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Violet Baudelaire is someone else, now. I’ll keep the name to myself, on account of her being, technically, a fugitive from the law. Suffice it to say that she is a scientist of some renown, and a professor at a noted institution for higher education. Klaus Baudelaire is someone else, too. He lives more quietly than his sister, in the hallowed halls of that same institution, nose in a book, even when he should be filing it. The students like him. He helps with their essays, and has many words- mostly kind- to share. Nobody knows he and the Professor are siblings. They have different names, different faces. They speak, sometimes, but the jury is still out- a phrase which here means that there is plurality of views in the general public about a subject- as to whether or not they are in some kind of romantic relationship. They would be amused if they knew how many students thought this.
Violet Baudelaire has a husband, now. Klaus Baudelaire does not.
Sunny Baudelaire is herself. As it turns out, it is very difficult to prosecute for crimes committed by a baby. If anyone asks, her older siblings are dead. She was raised by wolves, apparently, after their tragic deaths. Or, at least, that is the rumor, or the joke. Sunny Baudelaire doesn’t remember, she says. Do you remember being a baby? She says she doesn’t like to talk about it. And if she sometimes makes long-distance calls in the middle of the night, well, then that’s her business, isn’t it?
And me? Well, I’m as much myself as I always have been. Which is to say, not very. I haven’t been tracking the Baudelaires, contrary to what the last few paragraphs might have you believe. Sunny, of course is in the spotlight. She’s learned that it is very difficult to make a multi-millionaire celebrity chef disappear. Enough people would ask questions that some might land upon the right ones. But Violet and Klaus- well, I found them quite by accident, years after I thought their story ended. Because, dear reader, I was looking for a good book.
College campuses, as all those subjected to the halls of conventional education will tell you, are a location in which many things may be found. For me, an alumnus of this particular institute, it was a place where I mostly found requests for large sums of money I didn’t have, and a not insignificant number of books.
On one day, which was neither hot nor cold, dry nor wet, nor remarkable in any way, I was crossing said campus when I bumped into a professor and a librarian.
I looked at them. They looked at me. Even now, years later, it was impossible not to know them.
“Bertrand,” I said. Klaus looked so much like his father. I’d spent years not speaking Beatrice’s name. I’d learned to resist that urge. But it had been shockingly long since I’d thought of Bertrand. As his name left my lips, I felt guilt strike my heart. I should have been thinking of him. I should have been thinking of them both.
“No,” Klaus said, very firmly, “I’m [REDACTED]”
Obviously, Klaus did not say he was [REDACTED]. Instead, he said the name under which he has been operating since. I have redacted the information, as in the convention of important government files and unimportant spy novels. In another, different convention, pseudonyms- a word which here mean a name under which a person or author operates to avoid identification- are used in situations like this. Ergo, I will use the pseudonyms Klaus and Violet to refer to these two unlikely scholars. After all, Klaus and Violet Baudelaire are dead. Their names can be repurposed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For a second, you reminded me of a dead man who I loved very much.”
I turned to walk away, but as I did, Violet grabbed my arm, and pressed a business card into my hand. “It’s important to know who to call for help.”
I looked back at her. “Sometimes, the people who should be helping us don’t come. Or they come too late.”
She said, “call anyways.”
And so I did. You must understand; by this stage, I had nothing left, and had not for a very long time. Nobody was looking for me any more. The schism was over. Everyone who cared about it was dead. Except for me. I was only in hiding by force of habit, at this stage. Even if those rare few who were alive had found me, they probably would have given me no more interest than a celebrity feature serving as filler in a newspaper on Boxing day.
“Hello, you’ve reached Professor [REDACTED].”
“I’m looking for some help,” I told her.
Her tone was gentle. “From who?”
It had been so long that I almost didn’t understand what she meant. It came to me just as the pause stretched from comfortable to awkward. “Anyone who’ll volunteer.”
“Why?”
“For the people I loved.”
She was silent for a moment, and I thought I had answered wrong, until she said, “I’ll see you in my office. Monday morning. 9:00 sharp, Lemony Snicket.”
She hung up on me. I wondered, for a brief moment, as to how she had recognized me. Kit, Jacques, they had been a part of her lives for such a short time. But then I remembered Beatrice- I had seen her about, once or twice, lurking in the backs of photographs of Sunny Baudelaire. When she was younger, about ten or so, she had reached out to me, as Beatrice Baudelaire II, daughter of my sister. It had been a relief to know she was alive. But she hadn’t been looking for more family, really. She hadn’t wanted it. I had wanted it, but need and want, I have learned, are very different things.
Violet Baudelaire watched me carefully, as I took a seat. Her office was eclectically decorated, wheels and gears fixed to the walls operated coffee machines and opened and closed the blinds. Photographs of herself and her husband littered the walls, and a oil painting of a landscape hung just over the doorway.
“My arrival here is a coincidence,” I said to her.
She sighed, reached into her desk, and, opening a drawer with a key, withdrew a faded, sepia toned photograph. It took me a long moment to recognize it. It was us, me, and Beatrice, and Bertrand. Specifically, it was the wedding.
“Would you like to explain this to me?” She said, and turned it over to reveal the words ‘Beatrice, Bertrand, and Lemony’s Wedding’, scribbled in a messy hand on the back.
I reached out to touch it with something like reverence. I’d burned all the evidence I had after the schism, to keep them safe. Bertrand and Beatrice, however reluctantly, had done the same. I wondered which of the guests had refused. Monty, maybe? Or Dewey? Kit or Jacques? S. Theodora? My dear, dead people.
“Where did you find this?”
Violet snatched it back protectively. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Can I see it? Please.” I must have sounded truly pitiful. Like a mother giving up her child, she handed me the photograph.
We were all so young. Bertrand had just shaved, and his face had a boyish roundness to it. Beatrice’s dress had a corset- it had been so uncomfortable that she’d changed into a suit for the party, I remembered. She was radiant, but clearly nervous and short of breath. I flipped it over again, and looked at the handwriting.
Oh, how could I have forgotten. “Where did your mother hide it? How did she hide it?”
“I can’t tell you that. I’m sorry.”
If not trusting me kept her safe, I would not object.
“Well, you wanted an explanation? Here is what I can tell you…”
I told her about falling in love, with two brilliant and beautiful people. I told her of them falling in love with me, and asking them to share their lives with me. I told her about the wedding, the small party of dear people. I told her how Bertrand had cried during his vows, and how we had all gone to a small rooftop restaurant afterwards, and how instead of a cake, we had gotten ice cream, because most wedding cakes aren’t very good, and everyone likes ice cream. I assured her that, yes, Bertrand and Beatrice were her biological parents- were the biological parents of both her siblings. I explained the truth of the schism, from beginning to end, and how, to protect the people I loved, I had faked my own death, and destroyed- believed I had destroyed- all the evidence we had ever married.
“Beatrice told me she had burned it all- the photographs, the marriage certificate. She promised me that she had.”
Violet made an odd face. “Why- why burn it? Why not try and preserve something? Anything?”
“We preserved what mattered. A marriage is a story, but not one told in pictures, or documents. It was your father’s laugh, and a good meal shared together, and how absolutely, startlingly brilliant your mother was. No photograph could capture that, no contract or law could codify it.”
“If none of that was important, what mattered for you to preserve?”
I gave her what I hoped was a significant look.
Violet avoided my eyes. “Oh.”
I sighed. “You must be wondering where I was, all those years.”
“I know where you were,” she told me, “always one step behind.” Then she stopped, and considered. “The people who did try to help us- Monty, Kit…”
“Everyone either didn’t know about the marriage, or thought I was dead, or both. It- I count it one of very few great fortunes in my life that we were secretive enough to never tell Olaf that we were a triad.”
Violet took her photograph back, carefully, and looked at the three of us, young and innocent- well, more innocent, anyways. “Were you happy?”
“Yes,” I assured her, “we were. Not always- it’s not an easy thing to be in any relationship, and twice as many connections doubles the difficulty.”
“More than twice as many; a two-person relationship has one. A three person relationship has three.”
And I really was getting old. “Yes, three times. But we were happy, too, in the quiet, private moments that will never be written in any history. I loved them very deeply, and I know they loved each other, and they loved all three of you very much. As I get older, I hope that they might have loved me as much, too.”
Violet’s expression softened. “I think they did. There were so many things they never told us- so many secrets I’ll never know. But they made sure that I saw this. They cared about it enough to make real, tangible contingency plans to protect it.”
And that was all there was to say, really. I stood. “Thank you for showing me that, Violet. It’s been a long time.”
“You don’t have any pictures of them?”
I shook my head, and turned to leave. And then Violet was pressing a locket into my hands, and throwing her arms around my neck. She was a tall women, and in her heels, she had no trouble matching me in height.
“Look after yourself, Lemony Snicket,” she said, and I found myself stumbling out of her office like I was coming out of a trance.
It wasn’t until I was back in my room that I looked into the locket. It only had two picture in it. One of Violet, Klaus, Sunny, and Beatrice the Younger, when Violet could have been no more than twenty-five, and the other of Bertrand and Beatrice, when they were forty.
It was the first time I had owned a picture of them that was not a newspaper clipping from their deaths in more than a decade. I cradled it to my chest, and I wept, not for that I had lost, but for that most important thing that remained.
Violet Baudelaire is a different person, now, but she is the same, too. She still listens, and thinks. She has a heart for justice, and a head of compassion. She still loves her brother and her little sister, and tries to look after them both. Whatever there is in a name, it is not enough to change this fundamental part of her. And for that, I am glad.