Page 78 of Based on You

I did not stop.

Violet kissed me back.

TWENTY-THREE

VIOLET

ONE MONTH LATER.

The launch was on a crisp morning in early November.

The Beckett Publishing serialization app had gone live three weeks before. The hardcover of The Quiet Hour, Book Three: The Assistant had shipped to subscribers in the huge first run. I'd held a copy in my shaking hands the morning it arrived, stared at the beautiful cover, traced the real name printed on the spine, and felt something I didn't even have a word for yet. Not just pride. Something older, something essential that had been waiting a long time to arrive.

The line outside the bookstore wrapped around the city block.

I'd arrived early. I stood on the sidewalk, stared at the crowd, and had to take a sharp, steadying breath. Sloane stood beside me. She looked at the endless line, then at me, then back at the line, and said nothing, because she didn't need to. She'd been here with me this whole time. She'd designed every single cover. She'd answered every panicked, three-in-the-morning phone call. She'd pictured this exact line long before I could let myself hope for it, and she'd known this was what it would look like.

I sat at the draped signing table for hours. My hand cramped somewhere in the middle of the second hour, so I switched to a different grip and kept signing. People handed me their copies already open to the title page, and I wrote my name in them, Violet Paige, and handed them back, looking into the face of every person who'd read the intimate thing I'd written in the dark at midnight.

A woman in her mid-forties came up to the table, placed her copy down, and didn't speak right away. She looked at me, her hands resting on the glossy cover, her chin tipped down.

"I just need you to know something," she said. "My husband left me two years ago. And I found Book One in an airport bookstore on the way home from signing the final divorce papers. I read it on the plane, and I cried the whole flight, and by the time I landed, I felt less alone than I had in months." She paused, her eyes shining. "You saved my life. I don't mean that dramatically. I mean it literally."

I looked at her, my throat tight.

"I'm so glad you found it," I said. "I'm so glad it was there for you."

She nodded and exhaled, slow, and I nodded back, two people who both knew exactly what a book could do for someone who needed it. I signed her book to her by name, and she pressed it to her chest and walked away.

A young girl, maybe nineteen, came up to the table next with her battered copy open, her hands fidgeting at the edges of the pages.

"I really want to tell you something," she said, shy, "but I feel like an idiot saying it."

"Say it anyway."

She pressed her lips together, gathering courage. "I started writing because of you. I found Book One when I was seventeen, and I thought, 'I want to do this. I want to make people feel the way this made me feel.' I just finished my first novel last month." She looked down at her hands. "I haven't told anyone yet. But I wanted you to know."

I looked at her a long, quiet moment.

"Does it have your real name on it?" I asked.

She blinked, confused. "What?"

"Your name. On the cover. When you imagine it out in the world."

She looked up from her hands, her mouth falling open in realization. Then she smiled. "Yes."

"Then sign it," I said. "That's all there is to it. Just sign your name to it."

She laughed, a little breathless, a little relieved, took her signed copy, and disappeared back into the crowd. I watched her go, and my shoulders dropped half an inch.

Olivia was waiting in the crowd. She wore a bright sweater I hadn't seen before, her dark hair down, and she'd been the third person in line because she'd insisted on it. She clutched her worn copy, the one she'd read before it was even a real book, before it was a corporate contract, before it was anything except a digital chapter that went up on a Sunday at midnight. She handed it to me, and I opened it, signed it with a flourish, and looked up at her.

"Hi." I smiled.

"Hi," she beamed back. Her eyes were red at the corners, and she was pressing her lips together hard to stop them from trembling.

I reached across the wide table and held her hand a moment. She squeezed back fiercely.