Page 5 of Hostile

The dean’s voice continued, rolling through statistics on the incoming class, Harvard’s legacy, and the responsibility that came with a degree from this institution. I heard none of it. My pen had stopped moving without my permission, and I stared at the back of Wyatt Aldridge’s blond head with the intensity that came from years of practice in looking at someone while pretending you weren’t.

He was different.

That observation arrived with unwelcome clarity. The boy from that single Tuesday night—the one who’d knocked on my front door after nine o’clock, with his hands shoved in his pockets and his nerves written all over his face—had been beautiful and hadn’t entirely known it yet. The person sitting four rows ahead of me was something else. Broader through the shoulders. Stiller. He’d grown into himself over the year since I’d last seen him, and the result was deeply unfair.

I looked back down at my notebook.

Megan. I could practically hear Christine’s voice in my ear, the same fond exasperation she’d been deploying at me for years. Stop staring at him before they see you.

There was no Christine here. No one here knew my name, my history, or the weight of everything I’d lost. That was supposed to be the point. That was supposed to be the freedom.

I pressed my pen to the paper and wrote the date at the top of the page with the careful precision of someone reasserting control over the only thing they could control.

September. Harvard University. First day.

Start over.

The welcome address ended, and the auditorium filled with the sound of five hundred students rising and gathering their things. I took my time, capping my pen and sliding my notebook into my bag with deliberate slowness, letting the crowd thin before I stood. It was a habit I’d developed—giving myself a few extra seconds before entering any space where I’d have to navigate people. A buffer. A breath.

When I finally stood and turned toward the aisle, he was there.

Not approaching. Not even looking in my direction, not yet. He was three feet away, caught in the same slow-moving current of students funneling toward the exit, his leather portfolio under one arm and his eyes on his phone. And then, with the terrible timing my life had apparently decided was its signature move, he looked up.

Our eyes met.

His recognition appeared gradually—first as surprise, clear and unguarded, typical when the mind faces the unexpected. Then his expression grew more complex, a feeling I hesitated to name because doing so would admit I had been watching for it. Some part of me had been noting Wyatt Aldridge’s expressions since I was seventeen and had never truly stopped.

The crowd moved around us. Someone bumped into my shoulder as they passed by and said a quick “sorry” without slowing down. Neither of us moved.

“Megan,” he said softly. Not a question, just my name, spoken in his voice and resting between us like something he’d been carrying for a long time and finally released.

Every wall I’d built over the fourteen months since a Tuesday night on my mother’s porch—every carefully constructed, obsessively reinforced, load-bearing wall—held.

Barely.

“Wyatt.” My voice came out exactly as I needed it to. Level. Calm. The voice of a woman who had run into an old acquaintance and was mildly surprised and entirely unaffected. A small miracle, given that my heart was doing something completely unacceptable behind my ribs. “I didn’t know you were at Harvard.”

“I transferred.” Something shifted behind his eyes. “Last minute.”

Last minute. I filed that away without letting it show on my face. “Well.” I adjusted the shoulder strap on my bag. “Good luck with the semester.”

I stepped around him and joined the stream of students heading toward the exit, my pulse loud in my ears, my spine straight as a blade, every instinct screaming at me not to look back.

I didn’t look back.

But I felt him watching me until I walked out the door.

CHAPTER THREE

WYATT: PRESENT

Iinherited my grandfather’s desk, my father’s office, and a silence neither of them warned me about.

The desk is solid mahogany, older than anyone currently employed on this floor. Its surface is worn smooth where two generations of Aldridge men rested their hands while they thought. I’d sat across from it my entire childhood—first in the chair my father kept for visitors, then standing beside it as he explained things I was expected to absorb and never question. The desk meant authority. The desk represented legacy. The desk was the physical manifestation of everything the Aldridge name stood for and of what it expected of the men who carried it.

Now it was just where I worked.

Four months in, I was still waiting to feel like I belonged behind the wheel. Maybe that was normal. Maybe every man who’d ever sat here felt like an impostor for a while before the weight of it settled into something that fit. My grandfather had built this company from two properties and a handshake. My father had tripled its size. I’d inherited the result of sixty years of Aldridge ambition, and most days it felt less like a legacy and more like a conversation I’d arrived late to, still trying to catch up.