Page 28 of Based on You

My hand froze halfway back to my knee.

I looked over at my niece. She was still staring out her window, her face giving nothing away.

"Why are you bringing that up?" I asked, careful.

"I'm just making a general observation." She kept her eyes on the blurring city. "She's very pretty. That's a good thing."

She stayed quiet a long beat. "What's your physical type, Uncle Simon?"

I let out a harsh laugh. "Olivia, please."

She turned to look at me, her face a mask of innocence. "What?"

"Violet is my executive assistant. We happened to run into each other at a bookstore on a Saturday by accident. That's the whole content of our personal relationship. I'm not interested in her that way."

She was quiet another moment, studying my face. "You look at her a lot."

"She was sitting right across from me at a small table."

"You looked at her even when she was looking at Sloane."

I didn't have a defense for that, so I didn't answer. I turned back to my window.

I decided not to mention the ninety-one-minute midnight phone call.

"I really liked her," Olivia said. "And I really liked Sloane. I'd like to know both of them better."

I looked back at my niece. She'd turned toward her window again, her chin tipped up as she watched the city move past the tinted glass.

"What if we asked them to come up to the lake house?" The idea came out before I'd thought it through. "For your birthday weekend."

She spun around, her eyes wide.

"Are you serious?" She searched my face for the punchline. "I would love that! Both of them?"

"Both of them. I'll ask Violet on Monday."

She turned back to the window, but this time I caught the clear reflection of her mouth pulling up into a smile in the glass.

I turned back to my own window, satisfied.

Later that evening, I sat alone at the kitchen table long after Marta had gone home and Olivia had retreated upstairs. The big house was quiet. Through the ceiling, I could hear the faint sounds of Olivia moving around, the creak of her floorboards, the click of her reading light. She was awake. She was present now, not just getting through the day.

If I was going to bring them to the lake house for Olivia's birthday, I wanted to give her a gift that mattered. Something that would reach her the way those online books had been reaching her.

I thought about it, and the answer was right there. V.M. Ashby. That was the gift.

Violet was looking for her. I'd make sure she found her.

NINE

VIOLET

I had a mountain of work to get through.

The draft of Book Three had been sitting open on my personal laptop since morning. I'd hammered out eleven new pages the night before, and they needed formatting, polishing, and uploading to the platform before the week slipped away. My protagonist, Sandra, had just discovered that Nicholas knew about her secret writing, and the fallout of that meant I needed to be deep inside her head.

I was nowhere near Sandra's head.