Page 52 of Based on You

I barked a laugh. "You had that on the whole time?"

"I knew he was going to say yes," she said, with total confidence.

I thought about that as we walked the dirt path. About a fourteen-year-old girl who knew she was loved enough to push the boundaries, who understood she didn't need to earn that love first. She just had it.

The water was brutally cold. Olivia was diving in before I even had my shoes off. I waded in anyway and made a strangled sound that wasn't remotely dignified. Olivia laughed, ducked under the surface, and popped back up somewhere to my left.

I gave up and retreated to the edge of the wooden dock, only my feet dangling in the freezing water, and watched her swim.

The guilt came quietly, the way it had come every single day since I moved into the guest room. I watched Olivia surface and dive again, this fragile girl who'd told me her mother would have liked me, who'd knocked on my door bursting with questions about books, who'd sat beside me at the horse paddock and offered an acceptance she didn't have to offer. She trusted me. She'd decided to, without any guarantees, and she'd handed me a huge piece of her grief and her fragile hope in the same breath.

And I was lying to her.

Not directly. Not in words. But I was lying to her every day I sat at her uncle's dining table and didn't say: The book you love most in the world is mine. The dedication I wrote for your birthday was from me, not some anonymous stranger. V.M. Ashby is sitting right across from you eating toast.

She swam closer to the wood and rested her arms on the dock beside me.

"What's going on with you and my uncle?" she asked, blunt.

I forced a tight smile. "Nothing at all. It's strictly friendly. Purely platonic."

She tilted her head, assessing. "I really don't want that for you."

"Olivia," I warned.

"Are you happy being platonic with him?" she pressed. "Are you actually happy like that?"

I stared at the rippling water.

The honest answer was no. I wanted something so far past platonic that the clinical word felt embarrassing next to it. I wanted the deep affection, the closeness, the heated look he'd been giving me lately that I kept filing away. I wanted more quiet mornings with the coffee already poured, more charged encounters in kitchens at night, and the grounding weight of him in a hug that didn't have to end.

But wanting all of that while holding onto the secret was the same as stealing something I hadn't paid for. Anything past platonic meant the lie would land harder. And the more I cared about them, the worse the secret got, not better.

"It doesn't matter whether I'm happy or not," I lied. "I'm perfectly fine being just like this."

Olivia was quiet a long moment, studying my face. Then she asked, "Can I tell you something?"

I nodded. "Go ahead."

"I have no idea why you won't just make the first move. But I can tell you one thing for sure. My uncle does not see you as a friend, or as anything platonic. Whatever's going on in his head, it is definitely not that."

I looked at her, stunned. "Between Simon and me, there are complicated layers of things I can't start unraveling right now."

"When are you going to start unraveling it?" She tilted her head. "Because from what I can see, he cares about you. So why are you taking so long?"

What I needed to pick apart was the corporate lie I'd been building for months, and I couldn't do that here, shivering at a dock, in the freezing water, with his teenage niece staring at me like the answer was obvious.

"You really shouldn't push when you don't know everything," I deflected.

"If you don't make a move, he might think you're not interested," she said, ignoring me. "Or, if he tries again and you don't respond, that's going to make things strange between you two." She paused. "I'm just saying."

I offered a small, beaten smile. "I hear you, Olivia."

She pushed off the dock and swam away. I stayed where I was, letting the freezing water numb my feet, and thought about the weight of what I was carrying, and how much heavier it had gotten since the hug.

Eventually the cold beat her. She climbed out shivering and pleased with herself and let me wrap the towel around her before she'd finished asking for it. We walked back up the path together, her bare feet careful on the cold dirt, and somewhere along it the talk drifted to books.

She had opinions, and she handed them to me like she'd been waiting all day for someone to argue with. She'd just won a fight with her therapist about the ending of a fantasy series. Her therapist thought the ending was hopeful. Olivia thought that was a total cop-out, and she'd said so.