Page 63 of Based on You

"And you think keeping quiet is doing something better for them?"

I didn't have an answer.

"I'm really not trying to hurt you," Sloane said, softer. "I'm trying to keep you from making this worse than it already is. You can't keep lying to him to protect Ashby, knowing how much it means to him. Knowing how much it means to her."

"I know," I wept. "I know. I just don't know what to do. He'd hate me. He'd hate me for lying to him and writing about him for profit. I can't ever tell him I'm V.M. Ashby."

She was quiet a long moment, listening to me cry.

"I'm coming back to the office tomorrow," she finally said. "Come meet me for lunch. We'll sit down and talk about this properly, not over the phone, and not like this. And don't make any permanent decisions before we've talked, okay? Don't do anything rash tonight."

"Okay," I sniffled.

"I really mean it, Vi. No dramatic confessions tonight. No sudden decisions. Come see me for lunch tomorrow and we'll figure it all out together."

"Okay," I repeated, weak. "I'll come."

"Good." A reassuring pause. "It's going to be okay, Vi. I promise you."

I sat alone on the cold step with that promise a moment.

"I'll see you tomorrow," I whispered.

"See you tomorrow, Vi."

I hung up.

EIGHTEEN

SIMON

The living room was quiet.

I had my laptop open on the oak coffee table and an executive document I was supposed to be finishing pulled up, and I'd been staring at the same paragraph for twenty full minutes. The work wasn't difficult. The house was just different without her in it.

I sat back and stared up at the ceiling.

This was what she'd done to me. I'd spent a decade building an isolated life that required nothing from anyone, and I'd been sustaining it so well that I'd come to think of the isolation as a preference rather than a defense.

And now Violet was at Sloane's apartment for a single afternoon, and I couldn't focus on a basic paragraph, because somewhere in the last several weeks the hollow house had stopped being quiet and started being full.

Full of her voice, and her rich laugh, and the rhythmic sound of her typing late at night. Full of Olivia's eager footsteps coming faster down the stairs whenever she heard Violet in the kitchen. Full of the three of us at the dining table every evening in a routine that had no precedent in my entire adult life.

I'd told her in the back of the car, presenting it like a joke, that if I were ever going to ask her anything formal it would be to marry her. I'd said it lightly because I wasn't yet ready to say it heavily, but underneath the lightness, it had been the truth.

I couldn't picture my future as anything other than her husband. I couldn't picture a single morning without her at the kitchen island, or a lazy Sunday without her reading glasses on the couch cushion. I couldn't picture any version of Olivia growing up without Violet somewhere in the room.

I knew she was holding something back. I'd known it for weeks, sensing a hesitant pulling away at certain moments, noticing her gaze drop a fraction whenever I held it a second too long. I wasn't rushing her. Whatever she was carrying, she'd come to it in her own time. I was content to wait.

Footsteps came quickly down the main stairs.

Olivia rounded the corner and dropped onto the couch across from me, clutching her phone in both hands.

I looked at her over the top of the laptop monitor. "What's up?"

"I have something important to show you," she said grimly. She set the phone down on the table between us, screen up. "Read that."

It was V.M. Ashby's serialization platform. The newest, freshly uploaded chapter of The Quiet Hour, Book Three. I recognized the title at once. Olivia had told me all about this book on the floor of her messy bedroom months ago.