. The corner of her mouth pulled up into a knowing smirk. "So. You did mention something about granting me anything I wanted."
I narrowed my eyes, trying to take back the wheel of the conversation. "What I meant was monetary, Violet. Whatever the amount, I'll happily provide it."
She let out a low, dismissive sound. "I was about to ask for something else entirely."
"Such as?"
She tilted her head, studying me, then flashed a bright, cryptic smile. Without another word, she turned and walked out of the office.
I shook my head, baffled, and went back to my mountain of paperwork.
I ground through the rest of the afternoon. At lunch, I opened my tablet and pulled up the platform where Ashby's books were hosted. I told myself I was just checking the quality of what Olivia was reading. I started Book One.
I ended up reading for forty straight minutes at my desk. I forgot to eat.
Olivia had been right about the prose. The writing was clean, unhurried, and trusted the reader.
It read easy because all the work was buried inside the writing itself, the author's effort nowhere in sight.
The heroine arrived on the page already whole, not clumsily explained, just there, doing things that told you everything you needed to know without the prose bragging about it.
I'd edited enough manuscripts in my career to know how rarely that kind of craft lands.
I closed the tablet at one thirty because I had a two o'clock meeting, but the chapters sat in my head the rest of the day.
That night, I knocked on Olivia's door. She let me in at once, and I told her I'd read the first eight chapters.
She sat up so fast the blanket slid off her knees. "Eight. In a day. You forgot to eat, didn't you."
"I had a meeting at two."
"You forgot to eat." She was already grinning. "Okay. Tell me you hated something so I can prove you wrong."
We argued.
Not a loud fight, a spirited debate over literary theory. I thought the heroine's friend was written too broad, edging into caricature. Olivia insisted I'd missed the joke. I argued the male lead's actions were inconsistent in chapter four, and she countered that I'd missed the emotional point.
She pulled up specific paragraphs on her phone, reading them aloud and daring me to defend my read. I defended some positions badly and caved on others, and eventually I stopped playing devil's advocate and just listened.
She had real opinions, earned through actual engagement with the text.
She understood why certain beats worked and had the vocabulary to diagnose why others didn't. When she disagreed, she was specific, not just "you're wrong," but "you missed this," and then she'd show me the thing I'd skated past.
We went back and forth for an hour. I conceded three more points. I held firm on one, the pacing in chapter six, and Olivia argued it from two different angles before finally muttering, "Fine, maybe."
"What did you think of the ending of chapter five?" She watched me close.
"The letter scene?"
"Yes."
"I thought it was way too long."
She glanced at the ceiling and let out a patient breath before looking back at me. "It's supposed to be too long, Simon. She can't stop writing because she doesn't want to stop having the conversation. The length is the whole point."
I weighed that, nodding. "All right."
"You keep saying 'all right' like you're conceding a legal argument in court."
"I am conceding. Gracefully."
"You're conceding badly." The corner of her mouth twitched. "You're annoyed."
"I'm not annoyed. I'm recalibrating."
"Recalibrating," she mimicked, looking back down at her phone.
At one point I tore into a sentence, complaining about how it ended on the wrong rhythmic beat, and Olivia laughed, a real sound she hadn't meant to let out, cut short by her hand clapping over her mouth. She recovered fast and shook her head.
"You're wrong about that one, too." Her eyes were dancing.
"Tell me why, then."
She walked me through her reasoning, and I listened. She was right.
I didn't stay long after that. I told her I'd catch up to her chapter count by Sunday, then headed to my room and sat on the edge of my bed.
I needed to find V.M. Ashby. Not for Devika's deck or the launch numbers, but for the argument that had just erupted in that room over nothing more than a book.
I'd been killing myself trying to reach Olivia for eight months.
An anonymous writer posting every Sunday at midnight had done in three weeks what I couldn't manage in all that time. I wasn't too proud to learn from it.
I pulled up the platform on my phone and went to the comment section of the latest chapter.
The pinned comments were packed with wild theories about Ashby's identity.
She had to be a D-list celebrity. She had an MFA.
She was secretly published in literary fiction under her real name and this was a side project.
Each theory spawned nested threads, citation counts, and the frantic energy of readers so invested in an author they demanded ownership of the mystery itself.
I screenshotted the most-cited theories and forwarded them to Violet, telling her some of them might give us leads. Patterns. Backgrounds we could narrow down.
I kept scrolling until my phone rattled in my palm. Violet, telling me I couldn't trust those comment threads, that they were rampant theories and nothing more.
I pursed my lips. The comments sounded confident enough. That kind of confidence usually meant someone knew something, or at least thought they did. I didn't bother typing a reply. I tapped the call button.
It rang twice.
"Hello?" Her voice came pitched high.
"You sound sure about those comments. Do you know something about V.M. Ashby?"
A low, musical laugh drifted through the speaker. "I wish I did. Wherever she is, whoever she is, she must be doing well. These online platforms pay good money."
I doubted their pay matched the bounty my company was offering.
"Is that what the story in your notebook is for? The one I read this morning?"
A beat of hesitation hung on her end. "I'm not a writer, Simon. It was just an idea I put together. I can't do half of what Ashby does."
"Why are you comparing yourself to Ashby?
" I leaned back against the headboard, staring at the ceiling.
"However popular she is, writing is subjective.
Ashby gets applause, but plenty of people find her prose flawed.
Others love it. If you put your own work out there, you'd find people who'd enjoy it. " I paused. "I know I did."
"What?" she stammered. "You… you enjoyed it?"
I set the phone on the nightstand, switched to speaker, and folded my arms behind my head. "I did. And I understand I was the inspiration for the character Nicholas. I can't blame you. I'm your first and only boss."
"Mr. Beckett—"
"Don't lie to me." I was smiling. "Nicholas is what, six-foot-three, gray eyes, wavy hair, dressed in a suit? If not me, who? Do you have another job somewhere?"
She laughed. "It's not about you. And I do have another job, actually. My other boss is very handsome. Six-foot-four. Blue eyes."
I snatched the phone off the nightstand and pressed it to my ear. "What, does he have tattoos as well?"
"Oh, yes. He's covered in them. And when he smiles, he's got these dimples. He wears frameless glasses that make him look ethereal."
I shifted against the headboard. "And I'm sure he rides a bike."
"He does!"
"Violet." I kept my voice level. "Do you work for the mafia?"
Quiet stretched between us.
I listened to her steady breathing a moment before her laughter bubbled through the phone. She laughed for a good while, and I waited. When it died down, she cleared her throat.
"Mr. Beckett." She was still catching her breath. "Yes. I may have gone a little overboard with the descriptions."
"May have." A smile tugged at my mouth anyway.
"But—"
"Stop lying." I teased it out. "I'm your only boss. The only one you've ever had and the only one you'll ever have."
"Is this a formal proposal to keep me as your assistant for the rest of my life?"
I chuckled and turned onto my side, propping my head on my hand. "Yes. You're destined to be my assistant for as long as you live."
"This should be romantic, but it isn't. It's just you refusing to let me advance in life, keeping me stuck in one position forever."
I looked at the dark ceiling. "Not everybody's meant to be an entrepreneur. As long as the company grows, you grow with it. You're one of the highest-paid people here. That's why HR hates you."
She gasped. "Are you serious?"
"Of course not. Are you always this gullible?" I laughed and held the sound long enough to hear her huff on the other end.
"I see. Why would I want to be an assistant to a man who teases me?"
"Because who else would build such an easy place for you to land?"
"You're acting like you're special, Mr. Beckett. Other men being terrible doesn't make you better than them. You're supposed to build a good workplace. That's just called being a decent person."
"Oh, really? So any other employer would let you write fiction based on your working relationship?"
"Mr. Beckett!" Her voice climbed, the laughter plain underneath it. "That's a bit much."
"I'm not the one who drew my characters to look like my boss." I kept my voice steady. "Anyone who saw that would think you had certain feelings for me. Wouldn't be great for your reputation."
"I don't have any feelings." A pause hung there. "Anyway. I have something to tell you."
I rolled onto my back. "Do spill."
"I stumbled on some office gossip."
"Do you go around eavesdropping? Because I know nobody likes you enough to bring it to you directly."
"Ha. Ha. Very funny."
I laughed under my breath.
"Do you want the gossip or not?"
"Go ahead."
"There's a team leader, marketing I think, who's seeing one of his team members."
My eyebrows shot up. "In my company?"
"Yes." She let it hang. "They always sneak glances at each other. And here's the kicker."
"What?"
"He's married."
I sat up and swung my legs off the edge of the bed. "You're lying."
"I am not. He's married. And this isn't the first time. He's been with women from different teams. They all find out eventually."
"How do they keep falling for him? Is he good-looking?" I tried to picture the marketing team leader and couldn't place the face. Either my memory was slipping, or I'd never crossed paths with the man.
"Very. Tall. Works out. He's got this kind of dangerous smile."
I scoffed. "From the way you're describing him, sounds like you want to be one of his girls."
"I'm already your girl. Why aim lower?"
I smiled to myself. "Yeah. You're my girl. And I run this whole company."
"Right. And he's not as handsome as you, so."
I stared at the ceiling. "Your lips are full of compliments tonight, Violet."
She giggled. "You're usually the one with the honey. I decided to play your game."
"How gracious of you."
We talked like that for a long time, drifting between nothing and everything, until she said she wanted to sleep. I let her go.
When the call dropped, I sat with the phone in my hand, staring at the screen. I ran my thumb across my cheek. I'd been smiling the whole call and hadn't caught it once.
I'd always liked talking to Violet. But never for this long.
She was good at it, better than I'd ever given her credit for.
She never brought up Elena, never spoke about my loss, never stood at that careful, pitying distance everyone else still kept.
She just let me exist. Ninety minutes on the phone with no agenda, no weight, nothing required of either of us.
It was a good conversation. Long enough that my face ached.