Page 68 of Based on You

My mother was dead quiet a long moment.

Then she scoffed. "That's not a real career, Violet."

"I make a substantial living⁠—"

"How long is a silly fad like that going to last? How long are people going to keep reading smut? You need something stable. You need something real. Your brother⁠—"

"I know what Xavier does, Mom," I gritted out.

"Your brother built a respectable career! He has something to show for his life. What do you have to show for yours? A frivolous hobby hiding behind a fake name?" Her tone carried that particular, suffocating quality it always did, not cruel, but armed with the certainty of someone who'd never once questioned whether her opinion was welcome. "Do you honestly think that's something to be proud of?"

My voice dropped, going flat. "Can you just be proud of me? That's all I'm asking. Just this once. Just tell me I'm doing something worthwhile."

She hesitated, the silence pulling taut.

"I can't lie to you, Violet," she sighed. "I just want better for you than this."

I held the phone to my ear for five seconds, taking in the finality of it.

"I don't want to talk to you anymore," I said quietly.

I hung up.

I sat frozen on the edge of the mattress and didn't move a muscle.

It wasn't the rejection that stung. I'd known what she'd say. I'd been enduring variations of that exact speech my whole adult life, twisting myself into knots trying to either change her mind or hide from her judgment. What broke through the numbness wasn't her words but the thing underneath them, a light snapping on in a dark room I hadn't known existed.

Simon wasn't just a boss I'd fallen for. He'd been my actual home.

Not in the idealized, fictional version I'd imagined, not just the warm domestic picture I'd watched from a safe distance. He was home in the rawest sense of the word. Not because he was perfect, not because it was easy, but because he was the place where I'd finally stopped hiding.

The quiet kitchen at midnight. The dark hallway staircase. The chaotic birthday breakfast at dawn. He was the first place I'd ever spoken the honest truth about what I wanted, even if I hadn't been brave enough to tell him all of it. The first person I hadn't immediately tried to shrink myself for.

I loved him.

Not as a past-tense concept. Not as a fleeting feeling. Love. The plain, terrifying, present-tense reality of it, sitting heavy and absolute in my chest with nowhere left to go.

And I'd broken him. I'd taken the fragile trust he'd been rebuilding since Elena died, and I'd smashed it with my own two hands, the same hands that had spent two years typing romantic fantasies about him, the same hands that had held his in the back of a town car. I had no one to blame for this but myself.

I pressed my face into my palms and broke down.

The door eased open. Sloane crossed the room and sat down beside me, close, her arm coming around my shoulders. I leaned into her and cried again, quieter this time. I'd already emptied myself out earlier, and this was just what was left, my body still shaking out the last of it.

She didn't try to fix it. She stayed.

"I know what I have to do," I said finally, into her shoulder.

She waited.

"I have to stop hiding. All of it. The pen name, my parents, him." I pressed the back of my hand against my wet cheek. "And I have to do it whether or not he ever forgives me."

Sloane held on a little tighter. "Then that's where we start," she said.

Outside, the city kept going, bright and indifferent, the way it always had. Soon I would decide about the books, about my name, about the rest of my life. For now, I let myself know the one thing I'd spent every chapter writing around and never once saying plainly.

I loved him. I had loved him the whole time I'd been too afraid to write it down.

TWENTY