23. Violet
TWENTY-THREE
VIOLET
ONE MONTH LATER.
The launch was on a crisp morning in early November.
The Beckett Publishing serialization app had gone live three weeks before.
The hardcover of The Quiet Hour, Book Three: The Assistant had shipped to subscribers in the huge first run.
I'd held a copy in my shaking hands the morning it arrived, stared at the beautiful cover, traced the real name printed on the spine, and felt something I didn't even have a word for yet.
Not just pride. Something older, something essential that had been waiting a long time to arrive.
The line outside the bookstore wrapped around the city block.
I'd arrived early. I stood on the sidewalk, stared at the crowd, and had to take a sharp, steadying breath.
Sloane stood beside me. She looked at the endless line, then at me, then back at the line, and said nothing, because she didn't need to.
She'd been here with me this whole time.
She'd designed every single cover. She'd answered every panicked, three-in-the-morning phone call.
She'd pictured this exact line long before I could let myself hope for it, and she'd known this was what it would look like.
I sat at the draped signing table for hours.
My hand cramped somewhere in the middle of the second hour, so I switched to a different grip and kept signing.
People handed me their copies already open to the title page, and I wrote my name in them, Violet Paige, and handed them back, looking into the face of every person who'd read the intimate thing I'd written in the dark at midnight.
A woman in her mid-forties came up to the table, placed her copy down, and didn't speak right away. She looked at me, her hands resting on the glossy cover, her chin tipped down.
"I just need you to know something," she said.
"My husband left me two years ago. And I found Book One in an airport bookstore on the way home from signing the final divorce papers.
I read it on the plane, and I cried the whole flight, and by the time I landed, I felt less alone than I had in months.
" She paused, her eyes shining. "You saved my life.
I don't mean that dramatically. I mean it literally. "
I looked at her, my throat tight.
"I'm so glad you found it," I said. "I'm so glad it was there for you."
She nodded and exhaled, slow, and I nodded back, two people who both knew exactly what a book could do for someone who needed it. I signed her book to her by name, and she pressed it to her chest and walked away.
A young girl, maybe nineteen, came up to the table next with her battered copy open, her hands fidgeting at the edges of the pages.
"I really want to tell you something," she said, shy, "but I feel like an idiot saying it."
"Say it anyway."
She pressed her lips together, gathering courage.
"I started writing because of you. I found Book One when I was seventeen, and I thought, 'I want to do this.
I want to make people feel the way this made me feel.
' I just finished my first novel last month.
" She looked down at her hands. "I haven't told anyone yet. But I wanted you to know."
I looked at her a long, quiet moment.
"Does it have your real name on it?" I asked.
She blinked, confused. "What?"
"Your name. On the cover. When you imagine it out in the world."
She looked up from her hands, her mouth falling open in realization. Then she smiled. "Yes."
"Then sign it," I said. "That's all there is to it. Just sign your name to it."
She laughed, a little breathless, a little relieved, took her signed copy, and disappeared back into the crowd. I watched her go, and my shoulders dropped half an inch.
Olivia was waiting in the crowd. She wore a bright sweater I hadn't seen before, her dark hair down, and she'd been the third person in line because she'd insisted on it.
She clutched her worn copy, the one she'd read before it was even a real book, before it was a corporate contract, before it was anything except a digital chapter that went up on a Sunday at midnight.
She handed it to me, and I opened it, signed it with a flourish, and looked up at her.
"Hi." I smiled.
"Hi," she beamed back. Her eyes were red at the corners, and she was pressing her lips together hard to stop them from trembling.
I reached across the wide table and held her hand a moment. She squeezed back fiercely.
Over her shoulder, near the back of the store, I caught a familiar frame in a dark coat. Xavier had flown in the night before. He stood near the back in a dark coat, not folded in on himself the way he'd been in that hotel room a month ago, watching me with an ease that hadn't been there then.
He'd found me at the side door before the signing, while I was still pacing and trying to get my hands to stop shaking.
"You came," I said.
"I told you I would. A real one, remember. Not a forwarded article from Mom." He almost smiled, then stopped fighting it. "I've called you every Sunday since New York. I'm counting that as learning how."
"You're not bad at it," I admitted.
"I'm getting there." He glanced past me at the line wrapping around the block, then back at me. "Look at all of them. I keep thinking I should have figured you out years ago. Mostly I'm just glad I get to be here for it now."
I had to look at the ceiling a moment before I could look back at him.
"Go on." He tipped his head toward the table. "Your readers have waited longer than I have."
I turned back to the line, and Simon was right where he'd been all evening: standing to my left.
He wasn't seated. He stood to my left the entire night, handing me fresh copies as the line moved, stacking the signed ones, handing me my water bottle whenever I reached for it, producing a fresh pen the second the first one ran dry.
He kept his eyes on the line, on the growing stack, on the next copy coming forward.
He didn't once step back and let someone else on the staff handle it.
And he hadn't stopped looking at me.
Not at the crowd, not at the winding line, not at the display of covers staged near the front of the store. At me. All night. Every time I looked up between readers, his eyes were already there, and every time I caught them, he didn't look away.
I hadn't asked him to stop.
When the last reader finally cleared and the bookstore staff began stacking the few unsold copies, Simon came around the table and wrapped his arms around me from behind. I melted back into him. He pressed his lips to my temple and held them there a long moment.
"Are you hungry?" he murmured. "We can sneak out and get food before the reception starts."
"I'm really not that hungry." I turned in the circle of his arms to face him. "I honestly just want to get through this party and then go home."
He nodded. Then he lowered his head and kissed my neck.
His warm breath tickled my skin, and I put a hand flat against his chest to stop him. "Simon. We're still in public."
"You look very attractive sitting there signing those books," he said against my neck, unbothered.
I laughed despite myself. "Are you just attracted to my huge success?"
He pulled back and looked at me, one corner of his mouth tipping up, his gray eyes locked on mine. "Possibly. If I'd known earlier you were a wildly successful author, I might have made a move sooner."
I burst out laughing and leaned up to kiss him.
"Disgusting," Olivia announced, appearing from somewhere to our left with her heavy coat already on. "Also, we need to leave right now. The party started ten minutes ago."
I looked at her, grinned, and kissed him again.
"I'm going to the car," she declared, rolling her eyes and walking away.
We followed her. We climbed into the back of the town car, and the heavy door had barely clicked closed before Simon pulled me toward him, and I leaned in.
From behind the partition, Olivia groaned. "You're both absolute animals."
"That's what happens when you love someone," Simon said.
I laughed into his shoulder. He laughed too, his chest moving with the sound. We eventually stopped kissing and just sat close together for the rest of the drive, his arm around me, my head on his shoulder, the glittering city moving past outside the tinted window.
We arrived at the Beckett Media tower.
The moment we stepped into the lobby, applause started before I even reached the elevator doors.
My former colleagues were lined up on both sides of the grand lobby entrance, clapping and cheering. I stopped walking for a stunned moment and just looked at them, and my eyes filled with tears before I could stop them.
I gave a small, shy wave. Someone cheered louder.
Devika stood near the front with her hands raised above her head in victory.
I'd worked in this exact building for two years as someone's invisible assistant, and tonight, these same people were clapping for a romance book I'd secretly written about the man I'd come home with every night for the last month.
We took the private elevator up. The usually austere forty-seventh floor was unrecognizable, festive balloons, low music, and warm string lights draped along the wide windows that looked out over the glowing city.
A man I vaguely recognized from the publishing marketing team all but shoved a flute of champagne into my hand and beamed, "A million copies in three days. And counting."
I stared at the crystal glass, then up at Simon. "A million," I breathed.
He looked down at me with his chin tipped up, a slow, proud smile forming at the corner of his mouth. "And counting."
Someone clinked a glass, and the whole room lifted their drinks in congratulation. I stood in the middle of the forty-seventh floor with expensive champagne, my real name printed on a book, the entire city sprawling out the window, and I finally just let myself have it for a moment.
Simon leaned down and murmured next to my ear, "You look incredibly sexy as a powerful, successful woman."