Page 71 of Based on You

I'd been a coward. And now she was gone.

TWENTY-ONE

VIOLET

Xavier called the next morning, while I was still wrapped in Sloane's spare duvet, watching the light come up gray over the skyline.

We hadn't spoken in months. Our relationship ran on obligatory Christmas texts and the occasional forward from our mother, not phone calls. I almost let it ring out.

"Vi." He said my name carefully, like he wasn't certain he was allowed to use it. "I'm in New York. Mom called me last night, pretty upset." He hesitated, then made himself keep going. "I'd like to see you, if that's all right."

I sat up. "You flew here?"

"I moved a conference. That's not the point." He went quiet, and the silence held until I understood he was going to wait me out. "Can I see you?"

I booked a daytime room in Midtown, because I didn't want him anywhere near Sloane's door and because a rented room felt safer than a real one.

Before I left, I found Sloane in the kitchen and told her where I was going. I was meeting him at a hotel, somewhere neutral, nowhere close to her.

"You're going to be fine," I told her. "He doesn't even know where you live."

She stood at the counter with both hands wrapped around her coffee and nodded, tight, without looking up from the mug.

I put on yesterday's clothes, took a car uptown, and found him already pacing the lobby when I came through the revolving doors.

I knew him by his height before I knew him by his face. Xavier had always been the tall one, broad through the shoulders, dark curls and green eyes that had never matched anyone else in our family. We didn't look like siblings. We had never looked like siblings. We'd grown up in the same tense house on two parallel tracks that crossed at the dinner table and almost nowhere else.

He came across the lobby and stopped a few feet short of me, like he'd traveled all this way and only now realized he didn't know the protocol either.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi."

We rode the elevator up without talking. Inside the room we sat on the edges of two stiff chairs with a glass table between us, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.

"Mom thinks you've had a breakdown," he said finally.

"I know what Mom thinks."

"I told her I didn't believe that." He turned his water glass a quarter circle on the table. "I wanted to hear it from you. Whatever it actually is."

So I told him. I left out the parts that were still only mine and told him the rest of it plainly. I'd been writing for years, I said, under a pen name, V.M. Ashby, with more readers than I'd ever let myself admit out loud to anyone in our family. It was the truest work I had ever done, and I was finished letting our mother file it under a hobby.

He listened the whole way through without interrupting. When I finished, he didn't answer right away. He reached into his jacket, took out his phone, and turned the screen toward me.

It was the V.M. Ashby platform. Book One, open to the first chapter.

I stared at the screen, then at him. "You're joking."

"A guy at the hospital wouldn't stop talking about it a few years ago. Said it was the best thing he'd read all year." He set the phone on the glass table between us and looked at it instead of at me, like meeting my eyes was more than he could manage right then. "I read the first chapter that night to see what the fuss was about. I didn't stop until I'd caught up. I've been waiting every week for the next one since, same as five million strangers, and I never once put together that it was you."

I couldn't make a sound.

"It's good, Vi." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I don't know how to say it without sounding like an idiot. It's really good. Good enough that keeping your name off it always seemed like a waste to me, back when I thought you were just some writer I'd never meet."

It should have melted me, and some of it did. But neither of us knew how to do this, and it showed in the way we both kept looking at the table instead of at each other. He'd been quietly carrying the truest part of me around for three years, and here we were, two people who clearly wanted to get this right and had no idea how to begin.

"Thank you," I finally said. "For reading it. For telling me that."