Page 47 of Based on You

I didn't say a word.

She held out the next apple slice. Whatever took it just as gently as before. Olivia's thumb moved once along the horse's nose, an old, easy habit between the two of them.

"My mom always wanted him to end up with someone." Her voice was different now, quieter, the warmth still in it but pushed further back by grief. "She used to say it all the time like it was a joke. 'Simon needs a real one, someone genuinely good.' She said it a lot." She paused, the quiet stretching out. "I really think she would have liked you, Violet."

The golden afternoon held itself still.

I looked at the side of Olivia's face, tracing the sharp line of her jaw, the same one I knew from Elena's framed photograph on Simon's office credenza. I didn't have the words for what she'd just said to me. I had nothing big enough to meet it.

She fed the horse the last piece of apple. She wiped her hands, straightened up from the rail, and pushed her dark hair back from her face.

"I'm just telling you so you know," she said. "He's allowed to be happy."

Without another word, she turned and walked back toward the lake house, her hands shoved deep in her jacket pockets.

FOURTEEN

SIMON

It was Olivia's fourteenth birthday.

I'd known it was coming for weeks. I'd watched the date approach with the particular, suffocating feeling of things you aren't ready for but can't stop. Fourteen. Elena had been there for thirteen of them. She'd been there for the first one, obviously. She'd been the one who made it possible. I'd been in that hospital room.

I'd held Olivia before Elena had fully recovered from the delivery, her whole warm weight settling trustingly into the crook of my arm, and I'd known, right then, that I'd love this child fiercely for the rest of my life.

I woke before anyone else in the house and lay flat in the dark, thinking about my sister.

Elena would have been up before anyone. She'd have decorated the kitchen the night before, then decided in the harsh morning light that it wasn't enough and done more. She'd have baked an elaborate cake from scratch, the complicated one Olivia had demanded since she was small, and cooked Olivia's huge birthday breakfast, and set the table, and she'd have been humming something under her breath when Olivia finally came downstairs.

She'd have done all of it without making it a performance, without needing to be thanked, just doing it because Olivia was her daughter, and her daughter deserved to wake up to something beautiful.

The kitchen would be empty this morning. That was the brutal fact of it. Olivia would come downstairs, and the house would be as it had been for eight months, clinically clean, functional, and missing the warmth Elena had kept running in every room she occupied. I hadn't known how to replicate it. I honestly didn't know if it was even possible. Some things in this life just don't have substitutes.

I got out of bed. I pulled on my clothes. I walked to the door of my bedroom and stopped.

Something warm and sweet was drifting up through the floorboards. Something was baking.

I stood in the hallway a long moment. Then I headed down the stairs.

I stopped in the kitchen doorway and didn't go in.

Small, colorful balloons were tied around the backs of the island stools, and two larger ones floating near the back door showed the numbers one and four in shiny gold, lit by the early morning sun from the window.

The heavy table had been shifted to make room for the display. Crepe paper streamers ran along the top of the cabinets. A small banner strung above the window spelled out HAPPY BIRTHDAY in uneven, colorful letters, the kind you grab in a hurry from a cheap party supply store.

And Violet stood at the counter, her back to me, icing a cake.

Her shoulders sloped forward, a small tired stoop, like she'd been planted in that one spot half the morning. Her dark hair was knotted messily back, stray strands escaping to frame her face. She hadn't heard me come down.

I stood there, just looking at her.

My throat went tight. It wasn't grief, though it lived right next door to it. Elena had always done this. Elena had stood in messy kitchens in the early morning and made magic happen for Olivia before Olivia was even awake to see the effort.

My sister had simply done it, knowing what her daughter needed and never asking to be thanked for it. I'd watched her do it for years. I hadn't understood, until right now, that I should have been holding onto every detail of it.

Violet hadn't been asked to do this. Nobody had told her what Elena would have done, or what this morning would have looked like if the accident hadn't happened. She'd just been paying attention. She'd gotten up hours before anyone else and made something out of nothing.

I stepped fully into the kitchen.