Page 54 of Hostile

The city at this hour was the version I loved best—stripped of its daytime noise, the streets mostly empty, the wet pavement reflecting the light from the streetlamps in long orange streaks. We walked close enough that our arms brushed occasionally, neither of us pulling away, and I thought about October in Cambridge, the smell of wet leaves, and a boy who had said “I’ve been patient” in a quiet voice and meant it completely.

He wasn’t a boy anymore.

That was the thought I was having—carefully, privately, with the full awareness that I was having it and the full awareness of what it meant that I was—when he stopped.

We were at the corner of a block I didn’t recognize, the rain falling steadily around us, the city quiet enough at this hour that I could hear it hitting the pavement. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at nothing in particular, hands in his coat pockets, as he did when he was organizing something he’d been carrying for a while and had finally decided to set it down.

“I came to Cambridge,” he said quietly. “After. About three weeks later.” He paused, letting it sink in. “I stood outside your dorm for twenty minutes, trying to decide whether I had any right to knock on that door.”

I went very still.

“I decided I didn’t.” He looked at me then. “I went back to Savannah, told myself you were better off, and tried to believe it.” His jaw tightened. “I’ve thought about those twenty minutes often.”

My throat was doing something inconvenient.

“Wyatt—”

“I know you don’t want to hear it yet,” he said quietly, without pressure. “I’m not asking you to do anything with it. I just needed you to know I came. That I tried to come. That it wasn’t nothing.”

The rain fell around us. The city moved. I stood on the wet sidewalk, looked at him, and felt ten years of architecture shift under its own weight, with the word still in my chest like something lit.

Yet.

He’d said yet.

And I was standing in the rain at a random Manhattan corner, feeling something I had spent six years and twenty-two percent of his company’s stock trying to wall off, and the wall was doing something I hadn’t authorized, and I was so tired.

I’m so tired, I thought, and didn’t know exactly what I was tired of, except that it was heavy and had been so for a long time. Standing here in the rain, I felt it was heavier than usual.

“I believed you,” I said. The words came out before I’d decided to say them. “That’s what I keep coming back to. I believed every single thing you said to me. Every coffee, every walk, every—” My voice did something I quickly controlled before it got away from me. “I believed you. And then you stood in that hallway and said four words, and I⁠—”

“I know,” he said quietly. “I know you did.”

“Do you?” Something was loosening in my chest, something I’d kept sealed for a long time, and I wasn’t sure I had the strength to stop it right now, on this sidewalk in the rain. “Because you say that like you understand what I’m telling you, but you got what you wanted, Wyatt. You had me, and you used it, and then you⁠—”

“Megan—”

“Was it worth it?” My voice came out low, even, and precisely controlled, the way it did when I was holding something very heavy at arm’s length. “After you got what you wanted from me, was it worth it to you?”

He had gone very still.

“I need you to say that again,” he said.

“Which part?”

“The part where you think I—” He stopped. Something was shifting in his expression. Not anger. Not defensiveness. Something I couldn’t quite categorize, moving across his face like a man arriving at an understanding that was costing him something considerable. “Megan. When you say I got what I wanted, what do you think I wanted?”

I looked at him. At the rain on his face, the expression I couldn’t categorize, and the stillness of a man who had stopped performing entirely.

“I think you wanted what Blair wanted,” I said. “I think you wanted me gone. I think the video was how you made that happen, and the hallway was how you made sure I knew it.”

The silence that followed had a texture I’d never felt before.

He looked at me for a long moment. Just looked, with those blue eyes that had always seen more of the real me than I wanted them to. What I saw moving through them was not what I’d braced for.

Not anger. Not guilt.

Devastation.