21. Violet
TWENTY-ONE
VIOLET
Xavier called the next morning, while I was still wrapped in Sloane's spare duvet, watching the light come up gray over the skyline.
We hadn't spoken in months. Our relationship ran on obligatory Christmas texts and the occasional forward from our mother, not phone calls. I almost let it ring out.
"Vi." He said my name carefully, like he wasn't certain he was allowed to use it. "I'm in New York. Mom called me last night, pretty upset." He hesitated, then made himself keep going. "I'd like to see you, if that's all right."
I sat up. "You flew here?"
"I moved a conference. That's not the point." He went quiet, and the silence held until I understood he was going to wait me out. "Can I see you?"
I booked a daytime room in Midtown, because I didn't want him anywhere near Sloane's door and because a rented room felt safer than a real one.
Before I left, I found Sloane in the kitchen and told her where I was going. I was meeting him at a hotel, somewhere neutral, nowhere close to her.
"You're going to be fine," I told her. "He doesn't even know where you live."
She stood at the counter with both hands wrapped around her coffee and nodded, tight, without looking up from the mug.
I put on yesterday's clothes, took a car uptown, and found him already pacing the lobby when I came through the revolving doors.
I knew him by his height before I knew him by his face.
Xavier had always been the tall one, broad through the shoulders, dark curls and green eyes that had never matched anyone else in our family.
We didn't look like siblings. We had never looked like siblings.
We'd grown up in the same tense house on two parallel tracks that crossed at the dinner table and almost nowhere else.
He came across the lobby and stopped a few feet short of me, like he'd traveled all this way and only now realized he didn't know the protocol either.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
We rode the elevator up without talking. Inside the room we sat on the edges of two stiff chairs with a glass table between us, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.
"Mom thinks you've had a breakdown," he said finally.
"I know what Mom thinks."
"I told her I didn't believe that." He turned his water glass a quarter circle on the table. "I wanted to hear it from you. Whatever it actually is."
So I told him. I left out the parts that were still only mine and told him the rest of it plainly.
I'd been writing for years, I said, under a pen name, V.M.
Ashby, with more readers than I'd ever let myself admit out loud to anyone in our family.
It was the truest work I had ever done, and I was finished letting our mother file it under a hobby.
He listened the whole way through without interrupting. When I finished, he didn't answer right away. He reached into his jacket, took out his phone, and turned the screen toward me.
It was the V.M. Ashby platform. Book One, open to the first chapter.
I stared at the screen, then at him. "You're joking."
"A guy at the hospital wouldn't stop talking about it a few years ago.
Said it was the best thing he'd read all year.
" He set the phone on the glass table between us and looked at it instead of at me, like meeting my eyes was more than he could manage right then.
"I read the first chapter that night to see what the fuss was about.
I didn't stop until I'd caught up. I've been waiting every week for the next one since, same as five million strangers, and I never once put together that it was you. "
I couldn't make a sound.
"It's good, Vi." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I don't know how to say it without sounding like an idiot. It's really good. Good enough that keeping your name off it always seemed like a waste to me, back when I thought you were just some writer I'd never meet."
It should have melted me, and some of it did.
But neither of us knew how to do this, and it showed in the way we both kept looking at the table instead of at each other.
He'd been quietly carrying the truest part of me around for three years, and here we were, two people who clearly wanted to get this right and had no idea how to begin.
"Thank you," I finally said. "For reading it. For telling me that."
"Put your real name on the next one." He said it to the table first, then made himself look up. "In daylight. No more hiding behind a set of initials."
He stopped there, and for a moment he seemed to be working up to the harder thing.
"I owe you an apology, Vi. A real one. I should have called you years ago.
" He held my eyes this time, even though it clearly cost him something.
"I kept calling it distance, like it was something that grew between us on its own, instead of a choice I kept making.
I left you alone in that house and never came looking. I'm sorry."
I pressed my lips together.
"I don't know how to be your brother yet," he went on. "I'm not going to sit here and pretend I do. But I'd like to learn how, if you'll let me. That feels like a place to start."
It wasn't everything. It wasn't twenty-nine years undone in a rented room off a hotel lobby. It was two people who had been strangers their whole lives, sitting in the wreckage of that, deciding to try anyway. The trying was the thing.
"I'd like that," I said.
He stood, hesitated, then put a hand on my shoulder, careful, the way you reach for something you aren't sure is yours to hold. "I have a flight tonight. But I'll call you. A real call. Not a forwarded article from Mom."
I reached up and put my hand over his before he could pull it back.
"I'd really like that," I said. "And Xavier, thank you.
For getting on a plane. I know that isn't an easy thing for either of us, and you did it anyway.
That means more to me than I know how to say right now.
" And I found that I meant every word of it.
He left. I stood alone in the quiet room afterward, turning it over, this small, awkward, unfinished thing that had just happened, the closest the two of us had ever come to being family.
After a while, I sat down on the edge of the bed and opened my laptop.
I didn't have it in me to write, but I could read.
I pulled up the platform, the home I'd built in the dark for four years, and scrolled to the comment thread under the last chapter I'd posted before everything came apart.
The same readers were still there. They didn't know my name.
They didn't know I'd been fired, or thrown out, or that I'd spent two nights crying on Sloane's velvet couch.
They only knew the chapters, and they kept showing up for them the way they always had.
I read for a long while, and the fear I'd been carrying since the guest room finally went quiet. What rose up underneath was something solid, something I could stand on.
For ten years I'd treated the writing like a secret vice, a thing I did when no one respectable was looking.
My mother called it a hobby, and I'd half believed her.
But five million people didn't show up every Sunday at midnight for a hobby.
A woman flying home from signing her divorce papers didn't get saved by a hobby.
I'd built something real with my own two hands, in the quiet, with no one's permission, and it had been real the whole time I was too frightened to say so out loud.
I closed the laptop.
Forsyth was waiting. My real name was going on a cover whether or not Simon Beckett ever spoke to me again, whether or not my mother ever called, whether or not a single person in Cleveland approved.
I'd made up my mind, and it had already cost me everything soft and warm I'd built in that house.
The least I could do was not flinch now.
I stood, smoothed the tired dress, and reached for my coat.
Then there was a knock, and I was sure it was Xavier, back for a charger or his keys.
I crossed the room and pulled the door open without checking the peephole.
It was Simon.
He wore a tailored blue suit. His dark hair, usually neat, was messy. His eyes were bruised and red around the edges. He stood in the hallway with his chin tipped up and his sharp jaw set, his hands clenched at his sides, not moving.
I stared at him, my heart stalling. "What are you doing here?"
"I want to talk to you."
"I don't want to talk."
"Violet, please just hear me out—"
"I said I don't want to hear you out."
Ignoring me, he stepped into the room.
I turned and watched him walk in. Hot anger rose in my chest, and I held it there, because I wasn't going to cry in front of this man again. I'd stood in a room and let him say every devastating thing he'd said to me, and I wasn't going to give him my tears now.
"What do you want to accomplish here?" I demanded, cold. "You made yourself clear. We're over."
He turned to face me, his jaw tight. "I'm the one who should be furious here. Not you. You don't have the right to be angry with me."
Heat flooded my face. "You told me you were going to ruin my career. You think I don't have the right to be angry about that?"
"I was never going to ruin your career."
"I don't know that!" My voice spiked, harder than I intended, and I didn't pull it back. "You're a powerful man, Simon. You said it straight to my face. How was I supposed to know what you'd do? You were heartbroken. Powerful people do terrible things when they're heartbroken."
"Yes," he agreed, his voice dropping low. "I was heartbroken. And who broke my heart, Violet?"
I held his gaze, refusing to flinch. My shaking hands stayed clenched at my sides.
"Yes," I admitted, my voice trembling. "I broke your heart. I lied to you. But I was terrified."