Silence. Followed by “I’m calling to tell you, and I know this is horrible timing…” She trailed off.

Trey said something in the background. Words I couldn’t quite catch.

Then Diya recovered. “I wanted you to hear it from me. We’re friends, but I have to do what’s best for me. I’m sorry. You can’t raise the money for a buyout. We both know it.”

I stopped by the window and beheld the black night, feeling as if all that darkness was sucking me through the glass. I knew what she was going to say. “You sold your shares to Trey.” My stomach cramped. “He borrowed half a mil from his father? Why didn’t he borrow it to keep us afloat?”

“Trey and I agreed on two hundred thousand. Look, it was two hundred or nothing. Now I can pay off my student loans. Do you hate me?”

I didn’t have it in me to manage her guilt. “I don’t have the bandwidth to think about this right now. I have to go.”

“I’m sorry, Em. Give Violet a hug for me.”

I hung up, anger popping in my stomach like popcorn, burnt and bitter. Trey now owned sixty percent of the business we had built on my idea, with clients from my contact list.

The thought of losing Ludington’s to Trey made me want to run screaming down the hallway. It’d been a mistake all these months to plaster over the tensions between us for business’s sake.

I wanted to bang my head into the window. I didn’t. I was afraid I’d do it too hard and crack the glass.

I could not fall apart. I was here for Violet.

“You have to wake up to help me figure this mess out,” I pleaded as I turned.

Her monitors beeped a steady, reassuring rhythm.

“I know you’ll wake up. In a few days, we’ll be joking about this. We’ll be eating pudding and talking about why you wanted me to read that old diary.”

I walked to her wardrobe for the paint-splattered box and carried it to her bed. I riffled through the Dutch letters, all written by Johanna Bonger to the same woman. “Who is Clara? Why do you have Johanna Bonger’s letters and her diary?”

Now that I’ve read the first two entries, I couldn’t wait for more. I couldn’t believe I was reading the words of a woman from a hundred years ago. A woman who’d known Vincent van Gogh. If, the little green book was a diary.

“To be honest, it might be a biography, written by the mysterious Clara.” Here and there, there were notes in the margins that reminded me of editing notes on movie scripts I’d auctioned off over the years.