Page 4 of Hostile

I planned my crossings every day for two years.

For two years, the tide kept to its tables.

It broke exactly once—a knock on a door, a Tuesday night at the very end of everything—and I filed that night away so deep it would take ten years and my mother to make me open the drawer again.

But in the hallways, in the parking lot, day after day: the distance was law.

The distance also had an enforcer.

I had been managing Blair Aldridge since I started first grade—the ruined homework, the birthday parties I learned about afterward, the small daily tariffs levied on the housekeeper’s daughter for existing too near the family name—and I had learned the central rule for surviving her early years: never let Blair see you want something. Wanting, when Blair could see it, was how you lost things. So I admired her brother the only safe way there was. Silently. From across a parking lot. With my face closed.

It took me years to realize that Blair’s tariffs weren’t truly about cottages, my mother’s aprons, or which side of the hedges I slept on. Many staff had daughters, but Blair never singled them out. She only targeted me because she saw what the adults hadn’t yet acknowledged: I resembled someone who could sit at their tables, and I thought more quickly than most of those around me. Given an opportunity, I would outshine her. Blair never kept me away for being beneath her. She excluded me because I was the one thing her calculations couldn’t accept—a rival.

A year later, after graduating from high school, I arrived at Harvard with two suitcases, a full academic scholarship, and the absolute certainty that I was done.

Done with Savannah. Done with the suffocating weight of a last name that meant nothing beyond the city limits of a coastal Georgia town most people had only heard of because of a movie about a man and a box of chocolates. Done with the invisible fence that had kept my family on one side and the Aldridge Manor families on the other for three generations. Done with being the girl who watched from afar as people born into the right surname collected their birthright as if it were no more than picking up dry cleaning.

Done with all of it.

I told myself that on the morning I loaded my two suitcases into my aunt’s car, I didn’t look back at the house we’d been staying in since everything fell apart. I told myself that on the drive to the airport. I told myself that on the plane, in the cab from Logan, and for every minute of the first week of orientation, as I studied my schedule, memorized the campus map, and introduced myself to my roommate with a smile that didn’t reach my eyes because I was still learning how to make it look like it did.

Done. The word had become a kind of prayer. A mantra. The thing I repeated in the dark when the grief tried to pull me back under.

It almost worked.

Orientation week at Harvard was not designed for people like me.

That wasn’t a complaint—it was an observation, the same detached, clear-eyed kind I’d made my whole life. The kind you learn to make when you grow up watching people who have everything take it entirely for granted. The auditorium where they held the welcome address seated five hundred incoming students, and I sat near the back with my notebook open and my pen uncapped, watching the room fill with a familiar, easy confidence I recognized at once.

Old money didn’t announce itself. That was what people who’d never been around it didn’t understand. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t loud. It was the girl three rows ahead of me, in a cashmere sweater so understated it had probably cost more than my mother’s monthly salary, laughing at something her friend said, with the total physical relaxation of someone who had never once in her life worried about a bill. It was the guy beside her, who sat like he owned the chair, not because he was arrogant—he probably wasn’t, not on the surface—but because nothing in his entire experience had ever suggested the chair might not want him.

I sat the way I’d always sat. Back straight. Eyes forward. Pen ready.

Taking notes has been my survival mechanism since I was six. When you’re constantly working, preparing, and staying ahead of what’s coming, there’s less room for feelings to linger at the edges. It reduces the risk of overlooking things and helps avoid the kind of grief that isn’t neatly formed and can’t be addressed directly. That grief presses in from all directions, seeking any crack it can find.

I didn’t leave cracks.

The dean was midway through his welcome address when the auditorium’s back doors opened. Late arrivals weren’t unusual—I’d watched three other students slip in since the address began, each scanning the room for an open seat with the sheepish hurry of someone who knew they should have been there sooner.

This one didn’t look sheepish.

He stood in the doorway for just a moment—long enough for my treacherous eyes to find him as they always had, as if some frequency in my body were permanently tuned to his—and then he moved down the far aisle with the easy, unhurried stride of a man who had never once believed he was out of place.

The air left my lungs so completely and so suddenly that the girl sitting beside me glanced over.

No. The word detonated somewhere in my chest. No, absolutely not. That is not possible.

Wyatt Spencer Aldridge was supposed to be at his father’s alma mater. He was supposed to be several states away, locked into a plan made for him before he was old enough to have a say in it. He was supposed to be a chapter of my life that I had closed, locked, and buried somewhere in the Georgia red clay, along with everything else I’d left behind.

He was not supposed to be here.

He found an empty seat four rows ahead of me and two sections to the left. He dropped into it with the unselfconscious ease that made me irrationally furious, set a leather portfolio on his knee, and turned his attention to the dean as if this were simply the next item on his list and he were fully prepared to give it his complete focus.

He didn’t look around the room.

He didn’t see me.

I told myself that was a relief.