Page 75 of Based on You

"Then come to Beckett."

I just looked at him. His wrinkled suit, his exhausted, red-rimmed eyes, the powerful man who'd driven to Midtown on a weekday morning to stand in a cheap hotel room and apologize to the woman he'd thrown out of his house.

"Fine," I said, with a heavy sigh. "I'll sign with Beckett Publishing."

"And I'll hold up my end of the deal." He reached for the door handle. "You won't see me."

He walked slowly to the door.

He stopped with his hand on the brass handle. He didn't turn around to face me.

I watched his broad back. The expensive suit jacket, the proud set of his shoulders, the slight, defeated bow of his head. I'd spent months writing about those shoulders. I'd watched them in boring board meetings, and at kitchen islands, and in the dark lake house hallway at four in the morning. I'd written them down in detail and given them to five million strangers, and the person they belonged to was standing at my hotel door with his hand locked on the handle, refusing to turn around.

I didn't say a single word to stop him.

He pulled the door open and left.

The latch clicked, and the room went very quiet.

I stood where I was for a long time. I'd done it. I'd said the clean, final thing I'd been rehearsing since the guest room, and he'd taken it and gone, exactly the way I'd told myself I wanted.

It didn't feel like winning. I'd gotten precisely what I asked for, and I already wanted to take it back.

I sat on the end of the bed and made myself look past how brave it had sounded to what I'd actually told him. I'd said I couldn't be with a man who would doubt me. But he hadn't doubted me because he thought little of me. He'd doubted me because the last person he loved had been certain to stay too, right up until she died and took that choice out of his hands for good. I knew that fear all the way to the floor. I'd built an entire hidden life out of the same one. I'd just called mine a pen name instead of grief.

We weren't broken in different ways. We were broken in exactly the same way, and I'd just punished him for it and called it self-respect.

I let myself picture the other life. The one where I signed with Forsyth, put my name on a cover, did every brave thing I'd promised myself in that guest room, and went home every night to an apartment that didn't have him in it. I could see it clearly. It was a good life. It was the life I'd have told my own readers to be proud of.

And I didn't want it. Not with him missing from the middle of it.

And there it was, all at once. I had been wrong. The lie I would always own, that part was mine to carry. The mistake I could still take back was this room, sending him off and calling it the mature thing to do. We could do the work together, or we could each do it alone in separate rooms for the rest of our lives, too scared of losing each other to ever risk having each other.

I wanted to try. I wanted it badly enough to be the one who said so first.

I didn't know yet how I'd tell him. I only knew that the next time I stood in a room with Simon Beckett, I was not going to let him walk out of it.

I picked up my phone and texted Sloane.

Violet

I think I just made a mistake. I think I have to fix it.

She wrote back a second later.

Sloane

Good. Took you long enough.

TWENTY-TWO

SIMON

I'd been awake long before my morning alarm sounded.

I lay still in the dark a long while, staring at the ceiling and turning over what Violet had said in that hotel room. She'd stood across from me with her shaking hands clenched at her sides and coldly told me I'd sent her away like it was an easy thing to do. Like I didn't think our relationship was ever going to last.

Just like Mom didn't last. Olivia had said it to my face first. My father had called it cowardice. Violet had stated it flatly, without heat, which was worse than if she'd shouted it. All three of them had been right, the kind of consensus that's impossible to argue with, and I'd spent two miserable days not trying to.