Page 156 of Beau and the Beast

Wolfram is taciturn in the mornings sometimes. He’s a man ruled by his moods—quick to anger and withdraw, but also quick to forgive, to open up. It’s hard for me to imagine him behind a desk in a glittering Wall Street tower, and I find myself wondering some mornings if he would’ve made a better poet or artist than a businessman.

His career before I met him doesn’t line up with the way I view him today. Was Wolfram mellowed by his curse, or was the potential for deep thought beyond the world of making a buck always latent inside of him?

While it may be difficult to imagine him as a high-power executive, it is very easy to picture what he would’ve been like as a child.

“My mother was a constant innovator,” he recalls one morning over oolong tea. “If there was anything broken in the house, she rushed to fix it in her own way before my father found out and called someone in to repair it. She was a woman who delighted in leaks and clogs and misbehaving appliances because it meant that she would be allowed to tinker.

“When she fixed something, then, it became a secret between mother and son. We would share surreptitious smiles over something as banal as a water heater.”

That was the nature of the language that developed between Wolfram and his mother: clandestine moments of happiness, guarded closely against Isidore.

In spite of her misgivings about the way that Beau had revealed the curse, Violetlikedthis portrayal of Wolfram. She liked the way Beau wrote.

Maybe he can convince them,she allowed herself to think with a jolt of hope.Maybe this is what we needed all along.

* * *

“Violet wants to see you,” Wolfram said a few hours before dinner. “She just emailed me.”

They’d carried on the rest of the day professionally, never getting close to one another. It was as if Violet’s presence and her questioning about Beau’s progress with the manuscript had sucked all of the electricity out of the air between them—at least for the time being—and both men had been working independently since Wolfram returned from his run.

“Did she say anything else? Whether or not she liked it?” Beau asked, standing. His heart was thudding away in his chest. What if she hated it? What if she thought it was a total disaster?

Wolfram shook his head. “All the email says is that she’d like to see you.”

“God, why do I feel like I’m being called to the headmaster’s office?” Beau asked, dragging his hands through his hair. Wolfram just chuckled from his desk.

“I’m sure it’s fine. Go talk to her.”

It didn’tfeelfine. As Beau made his way to Violet’s office down the other wing, he felt like he was approaching a firing squad.

If it wasn’t what she wanted, would they still pay him the money promised? Was it possible that he’d walk away from the deal without anything tangible to show for it? Meeting Wolfram had been enough payment in his mind, but that didn’t change the fact that Beau had quit his job to write the book. He could pick up where he left off easily enough, but he’d be out an entire month’s wages with rent due soon.

Slow down,Beau told himself.You haven’t even spoken to her yet.

It was astounding that he’d been able to spend so much time with his own manuscript, confident that it was worthwhile and well written, only to have all of his self-assurance dissolve the moment the thing was in the hands of a reader.

He approached her door and knocked.

“Come in!”

Beau felt no less worried as he entered and took a seat across from Violet. Her expression was inscrutable. The borrowed pages of the manuscript sat stacked on her desk.

“Did you read everything I gave you?” he asked, unwilling to let her take the lead in the conversation, unwilling to let her try and cushion the blow if she hated every word of it.

“Not all of it. But I read enough.”

“Tell me—honestly—what do you think of it?”

“I had no idea you were going to talk about the curse in such… open terms,” she said.

“I know—but there was no other way to tell the story. It’s so central to everything that Wolfram is that—“

She held up a hand to stop him.

“It’s beautiful, Beau,” she said smiling finally and shaking her head. “This is quite a book.”

“You’re serious?”

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