Page 45 of Hostile

MEGAN: PRESENT

Camille Prescott had a rule about lunch.

It had to be somewhere with good natural light, real food, and a table far enough from the nearest occupied table that a conversation could breathe without an audience. She’d once explained the logic to me in that direct, unhurried way she had. “If you’re going to say something worth saying, you should be able to hear yourself say it.”

I’d adopted the rule immediately. It was the kind of rule that made perfect sense once someone said it out loud, as most of Camille’s rules did.

We were at her preferred Midtown spot, a French place with good windows and a corner table she’d apparently had a standing claim to for years, because the host had taken us there without asking. She had that effect on most rooms. Thirty-two years old, Harvard Law, a name that opened doors before she touched them—and entirely unbothered by all of it, with the ease of someone who’d been handed advantages early and had deliberately chosen how to use them.

She was the only person in my life who had known me before.

Before New York. Before Hale Capital. Before the plan became the architecture, and the architecture became the life. She’d known me on a Cambridge sidewalk, on my knees, falling apart in a way I’d never allowed myself to fall apart since.

She was also, I was fairly certain, about to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

“You’re doing the thing,” she said, without looking up from her menu.

“What thing?”

“The thing where you arrange your silverware when you’re trying not to think about something.” She looked up. Her eyes were calm, as if she had decided long time ago not to waste energy on anything she couldn’t change. “You’ve straightened your fork three times since we sat down.”

I put my hand flat on the table.

“Talk,” she said simply.

I told her about the negotiation. Not all of it—Camille didn’t need the full corporate architecture to follow the thread. She never had—just the broad strokes. The clause. The four seconds. Wyatt stopping the room, not making it about himself, and then looking at me afterward as if he were prepared to wait as long as it took.

Camille listened as she always did. Completely. Without filling the silence.

When I finished, she picked up her glass of water, took a slow sip, then set it back down. “What did you do with it?”

“I asked him why.”

“And?”

“He said it was the right call.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.” I looked at the table. “That’s the problem.”

Camille was quiet for a moment. Outside the window, a November Tuesday moved through its paces—people with their heads down against the cold, yellow cabs asserting themselves, the city doing its relentless thing.

“Megan.” Her voice grew careful, as it did when she was about to say something she’d been holding back for a while. “How long are you going to do this?”

“Do what?”

“Run a six-year acquisition strategy on a man you still have feelings for.”

The words landed exactly as she’d intended—cleanly, no drama, just the fact placed on the table between us like something that had been sitting in her bag all lunch and that she’d finally decided to set down.

“I don’t—” I stopped.

Camille raised one eyebrow by about two millimeters, which, for Camille, was the equivalent of a full reaction.

“It’s not—” I stopped again. Picked up my water glass. Set it down. “It’s complicated.”

“I know it’s complicated. I was there, remember? I drove you home. I sat across from you at my kitchen table for two days while you put yourself back together.” She held my gaze. “I also watched you build something extraordinary from the pieces. I’m not questioning any of that. I’m asking what happens when the endgame arrives and the man on the other end isn’t the one you’ve been telling yourself he is.”