Page 72 of Based on You

"Put your real name on the next one." He said it to the table first, then made himself look up. "In daylight. No more hiding behind a set of initials."

He stopped there, and for a moment he seemed to be working up to the harder thing.

"I owe you an apology, Vi. A real one. I should have called you years ago." He held my eyes this time, even though it clearly cost him something. "I kept calling it distance, like it was something that grew between us on its own, instead of a choice I kept making. I left you alone in that house and never came looking. I'm sorry."

I pressed my lips together.

"I don't know how to be your brother yet," he went on. "I'm not going to sit here and pretend I do. But I'd like to learn how, if you'll let me. That feels like a place to start."

It wasn't everything. It wasn't twenty-nine years undone in a rented room off a hotel lobby. It was two people who had been strangers their whole lives, sitting in the wreckage of that, deciding to try anyway. The trying was the thing.

"I'd like that," I said.

He stood, hesitated, then put a hand on my shoulder, careful, the way you reach for something you aren't sure is yours to hold. "I have a flight tonight. But I'll call you. A real call. Not a forwarded article from Mom."

I reached up and put my hand over his before he could pull it back. "I'd really like that," I said. "And Xavier, thank you. For getting on a plane. I know that isn't an easy thing for either of us, and you did it anyway. That means more to me than I know how to say right now." And I found that I meant every word of it.

He left. I stood alone in the quiet room afterward, turning it over, this small, awkward, unfinished thing that had just happened, the closest the two of us had ever come to being family.

After a while, I sat down on the edge of the bed and opened my laptop. I didn't have it in me to write, but I could read. I pulled up the platform, the home I'd built in the dark for four years, and scrolled to the comment thread under the last chapter I'd posted before everything came apart. The same readers were still there. They didn't know my name. They didn't know I'd been fired, or thrown out, or that I'd spent two nights crying on Sloane's velvet couch. They only knew the chapters, and they kept showing up for them the way they always had.

I read for a long while, and the fear I'd been carrying since the guest room finally went quiet. What rose up underneath was something solid, something I could stand on.

For ten years I'd treated the writing like a secret vice, a thing I did when no one respectable was looking. My mother called it a hobby, and I'd half believed her. But five million people didn't show up every Sunday at midnight for a hobby. A woman flying home from signing her divorce papers didn't get saved by a hobby. I'd built something real with my own two hands, in the quiet, with no one's permission, and it had been real the whole time I was too frightened to say so out loud.

I closed the laptop.

Forsyth was waiting. My real name was going on a cover whether or not Simon Beckett ever spoke to me again, whether or not my mother ever called, whether or not a single person in Cleveland approved. I'd made up my mind, and it had already cost me everything soft and warm I'd built in that house. The least I could do was not flinch now.

I stood, smoothed the tired dress, and reached for my coat.

Then there was a knock, and I was sure it was Xavier, back for a charger or his keys.

I crossed the room and pulled the door open without checking the peephole.

It was Simon.

He wore a tailored blue suit. His dark hair, usually neat, was messy. His eyes were bruised and red around the edges. He stood in the hallway with his chin tipped up and his sharp jaw set, his hands clenched at his sides, not moving.

I stared at him, my heart stalling. "What are you doing here?"

"I want to talk to you."

"I don't want to talk."

"Violet, please just hear me out⁠—"

"I said I don't want to hear you out."

Ignoring me, he stepped into the room.

I turned and watched him walk in. Hot anger rose in my chest, and I held it there, because I wasn't going to cry in front of this man again. I'd stood in a room and let him say every devastating thing he'd said to me, and I wasn't going to give him my tears now.

"What do you want to accomplish here?" I demanded, cold. "You made yourself clear. We're over."

He turned to face me, his jaw tight. "I'm the one who should be furious here. Not you. You don't have the right to be angry with me."

Heat flooded my face. "You told me you were going to ruin my career. You think I don't have the right to be angry about that?"