18. Simon
EIGHTEEN
SIMON
The living room was quiet.
I had my laptop open on the oak coffee table and an executive document I was supposed to be finishing pulled up, and I'd been staring at the same paragraph for twenty full minutes. The work wasn't difficult. The house was just different without her in it.
I sat back and stared up at the ceiling.
This was what she'd done to me. I'd spent a decade building an isolated life that required nothing from anyone, and I'd been sustaining it so well that I'd come to think of the isolation as a preference rather than a defense.
And now Violet was at Sloane's apartment for a single afternoon, and I couldn't focus on a basic paragraph, because somewhere in the last several weeks the hollow house had stopped being quiet and started being full.
Full of her voice, and her rich laugh, and the rhythmic sound of her typing late at night.
Full of Olivia's eager footsteps coming faster down the stairs whenever she heard Violet in the kitchen.
Full of the three of us at the dining table every evening in a routine that had no precedent in my entire adult life.
I'd told her in the back of the car, presenting it like a joke, that if I were ever going to ask her anything formal it would be to marry her. I'd said it lightly because I wasn't yet ready to say it heavily, but underneath the lightness, it had been the truth.
I couldn't picture my future as anything other than her husband. I couldn't picture a single morning without her at the kitchen island, or a lazy Sunday without her reading glasses on the couch cushion. I couldn't picture any version of Olivia growing up without Violet somewhere in the room.
I knew she was holding something back. I'd known it for weeks, sensing a hesitant pulling away at certain moments, noticing her gaze drop a fraction whenever I held it a second too long. I wasn't rushing her. Whatever she was carrying, she'd come to it in her own time. I was content to wait.
Footsteps came quickly down the main stairs.
Olivia rounded the corner and dropped onto the couch across from me, clutching her phone in both hands.
I looked at her over the top of the laptop monitor. "What's up?"
"I have something important to show you," she said grimly. She set the phone down on the table between us, screen up. "Read that."
It was V.M. Ashby's serialization platform. The newest, freshly uploaded chapter of The Quiet Hour, Book Three. I recognized the title at once. Olivia had told me all about this book on the floor of her messy bedroom months ago.
I picked it up and read it.
The fictional male lead had gray eyes. He had a teenage niece who lived in his house.
He'd lost a sister. He owned a media company.
He'd carried the exhausted heroine down a dark hallway and put her in his guest room.
He'd almost kissed her in his kitchen that night, and had only stepped back when his niece's door opened upstairs.
He'd finally kissed her at a secluded lake house, with the bedroom window open and the bedside lamp left on.
I picked up the phone and read the whole thing again.
I set it down carefully on the wood.
"Olivia." I looked at her. "How is V.M. Ashby writing detailed things about us?"
She looked down at her hands. "There's something I have to tell you. I know I should've told you earlier, and I didn't, because I didn't know how." She looked back up, her eyes wide. "Uncle Simon. It's Violet. V.M. Ashby is Violet."
I just stared at her.
"She's been V.M. Ashby this whole time." Olivia's voice had gone small. "I heard her on a phone call with Sloane. I heard her say, 'I can't tell him I'm V.M. Ashby.'" She pressed her lips together. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know how to tell you."
I sat there a long moment, paralyzed.
Then I snatched up the phone again.
I went back to Book Three, Chapter One. I read from the very beginning.
The brooding man with the gray eyes. The engraved watch Elena had given him at his college graduation.
The disastrous investor dinner. The blushing heroine in the red dress with her chest pressed against his hand.
The leather notebook left out on the desk.
Did you write this. The corporate search the man had asked his assistant to run.
He had asked his assistant to find herself.
I read it all. Every chapter. The published dedication. For O. On your birthday. From a quiet hour to another. The weekend at the lake house. The kitchen that night. The accidental brush in the pantry. The town car. The heavy word I'd said like a joke.
I'd given her everything. The story of the unreturned phone call.
The empty chair nobody ever sat in. The framed photograph I couldn't pick up.
The night in the kitchen when I told her that being with her was the first time I'd felt a real home since Elena died.
Private things I hadn't told anyone else.
And she'd been sitting right there, taking notes, with five million readers waiting for the next chapter.
I remembered what I'd thought when I first read her journal.
The character is based on me. I'd confronted her about it directly, and she'd deflected, and I'd let it go because I'd thought it was a harmless crush, something small and private she was embarrassed about.
I'd thought it was sweet. I hadn't understood that I was staring at the obvious answer to a corporate question I'd been trying to solve for months, while she sat three feet from my office door.
The heavy front door opened.
Violet came in with her winter coat still on, her leather bag slung over her shoulder, a small, tired smile on her face. She looked at me, frozen on the couch. She looked at Olivia's pale face. The smile vanished.
"What's happening?" she asked, panic in her voice. "Is everything okay?"
I stood up slowly. "We need to talk."
She looked at me, her chin raising defensively, her dark eyes narrowing a fraction in fear. "Talk about what?"
I crossed the room, opened the door to her bedroom, and held it wide.
She walked inside slowly. I followed behind her and shut the door.
She turned around. "Simon. What happened. You're scaring me."
I looked at her. She stood in the middle of the room with her coat still on and her bag still strapped over her shoulder, her brow furrowed, her hands resting loose at her sides. I looked at her and didn't recognize this woman at all.
"When were you going to tell me you were V.M. Ashby?" I demanded.
All the color left her face.
"Simon," she gasped.
"When?" The single word came out terrifyingly quiet. "When were you going to tell me?"
Her eyes filled with tears. She pressed her shaking hand over her mouth, then dropped it.
"I wanted to. I've been wanting to for weeks.
I tried to find the right moment, and there was never a right moment, and I was so scared, and the secret just got bigger and bigger and I—" Her voice broke.
"I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I swear I never meant for it to go this far. "
"Why didn't you just tell me?" I rasped.
"I thought you'd think I was a creep," she sobbed, shaking her head. "I started writing the fantasy about you before I knew you. Back before you were anything more than my employer. And then it became something else, and I knew I had to tell you, and I couldn't find how."
"Violet." My own eyes were burning. "I found your journal.
I read it. I sat across from you and told you I didn't mind being the inspiration for your character.
I told you that. I told you it didn't bother me.
And you still said nothing. Why? Why keep lying when I'd already shown you I didn't mind? "
"I know," she wept.
"I told you about Elena. I told you about the photograph. I told you private things I've never said out loud to anyone, and you were sitting right there knowing you were V.M. Ashby, and you said nothing."
"I know." She was crying hard now. "Simon, please. I know. I'm so sorry."
"You sat at your desk and ran a corporate search for yourself." My voice stayed level. "You came to me and lied straight to my face. You lied about the fan back channel. You invented an entire person—a woman too afraid to fly, too fragile to ever be in a room with me—so I'd stop looking."
My thumb moved once over the face of the watch Elena gave me. I made it stop.
"You built that. You sat across from me and built a whole fake human being just to keep me at arm's length."
She took a step toward me, her hand lifting. I didn't move. She stopped where she was, the bag still on her shoulder and her coat still buttoned, as if some part of her already knew she wasn't staying.
"And Olivia." The name came out quieter than the rest. "She finally opened up to you. After everything she went through, she chose to trust you, and you were lying to her the whole time."
"It wasn't like that," her voice broke on a sob. "I love Olivia. What I feel for her is real. What I feel for you is real. I swear I was never lying about what mattered."
"Then what were you lying about, Violet?" I looked at her, disgusted. "Because from where I'm standing, everything you told me about who you were was a lie. Every morning you walked into my office. Every evening at that kitchen table. The whole time."
"I was terrified," she pleaded.
"Of what?" My voice finally cracked on the word before I could stop it. "Of me? I told you I didn't mind the writing. I told you that to your face. I handed you the perfect opening, and you closed it and kept lying. So what were you so terrified of that you couldn't just give me the truth?"
She didn't have an answer.
I looked at her crying, and the thing I'd believed I was done with closed down in my chest. The same heavy door. The same lock.
"I stripped myself open for you," I said, hollow.
"I showed you things I've never shown anyone.
I told you about Elena. I told you about the worst night of my life.
I told you that after my sister died I felt homeless, and that being with you was the first time I'd felt a home since.
I gave you all of it." My jaw tightened.
"And the whole time, I was sitting with a stranger. "
"That's not what happened," she begged. "Please, Simon. Please believe me, that's not what happened."
"Then tell me what happened." My voice went flat.
"Because I need to understand how a person does this.
How you sit across from someone every single day, look them dead in the eye, and say nothing.
How you let someone bleed and tell you about the worst year of their life, and say nothing.
How you let me—" I stopped and pressed my mouth shut.
"Did you ever have feelings for me? Or was I just something for the plot? "
She dropped her hands in shock. "Don't you dare say that."
"I need to know."
"I have feelings for you. I've always had feelings for you. Everything that happened between us was real."
"Then why couldn't you trust me with the truth?" I looked at her. "Why, Violet? I gave you everything. And you couldn't give me the truth in return. Why didn't I deserve that from you?"
She was crying too hard to speak.
I looked at her and didn't blink. The burning in my eyes stayed where it was.
"You're fired," I said, cold. "Your employment at Beckett Media ends today. I want you out of this house by tonight." My voice never rose. "And Ashby doesn't sign. Not with Beckett, not with anyone I can reach. You'd be surprised how far that is."
She looked up in horror, her dark eyes red and pleading. "Simon. Please."
"You lied to me like I was easy to lie to. Like I was something that could be managed." I looked at her steadily. "You want to know what I am? I'm someone who will not be made a fool of twice."
"These past few weeks meant everything to me," she sobbed. "Everything that happened between us meant something real. Please, Simon, don't do this."
I just looked at her. The crying woman in front of me was the one I'd been prepared to build my whole life around. The one I'd thought about marrying. The one who'd made my grieving niece laugh for the first time since the funeral. She stood three feet from me, and I didn't know her at all.
"These past weeks," I said, "I spent with a stranger."
I turned around and walked out of the room.