19. Violet
NINETEEN
VIOLET
The heavy door clicked shut behind him, leaving me paralyzed in the center of the guest room.
I'd done this. I'd built every single piece of this disaster.
The lie had started as a small, private thing, a harmless fantasy I'd promised myself I'd correct before it ever mattered.
But then it did matter, and I hadn't corrected a thing.
Instead, I'd added to it, building an entire fragile life on top of a hollow foundation.
I spent these past weeks with a stranger.
He was right. I'd made sure of it. The hiding was the entire point.
I'd hidden from my critical parents, from my oblivious colleagues, from my millions of readers, and worst of all, from Simon and Olivia.
I hid from every person who'd ever gotten close enough to see something real.
Running, folding inward, disappearing, that was my one true area of expertise.
I'd been doing it so long I'd mistaken isolation for safety.
My hands shook as I packed. I couldn't focus enough to organize anything, just shoving my work bag, laptop, leather notebook, and three days' worth of clothes into my suitcase.
In the back of a taxi, the window gave me back nothing but my own reflection, and my face went flat. That particular, anesthetized absence that arrives only when you've run out of things to feel and are just waiting for the next blow to land.
Sloane yanked her door open before I'd finished knocking.
One look at my wrecked face, and she didn't say a word.
She stepped back, pulled my bag from my shoulder, and dropped it against the wall.
Then she wrapped both arms around me right there in the entryway.
Surrounded by the familiar warmth of her apartment, I finally stopped trying to hold myself together.
She brought me inside, brewed a strong pot of coffee, and deposited me onto her velvet couch. She sat across from me and waited.
"You were right," I rasped.
Sloane kept her chin level, her hands wrapped around her mug. "That's not what matters right now, Vi. What happened?"
I told her everything. How Simon had found out, how Olivia had been the one to crack it open.
How he'd confronted me in the guest room, his voice never once rising, which somehow made it worse.
He'd fired me on the spot. He'd ordered me out of his house by tonight.
He'd looked me dead in the eye and said he'd spent the best weeks of his life with a total stranger.
And then he'd walked out.
Sloane abandoned her coffee, crossed the rug, and sank onto the cushion beside me, pulling me into her side.
"I'm so sorry," she said into my hair. "I'm so sorry you're going through this."
I pressed the heels of my hands into my burning eyes.
"I didn't want any of this, Sloane. I didn't want to hurt him, and I didn't want to hurt Olivia.
" My voice scraped thin and broken. "I didn't even have the courage to knock on her bedroom door to say goodbye.
I just ran. Again. That's all I ever do. "
"Vi, don't—"
"I hid from my parents, I hid from him, I hid from her. And the second it all blew up, I ran straight to you. It's all I know how to do." Fresh tears spilled over my cheeks, and I let them fall. "I'm so exhausted from being this person."
Sloane just held on tighter. She didn't offer platitudes or try to fix the unfixable. She stayed.
A sharp buzz from my phone on the cushion broke the quiet.
I stared at the screen a moment, then picked it up.
Two unread emails sat in my inbox. The first was from Forsyth and Webb, a prestigious publisher that had been circling the Ashby account for months.
They were ready to offer a big deal to bring The Quiet Hour to print, letting me put either V.M.
Ashby or my real legal name on the cover, my choice. They needed an answer within the week.
The second was from Aldwyn House, a far larger conglomerate than Forsyth. Their offer was staggering, but their terms were ironclad: V.M. Ashby stays on the cover, no real name, no author photo, no public appearances. Total anonymity, indefinitely.
I passed the screen to Sloane. She skimmed it, her eyebrows rising, then handed it back. "So? What do you want to do?"
"I want to lie in a dark bed and not think about any of this," I said.
She studied my exhausted face. "Okay. For how long?"
"Sloane, please."
"I'm not being cruel, Vi. I'm asking practically." She shifted, forcing me to look at her. "Yes, you made a colossal mess. Yes, things are badly broken right now. But you can't lie in bed for the rest of your life. At some point, you have to decide what happens next."
"I know that! I just—" A sob hitched in my chest. "Can you please give me one night? Can I just have a single night where I don't have to decide who I am?"
She searched my eyes a long moment. "Okay," she relented. "Yes. Come on."
She lugged my suitcase into her spare room.
I collapsed onto the mattress without even taking off my street clothes, dragged the heavy duvet over my head, and sobbed until I was hollowed out.
Eventually, I was just breathing in jagged pulls in the dark, my face buried in a damp pillow, my chest scraped empty.
That emptiness was the last thing I remembered before sleep finally dragged me under.
A soft knock roused me. The bedroom was pitch dark, the window framing the glittering skyline, telling me the afternoon had slipped away.
Sloane pushed the door open with her hip, balancing two steaming bowls of pasta. She perched on the edge of the mattress and handed me a bowl without a word. I sat up, groggy, and took it.
"I'm sorry I snapped at you earlier," I said, staring at the noodles.
"Don't." She pointed her silver fork at me. "You were allowed to snap."
I took a small bite, then another. The room settled into a comfortable quiet. Outside the glass, the city moved through its evening, impersonal, ongoing, indifferent to the fact that my whole world had come apart on the Upper East Side just hours ago.
"You were right," I finally admitted. "About all of it."
She paused, looking at me, waiting.
"I'm not going to keep crying into this pillow." I gripped the warm bowl. "What's done is done. I have to live with the wreckage I caused, and I have to keep going." I pressed my lips together. "I have to."
"That's a good thing to know," Sloane said.
"The publishing emails." I met her gaze. "What do you honestly think?"
She tilted her head, weighing it. "One of them wants to gently hold your hand and walk you out into the daylight. The other wants to pay you a ridiculous amount of money to stay comfortably in the dark." She locked eyes with me. "Vi. You already know which one you need to take."
I sat with the weight of it. The millions of words I'd poured out, the readers who'd found solace in them, I knew they were real, because they were the only honest thing I'd ever made.
The pen name had been a heavy iron door I'd locked myself behind.
But the fragile thing I'd been trying to protect behind it, my relationship with Simon, had just been destroyed by my own hands. I had no more reason to disappear.
"If I'm coming out," I said, "my parents have to hear it from me first."
Sloane nodded. "Do you want me to stay in the room?"
"No." I set the empty bowl on the nightstand. "I need to do this part alone."
She slipped out, closing the door behind her. I sat a long moment in the quiet of the guest room, gathering my fractured courage. Then I dialed my mother's number.
She picked up on the fourth ring. "Violet. Well, it's certainly been a while. How are you doing?"
"I'm fine. I have something really important I need to talk to you about."
A beat of silence, then her sharp assumption. "Are you finally going to enroll in that paralegal program?"
"No, Mom. I'm not."
I heard her draw a long, dramatic breath. "Violet, you know how important it is for you to—"
"I need you to just listen to me," I cut in. "Just for one minute. Can you put Dad on speaker, too?"
Silence on the line. Then her muffled voice calling his name. A moment later, his gruff voice filtered through. "He's here. What is it?"
He hadn't even bothered to say hello. I'd spent my whole life noticing small dismissals like that, letting them dictate how small I made myself to fit into their lives. I was done letting it happen.
"I'm a professional romance writer," I said, my voice remarkably steady.
"I've been writing for years. I publish under a pen name, V.M.
Ashby. I have five million readers. Major publishing houses are offering me print deals.
I make a very comfortable living doing exactly this.
I just wanted you both to hear it from me before it goes public. "
My mother was dead quiet a long moment.
Then she scoffed. "That's not a real career, Violet."
"I make a substantial living—"
"How long is a silly fad like that going to last? How long are people going to keep reading smut? You need something stable. You need something real. Your brother—"
"I know what Xavier does, Mom," I gritted out.
"Your brother built a respectable career!
He has something to show for his life. What do you have to show for yours?
A frivolous hobby hiding behind a fake name?
" Her tone carried that particular, suffocating quality it always did, not cruel, but armed with the certainty of someone who'd never once questioned whether her opinion was welcome.
"Do you honestly think that's something to be proud of? "
My voice dropped, going flat. "Can you just be proud of me? That's all I'm asking. Just this once. Just tell me I'm doing something worthwhile."
She hesitated, the silence pulling taut.
"I can't lie to you, Violet," she sighed. "I just want better for you than this."
I held the phone to my ear for five seconds, taking in the finality of it.
"I don't want to talk to you anymore," I said quietly.
I hung up.
I sat frozen on the edge of the mattress and didn't move a muscle.
It wasn't the rejection that stung. I'd known what she'd say.
I'd been enduring variations of that exact speech my whole adult life, twisting myself into knots trying to either change her mind or hide from her judgment.
What broke through the numbness wasn't her words but the thing underneath them, a light snapping on in a dark room I hadn't known existed.
Simon wasn't just a boss I'd fallen for. He'd been my actual home.
Not in the idealized, fictional version I'd imagined, not just the warm domestic picture I'd watched from a safe distance. He was home in the rawest sense of the word. Not because he was perfect, not because it was easy, but because he was the place where I'd finally stopped hiding.
The quiet kitchen at midnight. The dark hallway staircase. The chaotic birthday breakfast at dawn. He was the first place I'd ever spoken the honest truth about what I wanted, even if I hadn't been brave enough to tell him all of it. The first person I hadn't immediately tried to shrink myself for.
I loved him.
Not as a past-tense concept. Not as a fleeting feeling. Love. The plain, terrifying, present-tense reality of it, sitting heavy and absolute in my chest with nowhere left to go.
And I'd broken him. I'd taken the fragile trust he'd been rebuilding since Elena died, and I'd smashed it with my own two hands, the same hands that had spent two years typing romantic fantasies about him, the same hands that had held his in the back of a town car.
I had no one to blame for this but myself.
I pressed my face into my palms and broke down.
The door eased open. Sloane crossed the room and sat down beside me, close, her arm coming around my shoulders. I leaned into her and cried again, quieter this time. I'd already emptied myself out earlier, and this was just what was left, my body still shaking out the last of it.
She didn't try to fix it. She stayed.
"I know what I have to do," I said finally, into her shoulder.
She waited.
"I have to stop hiding. All of it. The pen name, my parents, him." I pressed the back of my hand against my wet cheek. "And I have to do it whether or not he ever forgives me."
Sloane held on a little tighter. "Then that's where we start," she said.
Outside, the city kept going, bright and indifferent, the way it always had. Soon I would decide about the books, about my name, about the rest of my life. For now, I let myself know the one thing I'd spent every chapter writing around and never once saying plainly.
I loved him. I had loved him the whole time I'd been too afraid to write it down.