Epilogue
VIOLET
Four months later…
I got the mysterious text on a quiet morning in early March.
Meet me at the address below.
7 p.m. Wear something nice. Something warm. — S.
The address was tucked somewhere in the West Village.
I'd been writing all day. I had a huge chapter due to my editor on Friday, and I'd been at it since nine in the morning, hunched over the desk in the sunny apartment I now shared with Sloane, in the comfortable chair by the window that took the afternoon light at just the right angle.
I hadn't even glanced at my phone for hours. The cryptic text had come in at eleven.
I texted Sloane.
Violet
Do you know what this is?
She wrote back a second later.
Sloane
No.
She wrote back far too fast.
I forwarded the message to Olivia.
Violet
Do you know what this is?
She replied instantly.
Olivia
No.
She wrote back far too fast, too.
I stared at both identical responses on my screen, then glanced at my heavy winter coat hanging on the hook by the door.
There really wasn't much to think about.
He'd asked me to come somewhere, he'd told me to wear something nice, and both Sloane and Olivia were terrible liars. That was enough to know.
I put on the warm coat.
I went.
The address belonged to the independent bookstore. The one from the launch.
I'd walked past it a handful of times since that chaotic November night, each time aware of it, feeling the pull of a place where something important had happened to you. I stopped dead on the freezing sidewalk and stared at the front window.
The bookstore was dark from the outside, but lit from within. Hundreds of flickering candles glowed through the frosted glass, small and warm.
I pushed the heavy oak door open.
The patterned rugs had been pulled back.
Pillar candles covered every flat surface: the checkout counter, the wooden display shelves, the wide window ledge, the small step between the front room and the back.
Strands of small, warm white fairy lights ran above the shelves, tracing the ceiling.
The draped signing table from my launch sat in the middle of the room.
In the center of the table was a single copy of The Quiet Hour, Book Three: The Assistant.
Simon stood beside the table.
He wore a tailored black tuxedo. He'd shaved clean. He stood with his hands resting loose in front of him, watching me come through the door.
I stopped just inside the threshold, my breath snagging.
"Simon," I breathed. I took in the sea of candles, the glittering lights, the lone book on the table, and finally him. "What is all of this?"
The corner of his mouth curved into a devastating, slow smile. "You look beautiful, Violet."
"You look incredibly dashing yourself," I managed.
A breathless laugh escaped me before I expected it, and he crossed the room, taking both of my trembling hands in his. He looked into my eyes a long moment without speaking, and when he finally did, his voice came out low, gravelly, and unhurried, each word placed with care.
"I've been thinking about what I want to say to you for four whole months," he said.
"I wrote it all down, then threw it away because it sounded too much like a corporate contract, which is probably a sign that I've been running a company for too long.
" He looked down at my hands, his thumb stroking my knuckles. "So I'm just going to say it simply."
He looked back up, his gray eyes piercing mine.
"You're the most observant person I've ever met.
You saw broken things in me that I hadn't let anyone else see, and instead of using them against me, you wrote them down and gave them to people who needed them.
I didn't understand that for a long time.
I understand it now." He paused, stepping a fraction closer.
"You made my cold house into a real home.
You made my grieving niece laugh again. You made me see that the cynical version of me who'd decided he was better off alone was just a terrified coward hiding in an expensive suit.
You were patient enough to wait while I figured that out, and then you were brave enough to walk away from me when I didn't deserve your patience. "
I pressed my lips together, tears threatening to spill.
"I spent a long time afraid of loving someone fully," he continued, his voice thick.
"I spent a long time thinking that if I held onto things loosely enough, losing them would hurt less.
It didn't work. I lost you anyway, and the losing hurt exactly as much as I'd always been terrified it would.
" He paused, holding my gaze. "And I'd do it again.
I'd gladly let it hurt again, if this was what came after. "
I pressed my free hand against my aching sternum.
He let go of one of my hands.
He went down on one knee.
My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach.
I stood frozen in the middle of the candlelit bookstore, looked down at this man kneeling on the floor in his tuxedo, and felt something enormous I didn't even have a name for yet.
Far larger than simple happiness, and hiding underneath it was the small, toxic voice I'd carried for years: You don't deserve this.
But then, quieter, rising from somewhere deeper and truer: Maybe that's not the right question to ask anymore.
"I love you," he said, his voice filling the quiet room. "I've loved you for much longer than I knew what to call it. And I will not stop. I'm just not built for stopping when it comes to you." He reached into his pocket and opened a small velvet ring box. "Violet Paige. Will you please marry me?"
I stared at him, overwhelmed. The room was still. In the corner of my eye, I caught Sloane holding her phone up to record. Olivia stood beside her, both hands clamped over her mouth.
"Yes," I gasped, the tears finally falling. "Yes."
He stood up in one fluid motion and kissed me before I'd finished saying the word. I put my hands on either side of his face and kissed him right back. He pulled away just long enough to slide the cold, heavy ring onto my trembling finger.
"You once told me you'd give me anything I wanted," I said, my voice unsteady against his mouth. "If I found her for you."
He huffed a laugh, his forehead dropping to mine. "You never said what it was."
"I know." I looked down at the ring, then back up at him. "I think I was waiting until the answer was you."
I looked down at the diamond, then back up at him, and laughed a full, real laugh, because I didn't know what else to do with something this beautiful.
Olivia screamed at the top of her lungs.
Sloane kept filming, crying behind the camera.
Olivia ran across the bookstore at full speed, hit us with both arms, and held on for dear life. The three of us stood tangled together in the middle of the room, bathed in the candlelight, her arms wrapped around both of us and her face buried in the space between our shoulders.
I held on just as tight.
The ring was on my finger. The hardcover rested on the table with my real name gleaming on the spine.
Sloane stood in the corner making a strangled sound that might have been laughing, might have been crying, and was probably both.
She was shaking too hard to hold the phone steady, and the footage was going to be unwatchable, and I didn't care at all.
Four months ago, I'd stood broken in a sterile hotel room in Midtown and flatly told the man I loved that I never wanted to see him again.
I'd been wrong about that. I'd known I was wrong two days after I said it, and I'd said yes in a boardroom on the forty-seventh floor, and I was saying yes again now in a quiet bookstore in the West Village, wearing his ring, with Olivia still holding on to us.
He stayed.
He'd always been going to stay. I think I'd known that too, from somewhere buried under all the fear, in the quiet part of me that had spent two years writing him down, understanding his heart long before I was brave enough to say so out loud.
I signed my real name.
He stayed.
That was the whole story.
The story continues in Waiting for You.