15. Violet
FIFTEEN
VIOLET
I lay flat in the guest room bed a long time before I made myself get up.
The hug had been sudden. His arms wrapping around me in the kitchen, my hands pressing between his shoulder blades, both of us holding on tight without having planned to. It had felt like being found, like finally stepping into a warm room after a long time out in the bitter cold.
And that was the terrifying problem.
I'd been estranged from my family long enough that I'd stopped expecting any real warmth from that direction.
My mother's phone calls were harsh corrections dressed up as care.
My father's heavy silence was a standing judgment that didn't need words.
I'd moved out on my own and told myself I was fine.
I'd been telling myself that lie for years while building a quiet, solitary life inside the empty gaps: the corporate job, the secret writing, my friendship with Sloane, and the safe apartment I couldn't afford to lose, but had lost anyway.
And then, by accident, I'd walked into Simon Beckett's lake house, and somehow, without ever planning it, all those empty gaps had filled.
Olivia came to my bedroom door just to argue about a fictional couple.
Simon poured my morning coffee before I had to ask.
Marta left out my favorite bread. The three of us sat together at a dining table at night like it was something we'd done for years.
It was the closest thing I'd felt to a real family in over a decade, and the crushing part was that I was lying to all of them.
Lying to the man who'd confessed his darkest truth to me in a kitchen.
Lying to the grieving girl who'd told me her dead mother would have liked me.
Lying every single day I sat at their table, answering V.M.
Ashby's fan mail on my laptop, and smiling across the kitchen island like I didn't carry a secret that would rewrite everything they thought they knew about me.
I wanted to tell him the truth. I'd been agonizing over it for weeks, and the wanting had gotten louder since the near-kiss the other night, louder again since the hug. Because the ugly truth was, it was so much harder to lie to someone who'd held you.
I got up and made my way downstairs.
Simon was already at the stove. Olivia sat at the kitchen island in her pajamas, both elbows on the counter, watching him cook.
They were laughing at something when I walked in, Simon with his back to the door, Olivia with her chin in her hand, and the leftover laugh was still lighting up both their faces when they turned to look at me.
My heart flooded with warmth, and I hated that it did, and loved it.
"Sit," Simon said, already reaching into the cabinet for another plate.
I sat beside Olivia. He served the hot breakfast without needing to ask what we wanted.
We ate in comfortable silence. The morning moved at an easy pace, the three of us in the kitchen without needing anything heavy from each other.
Nobody mentioned the hug. Technically, there was nothing scandalous to mention.
All we'd done was stand in a kitchen and hold onto each other.
Which was not nothing, but it also wasn't the kind of thing you annotate over scrambled eggs.
"How did you sleep last night?" I asked Olivia, breaking the quiet.
She looked up, bright. "Really well. Good." She reached for her glass of orange juice. "What are we all doing today?"
"What do you want to do?" Simon asked.
She stared at her juice, then flicked her gaze to me, her face going still. "Swimming."
Simon looked at her, his brow furrowing. "No."
"Uncle—"
"The lake water is freezing, Olivia."
"I can swim fine." She turned to face him fully, her chin lifting, her voice sure. "I'm a good swimmer. I've swum in cold water before. I'll be safe." She paused for drama. "And Violet will come out with me."
I blinked. I hadn't volunteered for this freezing assignment.
Olivia turned her head to look at me and held my shocked gaze without blinking.
I looked helplessly over at Simon. He was watching me with one dark eyebrow raised, his mouth pulled to one side in amusement.
"I'll go out with her," I sighed, beaten.
Olivia returned to her breakfast without a word, settled and unsurprised by her win.
We finished eating. Olivia disappeared upstairs and bounded back down in a heavy winter coat, which she unzipped dramatically as we walked toward the lake to reveal she'd been wearing her swimsuit underneath it since breakfast.
I barked a laugh. "You had that on the whole time?"
"I knew he was going to say yes," she said, with total confidence.
I thought about that as we walked the dirt path. About a fourteen-year-old girl who knew she was loved enough to push the boundaries, who understood she didn't need to earn that love first. She just had it.
The water was brutally cold. Olivia was diving in before I even had my shoes off. I waded in anyway and made a strangled sound that wasn't remotely dignified. Olivia laughed, ducked under the surface, and popped back up somewhere to my left.
I gave up and retreated to the edge of the wooden dock, only my feet dangling in the freezing water, and watched her swim.
The guilt came quietly, the way it had come every single day since I moved into the guest room.
I watched Olivia surface and dive again, this fragile girl who'd told me her mother would have liked me, who'd knocked on my door bursting with questions about books, who'd sat beside me at the horse paddock and offered an acceptance she didn't have to offer.
She trusted me. She'd decided to, without any guarantees, and she'd handed me a huge piece of her grief and her fragile hope in the same breath.
And I was lying to her.
Not directly. Not in words. But I was lying to her every day I sat at her uncle's dining table and didn't say: The book you love most in the world is mine. The dedication I wrote for your birthday was from me, not some anonymous stranger. V.M. Ashby is sitting right across from you eating toast.
She swam closer to the wood and rested her arms on the dock beside me.
"What's going on with you and my uncle?" she asked, blunt.
I forced a tight smile. "Nothing at all. It's strictly friendly. Purely platonic."
She tilted her head, assessing. "I really don't want that for you."
"Olivia," I warned.
"Are you happy being platonic with him?" she pressed. "Are you actually happy like that?"
I stared at the rippling water.
The honest answer was no. I wanted something so far past platonic that the clinical word felt embarrassing next to it.
I wanted the deep affection, the closeness, the heated look he'd been giving me lately that I kept filing away.
I wanted more quiet mornings with the coffee already poured, more charged encounters in kitchens at night, and the grounding weight of him in a hug that didn't have to end.
But wanting all of that while holding onto the secret was the same as stealing something I hadn't paid for. Anything past platonic meant the lie would land harder. And the more I cared about them, the worse the secret got, not better.
"It doesn't matter whether I'm happy or not," I lied. "I'm perfectly fine being just like this."
Olivia was quiet a long moment, studying my face. Then she asked, "Can I tell you something?"
I nodded. "Go ahead."
"I have no idea why you won't just make the first move. But I can tell you one thing for sure. My uncle does not see you as a friend, or as anything platonic. Whatever's going on in his head, it is definitely not that."
I looked at her, stunned. "Between Simon and me, there are complicated layers of things I can't start unraveling right now."
"When are you going to start unraveling it?" She tilted her head. "Because from what I can see, he cares about you. So why are you taking so long?"
What I needed to pick apart was the corporate lie I'd been building for months, and I couldn't do that here, shivering at a dock, in the freezing water, with his teenage niece staring at me like the answer was obvious.
"You really shouldn't push when you don't know everything," I deflected.
"If you don't make a move, he might think you're not interested," she said, ignoring me. "Or, if he tries again and you don't respond, that's going to make things strange between you two." She paused. "I'm just saying."
I offered a small, beaten smile. "I hear you, Olivia."
She pushed off the dock and swam away. I stayed where I was, letting the freezing water numb my feet, and thought about the weight of what I was carrying, and how much heavier it had gotten since the hug.
Eventually the cold beat her. She climbed out shivering and pleased with herself and let me wrap the towel around her before she'd finished asking for it. We walked back up the path together, her bare feet careful on the cold dirt, and somewhere along it the talk drifted to books.
She had opinions, and she handed them to me like she'd been waiting all day for someone to argue with. She'd just won a fight with her therapist about the ending of a fantasy series. Her therapist thought the ending was hopeful. Olivia thought that was a total cop-out, and she'd said so.
"It wasn't hopeful, it was lazy," she told me. "The whole book she's going, the world's broken, nobody gets saved, that's just how it is. And then she gets to the end and saves everybody anyway. You can't do that. You can't promise me one thing for four hundred pages and then chicken out."
I should have agreed and left it alone. Instead I heard myself say, "An ending has to cost something. If she'd made the hope expensive, you'd have let her have it. She just didn't want to pay for it."
Olivia stopped walking. "Yes," she said. "That. That's exactly it."
We kept on. She told me about the books she loved and the ones she only said she loved, and then, because she was always going to get there, she got to V.M. Ashby.
My stomach turned over at the name, and I showed her none of it.