Page 140 of Theirs for the Holidays

“Really?” I fold my arms, looking at her. “You can’t spare five minutes to tell me what the fuck happened with us?”

Violet takes a deep breath and swallows hard. “I don’t see what else there is to talk about,” she says quietly. “You know what happened.”

“But I don’t!” I insist, stepping closer. “Rhett, Lennox, and I have spent the last few days trying to figure out what it is that pissed you off so badly. If we did something, I think we deserve to know what it was. So we can apologize, if nothing else.”

“You’re the ones who told me you talked to Isabelle,” she says. “After she told me herself. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it was to hear that from my sister? To know you went to her and said those things about me?”

Now she’s lost me. I stare at her, my brows pinching together as I try to figure out what she’s talking about.

“What things?” I finally ask. “I mean, we told her off for stealing your bakery and for not supporting you. Is it just that we went to her behind your back?”

“No!” Violet bursts out. Her cheeks color a second later, and she lowers her voice. “No. It’s not just because of that. She played recordings of the three of you saying… saying things about me that I never thought you would say. That I was pathetic and that I worked all the time at the bakery and it still didn’t matter. Stuff that I always believed about myself, but I never thought you all thought that. I guess I was deluding myself more than I realized.”

I watch as a tear tracks down her face, and my hands itch to wipe it away for her. To pull her into my arms and try to take away the pain she’s clearly feeling over this.

Instead, I stay where I am. Violet definitely doesn’t look like she wants to be touched by me right now. I keep my voice soft as I respond to her, trying to make it as soothing as I can despite the agitation sparking through me. Because what she just said makes no sense to me.

“Violet, I don’t know what Isabelle did, but we didn’t say any of that about you. We calledherpathetic. We told her that it was pathetic that she and the rest of your family never supported you. We said you work hard at the bakery every day, and it didn’t matterto thembecause no matter how successful you were becoming, they didn’t care.”

Violet’s head jerks backward a little, a look of surprise flashing across her beautiful features. “But I… I heard you. You said you couldn’t believe you ever even wanted to be friends with me. That I was the most selfish person you’d ever met.”

I frown, wracking my brain to try to figure out what she’s talking about—and then suddenly it clicks into place. I close my eyes, battling down a sudden rush of fury.

“I didn’t say that about you,” I say quietly, drawing a breath and opening my eyes to meet Violet’s gaze. “I was talking about Isabelle after my brothers and I tried to talk some sense into her, to convince her to back off and leave you alone. She must’ve recorded our conversation, and then secretly recorded me talking to Rhett and Lennox afterward. Then she played you whatever snippets she could find that would make it sound like we were talking shit about you. But what you heard me say? I was referring to Isabelle, and to the fact that I can’t believe I ever thought I could be friends with someone like her. We used to get along okay when we were kids, but I had no idea how selfish and manipulative she would turn out to be.”

I take a small step closer to Violet, my voice shaking with intensity. “Anything else that sounded like we were talking badly about you was just us repeating the thingsshesaid.” I clench my jaw, willing her to believe me. “I thought you would have known that we’d never talk about you like that. Not to your sister, not to anyone. None of us think like that about you.”

Violet swallows again, glancing off to the side. I can practically see the wheels turning in her head while she rewrites the conversation she must have had with her sister. “Really?” she says after a while. “That was all her?”

I nod. “Yeah. She was pretty shitty about the whole thing, and we should have expected her to pull something like that.”

There’s a beat where neither of us says anything. Violet takes a deep breath and lets it out in a slow rush.

“I’m glad then. That you don’t think like that about me. That you didn’t say those things. It hurt a lot to think that after all this…” She trails off. “Thanks for telling me.”

“You’re welcome,” I say, my throat tight.

My stomach is still wound into a knot. Even though we’ve cleared the air about what she thought we said, the energy between us still feels… off. Her posture hasn’t relaxed at all, as if she still has her defenses up, some kind of invisible armor wrapped around her heart. Rather than moving closer to me, it seems as if she’s retreating into herself even more, despite the fact that though she knows the truth now.

“Are you okay?” I prompt, an anxious feeling thrumming through me. “Is something else bothering you? Please, tell me.”

Her lips quirk up in a small smile, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “No, I’m… I’m fine. I’m glad we talked. It means a lot to me, Sawyer. Thank you. But I don’t think we should… continue the way we were.”

Her words hits me like a blow to the chest, nearly knocking the wind out of me. I stare at her, trying to make sense of what she means.

“Why not?”

Instead of answering me directly, she bites her lower lip, glancing down at the ground before looking back up at me. “It was always going to end, right? There was a deadline on this whole thing. It was for the wedding, and that’s passed now. So there’s no reason to keep it up.”

“Is that what you think?”

“It’s the truth.” Her fingers twist together, and she lets out a small sigh. “I lost sight of that because we were having fun and you all made me feel?—”

“Made you feel what, Violet?”

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter!” I insist. “Why are you giving up on this? I just want to understand.”