17. Violet
SEVENTEEN
VIOLET
I woke at six o'clock with his heavy arm slung across my stomach.
He was still sound asleep, his face turned toward mine on the white pillow, his strong jaw unshaved and rough. I lay still, just looking at him, careful not to wake him. I'd woken up happy, and I was already bracing for the guilt to arrive.
And it was there. It had been lingering all week, in the stolen kitchen kisses, in the charged elevator rides, in the way he handed me my morning coffee, in the devastating look on his face whenever I walked into a room.
The happiness wasn't in question. The problem was what lived directly underneath it.
I'd been lying to him since before I even really knew him.
I'd built a whole secret career while cashing his company's salary, all while writing a serialized romance novel about his life.
I'd coordinated the corporate search for V.M.
Ashby while knowing my own name belonged on that list. I'd let him carry me down a dark hallway, put me in a guest room, and fall asleep across the hall, while I posted intimate chapters about him on a platform with over five million readers.
And now I was waking up beside him, and his feelings had grown into something with weight and direction. Instead of being happy about it, I was lying flat in the thin gray dawn, trying to calculate how much time I had left.
A lie could only last so long. I'd always known that. It was going to come apart, and the only variable left was whether it came apart safely in my hands, or devastatingly in his.
I pressed my eyes shut a long moment.
I got up.
I cleaned myself up in the guest bathroom, moving quietly so I wouldn't wake him, and came back into the bedroom to find he'd shifted toward the empty side of the mattress. I sat on the edge of the bed and put my hand on his bare shoulder.
"Simon." I pressed, waking him. "We have to go to work."
He opened his eyes, still heavy with sleep, and they found my face right away.
"What time is it?" he mumbled.
"Quarter past six."
"Okay."
He reached up, grabbed my arm, and pulled me right back down into the bed.
I went willingly. We lay there a long moment, his warm mouth pressed at my temple, his hand resting loose at my waist. I just let the quiet morning be still around us, because I wasn't ready to stop having this beautiful thing yet.
He mumbled okay again into my hair, and then he finally got up.
We got ready in our separate bathrooms, moving quietly and finishing fast, and met in the main hallway at seven-twenty with our packed bags and our hot coffee. Manuel was already waiting at the curb. In the backseat, I sat closer to him than I had before the lake house trip, our shoulders touching.
But when he reached across for my hand, I moved it to my lap and looked pointedly toward the rearview mirror. He followed my anxious gaze, understood the risk of Manuel seeing us, and settled his hand back onto his own knee. We didn't touch for the rest of the drive.
At work, we were flawlessly professional. I routed all his incoming calls. I built his afternoon schedule. I sat at my desk holding the composed posture of an assistant whose mind was on her work, an act that took immense, sustained effort.
An urgent email pinged in from the strategy team at ten forty-five. Meeting confirmation. I printed the agenda and walked it down the hall to his office.
I knocked twice.
"Come in."
I pushed the heavy door open. He sat at his desk with his suit jacket still on, freshly off an earlier video call. He looked up the second I came in.
"Mr. Beckett." I set the printed agenda on his desk. "You have a strategy meeting in fifteen minutes. Devika's team. It's the app testing update."
He glanced down at the agenda. "Are you coming in with me?"
"Yes, sir. I'll be sitting in and taking notes."
What I didn't say was that I also wanted to hear the V.M. Ashby update, the corporate search I'd been secretly running for myself, just to know how close they were getting to the truth.
He looked across the desk at me, dropping his chin, one corner of his mouth holding something back.
"When it's time," he said quietly, "we go in together."
I nodded and retreated to my desk.
The strategy meeting convened at eleven in the small, glass-walled conference room. Devika ran through the current app testing status, then transitioned to the V.M. Ashby update. I kept my eyes locked on my open notebook and wrote down every single thing she said.
The corporate outreach was ongoing. No confirmed identification yet. The fan account back-channel had yielded the promised birthday dedication and the initial email agreement, but Ashby hadn't signed the legal contract, and the editor was still waiting.
I wrote it all down.
I was sharply aware of him across the polished table.
At some point I felt the weight of his gaze and looked up. He wasn't looking at his copy of the agenda. He was staring at me. Not glancing at my notes. At me, with his elbow propped on the table and his chin resting in his hand, nothing professional in his open expression at all.
The conference room was full of people.
Devika cleared her throat, a pointed little sound.
"Simon." She set her pen down with a click. "The testing timeline."
He turned to face her. "My apologies, Devika. Please go ahead." He cleared his own throat. "Violet, can you run and get me a fresh coffee?"
I stood, excused myself, and all but fled to the kitchenette. I took my time pouring it. I needed the thirty seconds to catch my breath.
When I brought the steaming mug back and set it on the table in front of him, his hand closed over mine on the ceramic handle for a fleeting moment before he took it, his warm thumb sweeping across my knuckles.
And then the forbidden moment was done, I was back in my seat, and the meeting went on as if nothing had happened.
The rest of the afternoon felt long.
We left the building together at the end of the day. Manuel pulled the town car into the underground garage, and we got in. The heavy door closed with a thud.
The second it did, Simon reached across the seat and pulled me hard into him.
I laughed, surprised, already pushing weakly back against his solid chest. "You have a serious problem."
"I know," he agreed, and kissed my cheek.
"I'm being serious, Simon. You need to learn some control."
"It's impossible." He pulled back just enough to look at my face, his hand anchored at my waist. "You're far too distracting."
I looked at him with an unconvinced sidelong glance. "Did you have this control problem before we got together?"
He considered the accusation with far more seriousness than the question deserved. "I had a version of it. It's different now, though."
"Different how?"
"Before, I was managing it. Now, I know there's nothing left to manage."
I held his gaze a long moment. "Since when are we together?"
He looked at me, his head tilting slightly in confusion. "Are we just hooking up?"
"I don't know. You never officially asked."
He was quiet a second, processing. "What do you think we are?"
"I think," I started, careful, "that you've never asked me anything formal."
"Asking you something formal in the back of a car is not how I want to do it." His mouth pulled up at one corner in a devastating smirk. "If I were going to ask you anything formal, it would be to marry me."
I barked a laugh. It escaped before I could catch it, and I quickly covered my mouth, caught off guard by how genuine it was.
He was staring at me. His jaw had shifted, the teasing smile gone, something far more intense underneath it. My laughter finished and didn't come back.
He'd said it lightly, and I knew it wasn't a real proposal, and I wasn't treating it as one. But the word had come out of his mouth, in that tone, in the back of this car, about me, and it sat somewhere deep in my ribs and pressed.
I'd understood the doomed shape of this secret for weeks, the collision point I couldn't avoid. But sitting here, with his hand gripping my waist and that word still hanging in the air between us, it landed differently. Not as something coming. As something already here.
He wasn't casual about me. He hadn't been for a while. And I carried a secret that was going to change what I was to him the moment it came out. The longer I stayed in this house, soaking in this warmth, the worse the landing was going to be.
I let out a shaky breath and sank back against the seat.
Manuel pulled the car out of the dark garage.
We got home in the early evening. Olivia was tucked away in her room. The house was dark, Marta already gone for the day, and nobody had bothered turning on more lights than they needed. Marta had left our dinner warming on the kitchen counter.
Simon said he was going to take a quick shower before he ate. He looked at me from across the marble counter, his gray eyes holding mine a beat too long before he turned and headed upstairs.
I mumbled that I was going to make a quick phone call.
I walked out to the chilly balcony, slid the glass door shut behind me, sat down on the cold step, and dialed Sloane.
She picked up on the first ring. "Hey. I literally just got back. I'm at the apartment now."
"How is she doing?"
"Better. Much better. The doctor finally said she can go home soon." I heard the muffled sound of her dropping onto her couch. "She was asking about you today. I told her you were totally fine."
"Sloane," I choked out.
A sharp pause. "Vi. What happened. You don't sound good at all."
I opened my mouth to answer, and my eyes filled with hot tears, the pressure of the entire week finding the first crack and flooding through it.
"Vi." Her tone dropped, fierce. "Hey. What is it? Tell me."
"It's been such a good week," I sobbed quietly.
"I keep laughing and I keep being so happy, and I don't know what to do with it because I know for a fact it's not going to last." My voice broke right in the middle of it.
"He said things, Sloane. About love. And tonight in the car he talked about marriage, like it was a joke, but he said it out loud.
And I knew exactly what all of it meant, and I couldn't say a single thing back, and I just don't know how to get out of this alive. "
"Oh, Vi." She exhaled a long, heavy breath. "Okay. I'm going to be honest with you right now."
"I know."
"You have to tell him. I know you know that, and I know you keep saying you'll figure it out eventually, but you have to do it now.
Because this has turned into something else.
You just told me yourself. His feelings are real, and they're getting bigger, and he doesn't know who you actually are. " She paused, letting it sink in.
"If he finds out from someone else, or if the book drops and someone smart puts it together first, he is not going to forgive you. And Vi, you'll have deserved it."
I pressed my shaking hand over my wet eyes.
"I can't," I sobbed. "I know I need to. But right now… now that it's real, now that he's so different… I can't go back to that kitchen conversation and say, 'By the way, I've been her the whole time.' I can't do that to him. I can't do it to Olivia."
"And you think keeping quiet is doing something better for them?"
I didn't have an answer.
"I'm really not trying to hurt you," Sloane said, softer. "I'm trying to keep you from making this worse than it already is. You can't keep lying to him to protect Ashby, knowing how much it means to him. Knowing how much it means to her."
"I know," I wept. "I know. I just don't know what to do. He'd hate me. He'd hate me for lying to him and writing about him for profit. I can't ever tell him I'm V.M. Ashby."
She was quiet a long moment, listening to me cry.
"I'm coming back to the office tomorrow," she finally said. "Come meet me for lunch. We'll sit down and talk about this properly, not over the phone, and not like this. And don't make any permanent decisions before we've talked, okay? Don't do anything rash tonight."
"Okay," I sniffled.
"I really mean it, Vi. No dramatic confessions tonight. No sudden decisions. Come see me for lunch tomorrow and we'll figure it all out together."
"Okay," I repeated, weak. "I'll come."
"Good." A reassuring pause. "It's going to be okay, Vi. I promise you."
I sat alone on the cold step with that promise a moment.
"I'll see you tomorrow," I whispered.
"See you tomorrow, Vi."
I hung up.