7. Violet
SEVEN
VIOLET
I woke up with my fingers pressing hard into my temples.
The night before had been chaotic, though none of it came from outside. My own restless mind had supplied all the noise. Most of it circled the phone call and the decision that came before it.
When his call rang through right after I sent the text, I'd stared at the glowing screen for a long moment, honestly unsure.
Agreeing to the search for Ashby had widened the edges of our working relationship a little, but taking a late-night phone call was a different kind of line. I'd answered half-expecting a misdial.
It wasn't a mistake.
And then we'd talked. The comment threads, Ashby's writing, books we both loved, terrible apartments we'd lived in, disastrous takeout we'd ordered, his niece arguing him to a draw over a novel she'd read on her phone.
The conversation moved sideways, drifting without an agenda, following its own current.
The call had lasted ninety-one minutes. I knew that for a fact, because I'd stared at the call timer on my screen long after the line went dead.
I lay in bed and considered the ceiling.
Taking the job to find Ashby was, if I was honest with myself, a little stupid.
But I had my reasons. The first was practical.
Simon had no way of knowing my assistant's salary only covered half of what I made.
My first book had taken off barely three months after I started posting, and the royalties had been climbing for four years since.
From where he stood, I was a twenty-nine-year-old executive assistant on a reasonable salary, probably with a month or two of expenses saved.
When he offered a huge bonus, anything I wanted, saying yes made sense.
Turning it down would have looked strange.
Turning it down right after admitting I was an Ashby fan would have looked stranger.
So I'd said yes, and now I had a sturdy financial excuse to stand behind.
The second reason was harder to defend, but smarter. If I ran the search, I controlled what it turned up. I knew which digital trails to follow and which to let go cold. I could run a real search, hand over real progress reports, and make it the slowest possible version of itself. It was dishonest.
But the alternative was walking in and confessing I was Ashby, which meant telling Simon Beckett that the books his grieving niece had been reading were written by his assistant, and that the male lead in the current arc was built from two years of sitting three feet from his office door.
I wasn't ready for that conversation.
Pressing my fingers harder into my temples, I dragged myself out of bed.
It was Saturday. Nothing needed me dressed, fed, or anywhere by a certain time.
I padded to the kitchen in my thick socks and put the kettle on the stove.
I made my coffee slow, taking my time measuring the grounds and letting them bloom, a small ritual I only had room for on weekends.
I stood by the window with the warm ceramic mug cupped in both hands and looked out at the street below, still wrapped in morning quiet.
My phone lit up against the counter. A text from Sloane, asking if I wanted to hang out. I set the mug down and tapped back a yes, told her to give me an hour, before I'd finished thinking through what it meant.
Sloane Ty had been my college roommate, my cover designer, and my best friend for seven years, in roughly that order and zero order of importance.
She was the only person alive who knew I was V.M.
Ashby. She'd been the one who made me start, the one who read my messy rough drafts without being asked and handed my laptop back with a command: you have to keep going with this.
I'd kept going. She'd designed every single cover, and I paid every invoice without a word of negotiation, which was my quiet way of saying thank you.
I got dressed and headed out to find her.
Her shop sat in the East Village, her name etched on the front window in gold leaf. Inside, the air was thick with fresh ink and imported incense. I'd spent enough time on the counter stool to know which one wobbled and to lean my weight left to compensate.
She was working on a client when I walked in. The client lay face-down on the table, Sloane bent over their back with the tattoo machine humming in her gloved hand. She glanced up at the bell over the door.
"You took your sweet time," she said, not lifting the machine from the skin.
I found the good stool and climbed onto it. "Is this you saying you were itching to see me?"
She scoffed. "Seeing as I'm the only person in your life who even wants to see you, don't you think you should get down off your high horse?"
I shook my head, amused. "You'd be surprised how many people want to see me."
"Please. List them."
I shot her a glare and rolled my eyes at the exposed brick wall. She had a point.
"Am I here to tell your client I'm single, or am I here to see my best friend?"
Sloane finally lifted her eyes and fixed me with a stern scowl. "Do not let people think someone as cool as me is friends with such a sorry loser."
My jaw dropped in mock outrage. "What do you think would happen if they found out we aren't just friends?"
She narrowed her eyes, playing along. "So, you want to spill the tea on your lesbian sexual awakening right now?"
"Please." I grinned. "You wish I was attracted to you. You wish I was a lesbian. I know you'd have stretched your clutches out to me years ago."
I laughed at my own ridiculous words. Sloane looked at me flat, one arched eyebrow climbing toward her hairline.
"I only want one Paige in my bed," she deadpanned, "and it's definitely not you."
I gasped and clutched an invisible string of pearls. "You want my dad?"
She burst out laughing, grabbed a crumpled tissue, and threw it at my head.
I caught it and laughed right back, the client on the table shifting with a muffled sound of amusement.
Sloane pressed her lips together, shook her head at me, and went back to her work.
I sat on the stool, letting the familiar hum of the shop wash over me.
Once she finished with the client and walked her to the door, she came back, dragging a stool across from mine. She sat down, wiping her hands, and leveled a look at me.
"So, talk to me. How's your boring life been?"
I gave a shrug. "You said it yourself. Boring."
"You liar." She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "I look at you and I feel like you're hiding something major. Is this about your hot boss?"
Over the years, I'd tried hiding things from Sloane and failed so reliably that I'd mostly stopped trying.
I told her everything. The emergency board meeting.
The slide with my secret pen name across it in bold text.
The notebook left careless on my desk. Agreeing to run the search myself.
The late-night text, the phone call that followed, the ninety-one minutes of it.
Sloane listened to the whole chaotic timeline without one interruption. When I finished, she stayed quiet for three long seconds, then exhaled.
"One week of us not seeing each other," she said, shaking her head. "And you took it upon yourself to ruin your life. Wow."
I reached out and smacked her knee. "What's your problem? You're supposed to help me, not leave me stranded on a sinking ship."
She threw her hands up. "Violet. This is your life and your doing. If my opinion mattered to you, wouldn't you have called me before you took a corporate bounty job to find yourself?"
I pouted. She had a point. The hour Simon had given me to think over the offer could have gone to calling Sloane. She'd have talked just the right amount of brutal sense into my head.
"But I have a solid reason. What if he finds out I'm Ashby?"
"So what?" she cut in. "What happens is you lose your assistant job, and then you stay home and focus on your writing. You make it sound like the end of the world."
I pressed my lips into a tight line.
The books had been paying well for four years.
But the corporate job wasn't only about the income.
Losing it meant my parents would find out, and that meant my father's crushing silence, my mother's unbearable certainty, an intervention dressed up as parental concern, and someone pushing the paralegal program again.
I'd been using the Beckett Media job as a bulletproof cover for the writing since I started. It was the respectable face of what I did with my time, and losing that cover before I was ready to explain what was underneath it wasn't something I had the stomach for.
"My parents already think the worst of me," I said quietly. "If I lose the job, there'll be a full-scale intervention."
Sloane rolled her eyes. "Oh, please. Like your parents are so flawless themselves. Have you taken a long look at the people they produced? If they were such model parents, would both their kids choose to live this many miles away from them?"
I pursed my lips. Easy for Sloane to say.
She'd already walked through the explosive version of this that I was still standing terrified outside of.
Her conservative family openly called her a disgrace.
She paid her own invoices, answered to no one, and what lived on the other side of that fallout looked, from where I stood, like a much better deal.
"I think," Sloane began, tilting her head to study me, "that you not wanting to lose your job is half about dodging your parents, and half about your desperate need to stay right next to your hot boss."
"That's not true." I said it too fast. "I just think he's cute. I don't have actual feelings for him."
"Sure," Sloane deadpanned.
I leaned back on the stool and blew out a long breath. "Do you have any actual, usable advice?"