Page 69 of Based on You

SIMON

It hadn't taken long for the house to revert to what it used to be.

Olivia was barricaded in her room. She'd exiled herself there by her own choice for two days now. Marta moved like a ghost through the kitchen, setting things down gently, lifting them quietly, keeping out of sight as much as the open floor plan would allow. The house had reclaimed the sterile quality it had before Violet ever arrived.

Over the last several weeks, I'd forgotten what this stillness felt like. The house had been quiet before, and I'd proudly called it a preference. I'd called it the perfect size for one person. I'd filled it with expensive furniture, a pristine working kitchen, and a high-pedigree horse at the lake house, telling myself I'd built something that mattered.

I'd told myself I was fine. Content. It was the convenient word I'd weaponized for years to mean that nothing was pressing against the empty spaces in my life where something else could have been.

And then Violet had walked in. The rooms had changed without my permission, and I'd stopped noticing the quiet because there was suddenly too much life to hear it over.

There'd been her cracked-spine paperbacks crammed in two deep, overcrowding shelves that were already full. There'd been Olivia knocking on a door just to argue about a couple in a book, instead of staying sealed inside her own room. There'd been evenings that ran long for no reason, none of us in a hurry to scatter to our own corners of the house, doing what people do when they're a family without anyone deciding to be one. It had just happened.

Now it had come undone.

I noticed the quiet differently now. Not as the absence of something new, but as the return of something old. The return was worse. I had no excuse for calling it a preference anymore.

Dinner was the worst hour of the day. Marta had made something excellent, set the table, and told me, without my having to ask, that Olivia had already eaten in her room. I sat alone at the long dining table. I ate. I stared at the empty chair across from me.

She wasn't there. She wasn't there to redirect a mundane conversation into something that mattered. She wasn't there to push her plate toward the center and lean forward when something caught her attention, or to deliver a dry, exact observation that would make Olivia laugh into her water glass. She was just gone. The chair was empty, the food was getting cold, and I sat at that table alone, finally understanding that I'd done all of this.

My phone rang against the wood.

I glared at the caller ID and rolled my eyes before I answered.

"How are you doing?" my father's voice came through the speaker, uncharacteristically cautious. "Are you okay?"

I pinched the bridge of my nose. "Dad. Why are you calling me?"

"Can a father not call his son?"

I rolled my eyes again. "What's going on here?"

"Olivia called me."

I froze, my eyes darting toward the staircase. Olivia hadn't spoken a word to me in two days, not beyond the minimum required by two people sharing a living space. Her bedroom door had stayed closed, her meals taken in isolation. But she was calling my father.

"I heard you recently started seeing someone," he continued, his tone shifting. "And I also heard you broke up with her over a lie."

"Is someone lying to me not reason enough to break up with them?"

"It's certainly reason enough for a huge fight," he conceded. "I don't think it's reason enough to end a relationship entirely."

"You always have a grand idea of what I should be feeling." The bitter words spilled out before I'd decided to say them. "Elena died, and you wanted me to perform my grief the way everybody else does. Now I've had a relationship-ending fight, and you're already calling to dismiss my feelings, lecturing me that a betrayal isn't enough. Is that how you talk to a grieving son?"

"It is," he answered. "Because I know who you are, Simon."

"You don't." My voice spiked, louder than I intended. "I gave her my heart. I gave her everything that was left inside me. And she lied to my face like it was nothing. You don't know what that betrayal cost me."

"Simon." A heavy pause hung on the line. "Isn't that just you showing your cowardice?"

I went still. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"You didn't refuse to see a therapist because you didn't know how to grieve. You refused because you were a coward who didn't want to confront your own feelings." He didn't raise his voice, letting the certainty of the words do the damage. "I'm not asking you to walk around crying everywhere. I just want you to finally face your own emotions."

I gripped the phone and didn't say a word.

"Whenever you started something and it faced failure, what did you do?" he pressed. "You stopped starting things. You wanted to blend into the background until Elena brought you the concept for the company. Do you remember that?"