Page 13 of Based on You

In one quick motion, I snatched the leather notebook off the desk.

FIVE

VIOLET

I dialed my mother's number from the only restroom on the forty-seventh floor with full-door stalls, which made it the safest place in the building for the conversation I was about to endure. Simon would never walk in, and the rest of the executive suite sat deserted. I stood at the sink a moment before locking the stall, meeting my own reflection and listening to the dead quiet of the floor.

Today was my mother's birthday.

I'd been awake since five that morning. After I got back from the board meeting the night before, I'd dropped into my reading chair and stared at the wall, the laptop and the notebook both within reach and both untouched. The image of the V.M. Ashby slide was still burned onto the back of my eyelids, and my mother's birthday reminder blinked on my phone. Both heavy things had lived inside me overnight, side by side.

When I woke at dawn, a quiet dread was already blooming in my chest, the same one I'd dragged into every phone call home for years. It wasn't a question of love. I did love her. But loving my mother and talking to my mother had become two different things, and I'd never found a way to make them fit together.

I'd been so far inside my own head that I'd walked out of my apartment without slipping the leather notebook into my tote. I'd scribbled in it on the subway to bleed off the nerves, and when I stepped off the train, I didn't bother to tuck it away. I carried it open through the main lobby, into the elevator, and across the floor to my desk, setting it down without a second thought. Then I marched to the bathroom, locked the stall, and dialed her number.

She answered on the second ring.

"Happy birthday, Mom."

"Oh, sweetheart." Her breath went long and slow through the receiver. "Thank you for remembering."

She always said that. Thank you for remembering. As if the problem with our relationship had ever been my memory.

We spent a minute on nothing. The crisp weather in Cleveland. The state of her garden. Xavier had sent a huge bouquet, arrived right at eight in the morning, and she'd cried a little because he was so thoughtful. The fact that he'd remembered, despite everything he had going on at the hospital, had brought her to tears. She made sure to say it twice.

"He has so much on his plate, Vi. So much. And he still remembers."

"That's really nice, Mom."

"Sweetheart," she began, her voice dropping into a quieter, slower register where each word landed like a placed stone. She didn't lead the ambush with now or listen or I need to talk to you. She just used sweetheart, and I'd learned to fear that tone before I was ten. "Your father and I were talking about you last night."

I squeezed my eyes shut.

"We were on the phone with Anne from the country club. Her daughter Camille—you remember Camille, don't you?—just made associate at McKinsey. She's only twenty-eight. Anne wouldn't stop talking about Camille's career, and naturally your father and I got to talking about yours."

I didn't say a word.

"We've been making some calls on your behalf. Your father knows the dean over at Case Western. There might be space opening up in their night program for a paralegal certificate. He says paralegals are practically pre-law now. Half the people who go on to law school take that exact route first. It's a real path. A proper name at the end of it." She paused to let the logic settle.

"Your brother also mentioned there's administrative work opening up at the hospital. An executive administrative track. Real options, with a title. Something we could put on a Christmas card."

My chest pulled tight. "Mom⁠—"

"Be honest with me, sweetheart." Her voice softened into that unhurried register that was impossible to argue with, because it refused to admit there was an argument. "Were you ever happy with your GPA?"

I pressed my forehead against the cold metal of the stall door.

"Because nobody's hiring someone with a GPA like that for anything real. We've been making these calls, your father and I, and frankly, we're a little surprised the Beckett job has lasted as long as it has. Two years as a basic assistant, Vi. Two years. That position should've been a brief stepping stone, not your final station. We just don't want you to wake up at thirty-five and realize you've spent your life making coffee for a man."

I stayed quiet.

"We love you, Vi. We're only saying these things because we love you."

I knew she was telling the truth. That was the sad root of the whole thing. She wasn't a cruel woman, and she didn't say these things because she wanted to make me feel like I wasn't enough.

She said them because she believed the distance between where I was and where I should be was a gap she could help me close, if only I'd listen. She'd built her own career brick by brick, raised two successful children, and followed a proper path her whole life. She believed in titles. She believed a mother's love was best spent pointing out the better road.

She loved me. I knew that in my bones. The problem was she loved me the same way she improved everything else in her life, by hunting down what fell short and working to fix it. And I'd spent ten years being the broken thing she was trying to repair.