Page 41 of Hostile

I answered them as I always had. As if no time had passed. As if the ten years between us were just something that had happened, and here we were, still the same two people who’d spent Thursday afternoons in a Cambridge café, running twenty minutes late to everything else because neither of us wanted to be the one to say it was time to go.

Forty-three minutes. I left first.

I didn’t look back.

By four o’clock, I was back at my desk, the trading screen open, numbers moving as they always did—indifferent, mechanical, utterly unbothered by the fact that Megan Hale had spent forty-three minutes at lunch, acting like a woman who had forgotten what she was supposed to be doing.

Dana looked up when I came in, said nothing, and then said nothing, as if she were a woman annotating a file. My coat had been over my arm instead of on. It was four o’clock. I had left at noon and had come back with color in my face. She’d worked for me for five years. Somewhere in her flawless, silent recordkeeping, a new folder had just been opened, and we both knew it. Neither of us was ever going to mention it.

I stared at the screen. What are you doing?

It was a fair question. I’d been asking it in various forms since the gala, since the conference room, and since the hallway outside the boardroom, where he’d stood close enough that I felt the warmth of his voice and my hand had tightened on the door handle as if it were the only fixed thing in the room.

I knew what I was doing. I’d known for six years, mapping it down to the quarter point, the calendar date, and the exact sequence of moves that would bring the Aldridge name to its knees in a way that couldn’t be undone. I had a plan. My plans had no flaws.

You planned around a version of me you made up before you knew me.

I closed the trading screen.

Stop it.

I opened it again.

The problem—the real one, the one I’d been deliberately avoiding since the moment I walked into that Harvard auditorium and found him already there—wasn’t that I hated Wyatt Aldridge.

I had hated him. I want to be precise about that. The hatred had been real and functional, and it had done its job admirably for the better part of a decade. It had gotten me out of bed on the mornings when grief pressed in from every direction. It had kept me focused through the Series 7, the eighty-hour weeks at Goldman, and the terrifying, exhilarating loneliness of the first year of building something from nothing. It had been the engine. Cold and reliable and mine.

The problem was that sitting across from him at a corner table, watching him turn his coffee cup without realizing he was doing it, I couldn’t find the hatred anywhere.

I could locate the anger. That was different—specific, justified, and still very much present, a clean, bright line running from that Cambridge hallway directly to now. I had heard what I heard. I had seen what I saw. His face when he’d looked up and found me standing there—the guilt written so plainly across it that even at eighteen, even with my world collapsing in real time, I’d read it without difficulty.

No, that’s not me.

Four words. I’d built ten years of hatred and vengeance around four words.

I pulled open the bottom drawer of my desk without meaning to. Just my hand, moving on its own, as it sometimes did when I was thinking about something I wasn’t ready to face. My fingers found the velvet pouch and stopped there, pressed against the worn fabric, as they always did.

I didn’t open it.

I thought about the night he’d given it to me. Christmas, our first year at Harvard. We’d been whatever we were by then—not named, not official, something that lived in Thursday afternoons and late nights in the library, and in the gravitational pull that had been operating between us since a parking lot in Savannah, a pull neither of us had yet been brave enough to call by its real name.

He’d pressed the pouch into my hand outside my dorm in the December cold, wearing the expression of someone who had thought it through and was prepared to mean it completely, regardless of what happened next.

Open it later, he’d said. When you’re alone.

I had. Silver arrow, thin chain, cool in my palm.

Your true north, I’d told him the next day, my voice doing something embarrassing. My heart will always point to you.

His smile had been the quiet, real one. Mine too, he’d said. It always has.

I pressed my fingers harder against the pouch.

Mine too. It always has.

I’d loved him. That was the thing I spent the least time examining because it had the sharpest edges. I’d loved him the way you love something you never expected to have—carefully at first, then completely, then in the all-or-nothing way of someone who doesn’t do things by halves. After eighteen years of watching from a distance and telling herself she didn’t want what she was watching, she finally let herself want it.

And then it was gone. One morning. Four words, a face full of guilt, and legs that ran before her brain had caught up.