Page 100 of Hostile

I looked at her for a long moment.

“You were right,” I said. “And you were wrong.”

“Yes,” she said simply. “You’re right about both.”

We stood in my kitchen in the March light, letting it sit between us, as things do between people who have known each other long enough to hold complicated truths without needing to resolve them.

Then she picked up her coffee cup and said, “He looks at you exactly the way he looked at you from across that parking lot.”

“I know,” I said.

“Except now he doesn’t look away.”

“No,” I said. “He doesn’t.”

She smiled into her coffee. I did too, because she wasn’t looking.

My mother met him at Christmas, as requested.

She arrived on the twenty-third with two checked bags, immediately declared the apartment too cold and too high off the ground, and spent the first evening sitting across from Wyatt at my dining table, asking him the same questions she’d been asking every person of significance in my life since I was six years old—not about his work, his name, or his family’s wealth, but about what he thought was important, whether he meant what he said, and what he intended to do about it.

He answered all of them directly. Without deflection. Without the social register.

By the end of the first evening, she decided she approved. She communicated this not by saying anything to me directly but by asking Wyatt over dessert whether he’d ever been to Savannah.

He said yes. He said he grew up there, and he still had family there.

She said she knew. She said she’d worked for that family for twenty years.

The table went very quiet.

Then my mother looked at Wyatt with the steady, clear-eyed regard of a woman who had spent her life reading people accurately and had made her judgment. “My husband worked for your grandfather for eleven years,” she said. “He was a good man. Your grandfather. Your family didn’t always deserve the people who served them.”

Wyatt held her gaze. “No,” he said. “They didn’t. I’m sorry about that, Mrs. Hale. I mean that genuinely.”

She gazed at him for a moment before giving a single nod, a gesture that conveyed enough.

Later, when Wyatt was in the kitchen doing the dishes—he’d offered, and she’d accepted, and I’d watched her watching him do it with the expression of someone filing information—she sat down beside me on the couch and took my hand.

“He reminds me of your father,” she said quietly.

My throat did something I couldn’t control.

“The way he means what he says,” she said. “Your father always meant what he said. You could count on it.” She squeezed my hand. “That’s not a small thing, pumpkin.”

“I know, Mom.”

“I know you know.” She patted my hand. “I just wanted to say it out loud.”

The arrow lived on my nightstand now.

Not in the velvet pouch, not in the bottom drawer—on the nightstand, where I could see it in the morning. Wyatt returned it to me the week after the board meeting, pressing the pouch into my hand as I’d pressed it into his in the conference room, and saying simply, “It was always yours.”

I’d taken it out of the pouch and set it on the nightstand that night.

It had stayed there.

Some things, I’d learned, didn’t need to be locked away. Some things were better kept where you could see them, where they could do their work in plain sight instead of at the bottom of a drawer.