The man in the taxicab winces as the door is shut with a bang.

"You know," he says, the words tumbling from his mouth before he can have a chance to catch them, "All it needs is a firm push."

There is no reply, but he does not turn his head towards the girl to see her expression.

Violet Baudelaire.

He's seen her once or twice, but she was just a little girl back then, darting around the grownup's ankles during dinner parties, carrying heaps of junk to and from the kitchen for various inventions while baby Klaus sat in the corner watching her intently. They had been mere children, with no idea of the misfortune to come; no clue that their parents would be dead in less than a decade.

It breaks his heart, remembering, the smiles and shrieks of delight that used to come from the Baudelaire children. He had never liked the fact that they were Bertrand's, of course, but they were hers as well, and because of that he could never hate them.

Not for an instant.

Not even when he took a train down to the Village of Fowl Devotees and found out that it was there that Jacques had died, died because of them.

Not even when he sat upon that costal shelf tapping furiously at the keys of a typewriter, watching as tears for his sister fell upon the words and smeared the ink.

Violet Baudelaire.

It's unbelievable. Years upon years he's spent documenting her life and the life of her siblings, and still they remain a shadowy enigma in his life like everything else that the V.F.D. seems to touch, and despite his research they always seem to lie somewhere out of reality. Ghosts of something he never wanted to be a part of but was and always had been.

And here she is, she's real, he could reach out his hand and touch her ribbon and she wouldn't disappear and turn out to be a dream.

He can't believe it, not really, and he won't until he turns and sees her face, so impeccably like her mother's. And still he is unable to.

"Well?" she says, and her voice is hoarse from screams and the brine from the water still lapping at the shore beside them, and in spite of this the sudden urge to weep is overwhelming. That voice. He's typed her words in quotation marks so many times; he's written her sad and happy and angry and scared and he knows that if he ever writes up this meeting he will put her down as rough and exasperated.

Swallowing his tears he looks to his left with a weak smile.

Her hair is dripping wet and only now he notices it smells of the ocean. She's looking at him with a gaze of fierce defiance, one very uncommon for her according to what he's so far documented. Something must have snapped while she was standing on that dock—her manners have dissolved, whatever shame she might have once had is nowhere to be seen. Violet looks like she could take on the world and fight back and he is painfully reminded of her. That one time. He remembers her reaction when she read that article, and when she found it had been fake the difference in personality had been astounding.

The tides turn quickly with the Baudelaire women.

She does not break their eye contact. She acts more like her father but has her mother's eyes, deep and dark and hiding far too many secrets. But he can see her gaze wavering just a bit, the only part of her that gives away her fear. She's searching his own eyes, searching him, reaching out for comfort, reassurance, anything—and he knows what it feels like, that desperation.

"Violet," he says at last, and he can hear his voice break on the last syllable. He's uttered her name a thousand times, to librarians and annoying waiters and to stagehands and janitors and even, once, to a snake—and on paper the letters that make up her name have been written and typed and scribbled and jotted more times than he can count. But this is different. This is her name, said to her, and all of a sudden she is terribly real and he feels like a child whose fairy tale character has just come to life. And he realizes then that the documentation of a person does not make them seem any more real—it makes them more of a fiction, a fragment, a story.

Violet opens her mouth to say something but suddenly finds it impossible to utter a thing, and in that instant she wishes dearly for Klaus. He was always far better with words than she.

Eventually something has to be said.

"Who are you?"

Her voice is soft now, calmer, as if she's come to terms with her situation. It must be mentioned, though, that she hasn't. By the tone of the question he can tell that she really does not know who he is—but that is something to be expected. He has been avoiding her all his life, just like he's been avoiding the others. He just cannot face the truth anymore. Why do you think he's requested for his manager to keep his works listed as mere stories despite the words inside telling otherwise? It must be so easy for his readers, to get caught up in the whirlwind of mysteries and unsolved puzzles, of death and of tears and of arson, and then to flip back to the beginning and read 'This book is a work of fiction.' Then they'd just go "oh" and laugh it off. What a wonderful way to live, he thinks. Just sublime.

"My name," he says, and thinks this is a perfect time to start the car, "is Lemony."

The name sounds so terribly familiar.

After a moment it clicks.

"My mother," she says, as he puts his hands to the wheel and his foot to the pedal and begins to back out of the dock and onto the street behind them, "This book, on the island I came from—your name was in it."

The car comes to a sudden halt, and Violet is jerked forward. She quickly reaches back for her seatbelt only to find that there is none. It's been torn off.

"Was it?" Lemony says softly. His fingers grip tighter on the steering wheel.

"Yes, but she can't possibly have been talking about you. She was going to name me that, if I turned out to be a boy, after someonewho had… died. So you must be named after him."

When he finds his voice it is quivering.

"No, that was… that was me. She was talking about me, yes." He pushes on the gas pedal again, with less force this time, and makes a slow U-turn so that now they're opposite the sea, and starts driving. They're on an open stretch of road than runs right through the middle of town, going on farther than the eye can see—it is terribly dark and the headlights are still not on. "I was… long story, I was supposed dead for a… rather long while, I'm afraid."

The familiarity of his speech patterns and movements and even his profile, from what she can see of it in the shadows, is beginning to nag at her.

"Have we met before?" she asks, though she thinks it unlikely. Perhaps they had come across each other once or twice during that one terrible year. But met proper—no, they couldn't have.

Jacques, he thinks, when he hears the question. Kit. They had always been easy to associate with each other. Close siblings were common among the V.F.D., after all—in times of despair sometimes immediate family was among the only groups one could trust. But even that faith had faded away as years went by. Relatives could no longer be counted on, not in situations like these.

"I believe," he says, stricken with pain though he tries not to show it, "You have met my brother. And… and my sister, as well. Late. Both of them."

Realisation dawns upon her quicker than he'd anticipated. "You're the third Snicket sibling."

"And the last."

The words are cold, and Violet realises he sounds judgmental behind the hurt. And one can hardly blame him. At that moment she feels as if the word sorry written a thousand times on the wall of a cave with her fingernails could hardly suffice for what she's caused his family.

And it is because of her, she realises. Jacques's execution. Kit's death on that beach after childbirth. All the fault of her and her siblings.

She's been the reason for so many unwarranted deaths.

Murders. Burnings. Accidents too.

The "I'm sorry" escapes her anyway, and in that instant he knows he forgives her in spite of it all.

"There will always be death, no matter where you go," he says, swerving left onto a fork in the road that Violet hadn't known was even there. "You of all people know that, Miss Baudelaire. They would have fallen eventually."

That is his forgiveness, and it is enough.

"In my lap," he continues, "There is an envelope. In the envelope is a letter, and written on the letter in invisible ink is a secret. But before the secret comes a message typed in the India ink that your mother bought for me on my eighteenth birthday, the same ink that was used to stain Ike Anwhistle's fingernails blue so that he could enter a garage in Yokohama meant for bikers from Switzerland. That, however, is irrelevant to the message itself, which I believe, dear Violet, you should have the honour of reading."

She blinks once, trying to make sense of what has just been said. Once she's sorted it out in her head she realises that all she has to do is open that envelope and read what's written.

With a shaky hand she reaches and takes the envelope from Lemony's lap.

She holds it delicately, as if it would break if she dropped it. And it just might. The corners are ragged and yellow and she knows that it's likely older than her. The words—it looks like a name, and something is scrawled in smaller font underneath it—written on it in fading ink are difficult to make out in the darkness.

Violet squints and thinks she can make it out.

To Lemony. I'm sorry I had to go.

"But this says it's for you."

"Just read it," he replies, softly.

She says nothing more but flips the envelope over. The seal has already been broken. The V.F.D. symbol. The eye. She recognises it even without the advantage of light—even now she is being watched.

She takes a deep breath that rivals the one she took at the dock to calm her nerves and opens the envelope, pulling out the folded sheet of paper inside. The letter is even worse off than what it's been sitting inside for the past age.

That's her mother's handwriting, she sees now. She could never forget that curling script. When she was younger she'd always hoped she'd be able to print like her mother. Somehow it's instead stayed messy and out of control like her father's.

Her eyes scan over the letter. It's long, and though one corner seems to have been… burnt, it's still legible—or would be, if there were reading light available.

As if he had heard her, Lemony turns on the headlights, and it reflects into the car, making the words easy to see.

There's more on the other side, she notices.

"Should I read it out loud?" she says. There's no reply. It might be a yes, it might be a no—she decides to assume the latter. Being left alone with thoughts while reading a letter from her dead mother is not something she especially wants to do. Perhaps the sound of her own voice will make it easier.

"Dearest Lemony,

If you're reading this, it means I've died before you. It seems rather morbid for me to be writing this letter so early in our relationship, but with the schism and the fires I feel that it is necessary. I've no idea what might happen. I could be stabbed in the back while writing this letter, even if it is by candlelight in this old abandoned warehouse.

I don't know about your current situation. Perhaps you are old and have just attended my funeral, where there was a speech about what a long, happy life I lived. Perhaps, then, you are now a widower.

That is unlikely."

Violet has to pause here. That means the man she is sitting beside once held the love of her mother. It's a strange thought, but she understands, and it makes sense, even though the child in her is yelling that she couldn't have ever loved anyone else but her father.

"A more probable scenario right now would be that I have just died a rather unfortunate and unprecedented death that came about due to some sinister events at a party. Or maybe it was her. Maybe she's finally decided to get her revenge. But if so, you're probably dead as well, and in that case this letter is of no use.

Whatever might be happening in your life right now, Lemony, I just want you to know that if I were alive I'd be by your side. I hope you know that. It might be more comforting for me to say that I would have abandoned you long ago and gone sailing off with… well, for all intents and purposes I could have gone running off with Bertrand."

A bitter laugh escapes Lemony, and Violet wonders if he still loves her.

"Anyway, the reason I'm writing this is because if I am, in fact, dead, I would like you to do several things for me.

My first task is to please send the enclosed check to that ice cream shop on the corner of Gardenia Road and Red Herring Street. The one we always went out for root beers at before that waiter started dropping tacks in our drinks. I don't want them to go out of business.

My second is to ship Ink to some remote jungle and give Monty a map to the spot so complicated that he only finds him in eighteen years exactly.

My third wish is for you to check up on Josephine ever few years, or send someone if you can't make it. She hasn't been the same since Ike's death.

And my final request, love, is that you watch over my children should I have the fortune to have any."

That is the end of the page. Violet has been trying to keep in her tears for a while now, and it is at this line that they finally spill. She wipes the first of them away before they can ruin the paper, but there are only more to follow.

When she flips the paper over and starts up again her voice is trembling.

"They're probably your children too. But if they aren't—even if you do it from afar, just take care of them. Make sure they do not come in harm's way. Don't you ever involve them with V.F.D. Don't you dare let them near this organisation. It would do you well to swear on your life that you will keep them away from our secrets; I do not want them to suffer as we did, as we are doing. And if they do somehow manage to entangle themselves in this complicated game of lies and fires, as I realise now it seems inevitable, I want you to guide them. Please."

She chokes up on the last word. Her mother's pleading seems desperate, and she wonders just what she was doing hiding in that warehouse. Even Lemony is having difficulty concealing his desire to just break down and weep, and he's read through this letter a thousand times. Not once did he think he would be having the words read by one of the children that the love his life had requested he take care of. A child he'd failed. A child who had grown up far too fast.

"There are simpler things required for them. Don't let them touch peppermints: they've more than likely inherited my allergies."

A sad smile graces Violet's features.

"Make sure they use coasters and always bring a book with them, and that they know the importance of being proud of themselves—this is also for you, Lemony. But don't let them become arrogant, or selfish, or the next Esmé—

"Please. Please. Please."

The words come from Violet as much as they do from her mother. She wishes Lemony had come through with that request. She can, on some level, understand why he didn't, but… that fourteen-year-old Violet, two years ago; she wishes more than anything that someone had been there to keep them safe. And she is still a part of the sixteen-year-old Violet, the one reading this letter, the one still angry at herself for losing the only three people she really wants to care for.

"Please.

"Watch them. I may just be getting ahead of myself. I don't even know if I do have a single child, let alone more. But… this is important. One factor of all of our lives was that we never had a proper parenthood, and that may be just what has destroyed us. We never knew the love and care of a family. And document their lives, will you, Lemony? Keep separate commonplace notebooks for them. When my son reads his first words, I would like to know, someday. Or maybe other people could. Start a book series, for all I care! Just keep up with them. You're the finest writer I know. Don't let that part of you slip away. It's the only thing keeping you grounded.

This is, I now suppose, something like my last will and testament, written not so much earlier than I'd anticipated writing it. And if it is a will, then I leave you with the care and responsibility of my offspring, should they be orphaned or should they be yours. I also give to you the possession of my car, my father's typewriter, the packet of straws we used to use for root beer, the series of couplet books you love (yes, I own them—sorry for not telling you, I was afraid you'd steal them), and my brother's taxi.

I leave to you the sugar bowl.

(These would not sound important to anyone normal, but then again you never were. Make good use of them.

Promise?)

I had one last thing I wanted to tell you but there is no time; it would take too long and by then I really would be dead. I must leave. Just—remember to remember me once in a while when I'm gone, if you could, though of course if you have no desire to I give you full permission to forget.

As if you ever needed permission, Lemony Snicket.

With all my love—"

"Beatrice," Lemony finishes, even as she begins to choke up on that last, simple solitary word. The sheer number of emotions stirred into that one word are so plentiful that she can almost feel them herself. They are deep and pain-ridden, as if all this man has ever known is grief. She thinks that if tears could be heard then that name is what they would sound like.

And above all else there is that overwhelming sense of love, and despite the doubts the eldest Baudelaire child still has about the mysterious Lemony Snicket she knows that anyone who cares for her mother as much as he still does could not ever be entirely untrustworthy.

She folds up the letter and tucks it back into the envelope, and without a word she leans over and gives Lemony a quick peck on the cheek—a phrase which here means the most meaningful gesture she might ever have the chance of giving, and the last remnants of the lost love of Beatrice Baudelaire that he will ever have.