Page 76 of Hostile

He leaned forward slightly, resting his forearms on the table, with his gaze fixed steadily on mine. He was neither acting nor trying to control the situation—simply being himself, as he always was—which was precisely what made him so disarming from the start.

“I need you to know something before we go any further,” he said. “Before the board, before Blair, before whatever comes next with the acquisition.” He paused. “I need you to know that I transferred to Harvard because I couldn’t let the parking lot be the whole story. That I sat behind you in Business Law on purpose. That every Thursday coffee was the best hour of my week, and I knew it from the first one. That the night I gave you the arrow, I’d had it in my jacket pocket for three weeks because I kept finding reasons not to give it to you yet.” He stopped. Let that sit. “I need you to know that none of it was a plan. None of it was a setup. It was just—you. It was always just you.”

The candle between us was very still in the windless room.

I looked at him for a long moment. At his earnestness, which had been the first thing to disarm me and had remained the most dangerous in every boardroom, conference room, and rain-soaked sidewalk since. At the man who had kept a textbook open to page one hundred and twelve for ten years, not because he’d planned to show it to anyone, but because he hadn’t been able to close it.

“I know,” I said, quietly, meaning all of it.

Something in his expression shifted—not relieved, not validated, just—settled. The way a thing settles when it’s finally been said out loud after a very long time of being held in silence.

“So,” he said. “What do we do about Blair?”

And just like that, we were back—not to the corporate version of us, the acquirer and the acquired, the positions and the percentages and the architecture of six years. Back to the version that had existed in a Cambridge café when we’d talked about ideas and meant everything and trusted each other with the most honest parts of ourselves.

The version that had always been the real one.

“We do what we’ve both been doing,” I said. “We finish building the case. We present the full picture to the board before she can establish her counter-narrative. We let the evidence do what it does.” I paused. “Together this time.”

He looked at me. “Together.”

“Together.” I picked up my tea. “But first you’re going to eat something. You look like you’ve been surviving on coffee and folder tabs.”

His quiet laugh settled somewhere in my chest, a place I’d spent ten years trying to empty out and had apparently failed to empty completely.

“Takes one to know one,” he said.

I smiled into my tea.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

MEGAN: PRESENT

We worked until two in the morning.

He wasn’t in his office or mine but in the conference room at Hale Capital. Dana had set it up before she left for the evening, after I called ahead and asked her to do so. She did it without question, which was why she’d been with me for three years and would stay for many more if she chose. On the table were two laptops and the full documentation, organized as I’ve developed over six years of building cases from financial evidence. He had black coffee, and I had tea, and we fell into a quiet, focused rhythm shared by two people who work well together in the same room.

We’d always worked well in the same room.

That thought arrived around midnight, after we’d been at it for four hours and the case was taking shape in the clean, irrefutable way that well-documented evidence does when you finally have it all. I looked up from my laptop and found him staring at something on his screen, wearing the same focused expression he’d worn in the Harvard library, pen in hand, turning something over.

We’ve always worked well in the same room.

I’d looked back at my screen before he noticed.

By two o’clock, we had the outline of something that would hold—the full timeline of Blair’s financial architecture, sourced and documented, spanning from the earliest consulting arrangements through the property intelligence scheme, the Billy Brown payment, and the consolidation clause. Twelve years of building. Presented in sequence, it told a story so clear that no board member, however sympathetic to Blair, could read it and reach an innocent interpretation.

“It’s enough,” Wyatt said. He was looking at the summary document on his screen, the final version, compiled from both our research. “This is enough to take to the board.”

“It’s more than enough.” I closed my own laptop. “The question is sequencing. Do we go to the board before or after we approach Blair directly?”

“After,” he said without hesitation. “She gets the chance to step down voluntarily. I told Marcus that. I’m not going back on it.”

I looked at him. “Even now? With all of this?”

“Even now.” He held my gaze. “Not for her sake. Because it’s the right process. Because if we go to the board first, it becomes a spectacle. It becomes the defining element of the Aldridge name for the next decade. If she steps down first—” he paused, “—it’s still damage. But it’s damage that the company survives.”

His grandfather’s company. His father’s company. The thing he’d inherited and was still, four months later, learning to carry.