Page 78 of Hostile

That was the thing about Wyatt Aldridge I had been noticing since a parking lot in Savannah, but I could never quite classify it as anything less dangerous than it was.

He told the truth even when it cost him. Especially then.

“I need to ask you something else,” I said. “The last thing.”

“All right.”

“In the hallway—when Blair was standing there, and Billy was holding his phone—” I held his gaze. “What did she say to you? After I ran. What did Blair say to you in that hallway?”

Something crossed his face. Old and specific and still sharp around the edges despite ten years of sitting with it.

“She said—” He stopped. Took a breath. “She’ll land on her feet. People like her always do.” His voice was very quiet. “And then she put her hand on my arm and said we should go to class.”

The silence between us had a texture.

People like her. Blair Aldridge, at nineteen, knowing her brother’s girlfriend was destroyed and fleeing, claimed, as people like her always do, with the effortless confidence of someone who has never doubted she would land on her feet—because landing on her feet had never been in doubt.

I felt the anger move through me—clean and sharp and old—and then felt it do something I hadn’t felt it do before.

It settled.

Not gone. Not resolved. Just... positioned. It has its correct dimensions and its proper place within the structure of everything that occurred and everything built upon it.

It was the right size now. Not bigger than the truth. Not smaller than the damage.

Just the right size.

“Okay,” I said.

He looked at me carefully. “Okay?”

“Okay.” I pulled my coat tighter against the cold. “I needed to know that. I needed the full picture.” I paused. “You said that once. That you needed the full picture before you asked me to hear it. I needed the full picture too.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Do you have it?”

I thought about page one hundred and twelve. About forty-seven seconds. About I want to. There’s a difference. About a man who had transferred colleges because he wasn’t ready to let a parking lot be the whole story, had stood outside a dorm for twenty minutes, choosing wrong, and had spent ten years knowing it.

“Yes,” I said. “I have it.”

The cab he’d called pulled up to the curb. He looked at it, then looked back at me.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We approach Blair.”

“Tomorrow,” I agreed.

He held my gaze for one more moment—as he always did when he meant what came next and wanted me to understand its importance. “Whatever happens after tomorrow—with the board, with the acquisition, with all of it—” he paused. “I want to be clear that none of what I’ve done in the last six weeks has been about the company.”

I looked at him.

“I know,” I said, meaning it this time, completely. No qualifications. No armor. Just the plain, honest truth of a woman who had the full picture and understood what it meant.

Something in his expression shifted to something quieter and more real than anything I’d seen on him yet.

“Good night, Megan,” he said.

“Good night, Wyatt.”

He got in the cab. I stood on the sidewalk and watched it pull into the Midtown night and disappear around the corner. Then I lingered a moment longer, in the December cold, alone on the sidewalk outside my own building.