20. Simon
TWENTY
SIMON
It hadn't taken long for the house to revert to what it used to be.
Olivia was barricaded in her room. She'd exiled herself there by her own choice for two days now.
Marta moved like a ghost through the kitchen, setting things down gently, lifting them quietly, keeping out of sight as much as the open floor plan would allow.
The house had reclaimed the sterile quality it had before Violet ever arrived.
Over the last several weeks, I'd forgotten what this stillness felt like.
The house had been quiet before, and I'd proudly called it a preference.
I'd called it the perfect size for one person.
I'd filled it with expensive furniture, a pristine working kitchen, and a high-pedigree horse at the lake house, telling myself I'd built something that mattered.
I'd told myself I was fine. Content. It was the convenient word I'd weaponized for years to mean that nothing was pressing against the empty spaces in my life where something else could have been.
And then Violet had walked in. The rooms had changed without my permission, and I'd stopped noticing the quiet because there was suddenly too much life to hear it over.
There'd been her cracked-spine paperbacks crammed in two deep, overcrowding shelves that were already full.
There'd been Olivia knocking on a door just to argue about a couple in a book, instead of staying sealed inside her own room.
There'd been evenings that ran long for no reason, none of us in a hurry to scatter to our own corners of the house, doing what people do when they're a family without anyone deciding to be one. It had just happened.
Now it had come undone.
I noticed the quiet differently now. Not as the absence of something new, but as the return of something old. The return was worse. I had no excuse for calling it a preference anymore.
Dinner was the worst hour of the day. Marta had made something excellent, set the table, and told me, without my having to ask, that Olivia had already eaten in her room. I sat alone at the long dining table. I ate. I stared at the empty chair across from me.
She wasn't there. She wasn't there to redirect a mundane conversation into something that mattered.
She wasn't there to push her plate toward the center and lean forward when something caught her attention, or to deliver a dry, exact observation that would make Olivia laugh into her water glass.
She was just gone. The chair was empty, the food was getting cold, and I sat at that table alone, finally understanding that I'd done all of this.
My phone rang against the wood.
I glared at the caller ID and rolled my eyes before I answered.
"How are you doing?" my father's voice came through the speaker, uncharacteristically cautious. "Are you okay?"
I pinched the bridge of my nose. "Dad. Why are you calling me?"
"Can a father not call his son?"
I rolled my eyes again. "What's going on here?"
"Olivia called me."
I froze, my eyes darting toward the staircase. Olivia hadn't spoken a word to me in two days, not beyond the minimum required by two people sharing a living space. Her bedroom door had stayed closed, her meals taken in isolation. But she was calling my father.
"I heard you recently started seeing someone," he continued, his tone shifting. "And I also heard you broke up with her over a lie."
"Is someone lying to me not reason enough to break up with them?"
"It's certainly reason enough for a huge fight," he conceded. "I don't think it's reason enough to end a relationship entirely."
"You always have a grand idea of what I should be feeling.
" The bitter words spilled out before I'd decided to say them.
"Elena died, and you wanted me to perform my grief the way everybody else does.
Now I've had a relationship-ending fight, and you're already calling to dismiss my feelings, lecturing me that a betrayal isn't enough.
Is that how you talk to a grieving son?"
"It is," he answered. "Because I know who you are, Simon."
"You don't." My voice spiked, louder than I intended. "I gave her my heart. I gave her everything that was left inside me. And she lied to my face like it was nothing. You don't know what that betrayal cost me."
"Simon." A heavy pause hung on the line. "Isn't that just you showing your cowardice?"
I went still. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"You didn't refuse to see a therapist because you didn't know how to grieve.
You refused because you were a coward who didn't want to confront your own feelings.
" He didn't raise his voice, letting the certainty of the words do the damage.
"I'm not asking you to walk around crying everywhere.
I just want you to finally face your own emotions. "
I gripped the phone and didn't say a word.
"Whenever you started something and it faced failure, what did you do?" he pressed. "You stopped starting things. You wanted to blend into the background until Elena brought you the concept for the company. Do you remember that?"
I remembered.
I'd started a logistics company in my early twenties. Small delivery bikes, a project I'd been excited about. It had failed early on, and I'd packed up the office, walked out the door, and refused to start another single thing until Elena came to me with the blueprint for what became Beckett Media.
I'd briefly dated Lara. She had a terrible personality and the relationship ended, and even then, I'd stopped trying to date. I'd liked Violet for a long time, and I'd never tried. And now, the second she'd lied to me, I'd sent her away.
"You didn't even try with Olivia," my father pointed out. "You took that grieving girl into your home, and you never tried to reach her. A fictional book did that work for you."
"I tried," I rasped.
"Was it not an author who finally reached her?" He paused, letting the trap close. "And who was that author, Simon?"
I stared at the empty chair across the table. "Violet."
"If you want to remain a coward for the rest of your life, then so be it," he said. "I'm not telling you your feelings of betrayal aren't real. I'm telling you to open your eyes and look at every other part of this. The parts you're terrified to look at."
The phone went dead.
I sat alone at the dining table and stared at the dark screen in my hand.
I didn't know what to do. I eventually wandered upstairs, went into my bedroom, turned off the overhead light, and lay down fully clothed.
The bed was freezing. I'd grown used to her beside me, and now the other half of the mattress was empty. I lay there in the dark and felt the cold of her absence. I'd never known how much I hated sleeping alone until I'd finally stopped doing it. Now I knew.
I lay awake a long time.
In the morning, I trudged downstairs for coffee. Marta was busy at the stove, and Olivia sat at the island. The second she saw me walk in, she grabbed her mug and turned to leave.
"Olivia."
She stopped. Slowly, she turned back around.
"Why are you avoiding me?" I asked.
"I'm not avoiding you," she muttered, staring into her mug. "I just don't have much to say to you right now."
"You called your grandfather."
She finally looked up. "I had things to say to him."
I looked at her, exhausted. "What did I do wrong here, Olivia?"
She exhaled a sharp breath. She set her mug down on the marble counter, her chin dropping, her shoulders sinking with it.
"You were impulsive." She shook her head.
"A huge fight would've been understandable.
I would've taken walking around this house with tension everywhere over just losing her like that.
" She looked at me, her eyes accusing. "Why was it so easy for you to send her away? "
"It wasn't easy," I defended, but there was no fight left in me.
"That's not true." She shook her head. "It was pretty damn easy for you.
You forced her to leave because, deep down, you didn't think it was going to last anyway.
" She paused, her voice breaking. "Just like Mom didn't last. So your best solution was to end it right now, before it could actually hurt you. "
I didn't have a single word to say in my defense.
"I was angry at her lie, yes," she admitted, her eyes shining. "But it also felt amazing to know that my favorite writer in the world was my friend now." She looked at me, her chin leveling in judgment. "You took that away from me."
She grabbed her mug and marched out of the kitchen.
She was right. Maybe not about every detail, but about enough of it.
I'd enjoyed every minute I'd spent with Violet.
Every one. And yet the moment she'd said something that even touched the edge of love, I'd changed the subject.
When she'd asked, in the back of the car, when we'd officially gotten together, I'd deflected with a sarcastic joke about marriage.
I was always keeping one foot outside the room, so that when the room inevitably hurt me, I could leave.
Letting myself be vulnerable meant it would eventually end. Elena's death had wrecked me, and this one would finish the job. So I'd sent Violet away before it could.
I stood in the kitchen while the early sun laid everything bare across the marble, my coffee going cold in my hand, and I couldn't find a single counter-argument. The evidence was stacked on one side.
I'd been a coward. And now she was gone.