Page 79 of Hostile

People like her always do.

Blair had been wrong about that, as people were wrong when they looked at someone they’d decided to underestimate and decided to keep underestimating them regardless of evidence.

I had landed on my feet. I had built something extraordinary on a foundation she’d designed to destroy me. And tomorrow I was going to walk into whatever came next with the full picture, the right-sized anger, and the man who had kept a Business Law textbook open to page one hundred and twelve for ten years and still hadn’t been able to explain it to anyone because there was no explanation that didn’t require saying something he’d been trying to find the right moment to say.

I thought that qualified as landing on my feet.

I went inside.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

WYATT: PRESENT

Blair opened the door before I knocked, which told me two things: the doorman had called up, and she had used those ninety seconds to arrange the room.

Coffee service on the low table. Two cups. A fire burning in a fireplace she never used. My sister staged rooms the way other people locked doors—it was how she controlled what happened inside them—and I stood in her entryway on East Seventy-Third, realizing I was looking at a set. She had dressed for a family meeting. She expected to win one.

“Wyatt.” She kissed my cheek. “Sit. It’s early. Have you eaten?”

Ten years ago, she came to my apartment with red eyes and a container of soup, and I spent the rest of my life learning what that soup had cost me. I did not sit down.

“This isn’t a family meeting, Blair.”

“Everything between us is a family meeting.” She settled onto the sofa and poured anyway, unhurried, the performance continuing on schedule regardless of audience participation. “All right. You’ve come to manage me. Manage.”

I set the folder on the table next to her coffee service. She didn’t look at it. That was its own answer—Blair inventoried everything that entered a room, and the only things she refused to look at were the ones she’d already seen.

“Monday morning, the board reviews everything in that folder,” I said. “The consulting entities. The property transactions. BCA-4. The consolidation clause. All of it, documented, with outside counsel in the building.” I kept my voice level, which took less effort than I’d expected. I’d rehearsed this in the car, but I’d stopped when I realized it was the old habit—the one where I prepared versions of things for Blair to approve. “Before that happens, I’m giving you the exit our name buys you. Resign from the advisory role. Unwind the entities. Full restitution, quietly structured. Ninety days, framed as restructuring. No referral, no charges, no press.”

“Generous.” She sipped her coffee. “And in exchange?”

“A complete accounting. To the board, in writing. Everything.”

“Everything,” she repeated, setting the cup down with a click as precise as a decimal point. Then my sister smiled at me, warm, rueful, and almost proud, and reached for the oldest tool she owned. “Wyatt. Look at me. Everything I have ever done—every hour of it—has been for this family. For the name. For you. You were nineteen and sentimental, about to hand the future of everything four generations built to a girl from the staff cottages, and somebody had to be the adult. I have spent my entire adult life being the adult so you could afford to be the good one.” She lifted one shoulder, gracious in victory she hadn’t yet won. “I won’t apologize for loving this family competently.”

There it was. Every sentence true. Every sentence arranged.

“I know how this works now,” I said. “That’s the part you haven’t priced in. You arrange the facts in the order that serves you, then let the other person draw the conclusion so they’ll swear it was theirs afterward. It took me ten years to see the mechanism. Order them however you like, Blair. I already know where they go.”

Something flickered—brief, reptile-quick, gone. Recalibration. I had watched her do it my whole life and called it poise.

“Then let’s talk about what you’re actually doing,” she said, and the warmth left her voice like heat escaping a room when a door opens. “You’re not here about consulting fees. You’d have sent Marcus for that. You’re here because of her.”

“I’m here because of what you did to her.”

“What I did.” Blair’s eyebrows rose, elegant and forensic. “Be careful, Wyatt.”

“A mole camera in my bedroom. Forty thousand dollars to a boy you knew was in love with her. My phone on your counter while you kept my glass full and the bathroom door stayed closed. And then you sat on my couch and cried real tears and told me to let her go—in the same breath, Blair. The same breath.” I heard my own voice and didn’t recognize the steadiness in it. “She was eighteen years old. She lost her school year, her privacy, her father’s peace, and things you will never know the weight of. You mailed me cheerful letters about the boats on the river while you stood in her dining hall, confirming the pieces stayed where you left them.”

Blair looked at me for a long moment. I watched my sister decide, in real time, that the warm approach was spent and choose the next tool with the same efficiency she’d use to pick up a fork.

“I’m not going to confess to a decade-old fairy tale,” she said. “And you should pray I never do, because your version requires you to explain what you were doing when it happened. Standing in a hallway, as I recall, saying four little words.” She tilted her head. “You want to burn sixty years of this family over a girl who came back to gut you.”

“She came back to gut the thing that gutted her,” I said. “And I would hand her the knife before I’d stand in another hallway.”

“You’re choosing her.”

“I chose her eleven years ago. I just didn’t have the spine to say it in daylight.” I picked up the folder and tucked it under my arm again. “Consider this daylight.”