Page 56 of Hostile

I just let it be what it was.

Which was the scariest thing I’d done in ten years.

WYATT

I stood on the sidewalk for a long time after she left.

The rain kept falling. The city kept moving. I stood in it, thinking about a girl who had built a weapon from ten years of believing I had deliberately destroyed her, about the devastation on her face when she’d said, “Was it worth it after you got what you wanted?” and about how I had never—not once, not for a single second—understood that was what she believed.

I’d thought she was angry about the hallway, about the four words, and about the cowardice of a nineteen-year-old boy who had failed to protect her and then failed to come after her.

I had not understood that she’d heard something different entirely.

No, that’s not me—I’d said so, meaning I didn’t send that text. I hadn’t distributed that video. I hadn’t put it in Billy’s hands or anyone else’s. That was the truth I’d been trying to establish in that hallway, loudly enough for the crowd around Billy to hear, while Blair stood six feet away, watching everything fall apart in the exact order she’d designed.

But Megan had heard something else.

She’d heard I wasn’t in that video with you.

She’d heard I don’t know who she is.

She’d heard me erase her. Publicly. In front of the people who mattered most in that world, on the morning after the best weekend of my life, while she was still carrying everything I’d said to her at the beach house.

I stood in the rain and let it hit me all at once—everything she’d carried and everything I hadn’t understood.

Ten years. She had spent a decade trusting four words that, to her, meant something entirely different from what I intended. Every ’I love you’ I ever said to her now seemed, in hindsight, like the setup for the harshest joke. Even our Thursday coffee chats, rainy walks, and those peaceful library hours now appeared as manipulations—parts of a scheme I never actually devised.

She built her entire life around it, I thought. Hale Capital. The acquisition. Six years of buying my company piece by piece, with the cold, focused precision of someone who had decided that the only response to being used and discarded was to become someone who could make it mean something.

She hadn’t been dismantling my company. She’d been dismantling what she believed I’d done to her.

I didn’t do what she thought I did.

I had stood in a hallway and said four words that destroyed everything anyway. I had let her go, and I had spent ten years telling myself she was better off without me, even though the truth was simpler and worse—I had been a coward at the moment it mattered most, and I had never stopped paying for it.

And neither had she.

I pressed my fingers against my eyes.

Blair had paid Billy forty thousand dollars thirty days before the beach house weekend. I’d known that for three weeks, building the case, documenting everything, and waiting until I had the full picture before presenting it to Megan. I’d told myself the timing had to be right and that she needed the full truth, not pieces of it.

Standing in the rain on a Manhattan sidewalk, I realized I’d been waiting because some part of me had hoped the full picture would be enough—that evidence alone could repair the damage four words in a hallway had caused.

It wasn’t enough. She needed the full truth and an explanation, and I’d given her half of it tonight, without meaning to, standing in the rain because she’d finally said the thing she’d been carrying, and I couldn’t let it sit between us any longer.

She hadn’t run out of anger yet tonight.

She’d run because of something more complicated than anger, and I’d seen it on her face in the moment before she turned away—the devastated look of someone whose certainty had just collapsed and who didn’t yet know what to put in its place.

That wasn’t nothing.

I pulled out my phone. Typed one sentence to Marcus.

Move the timeline up. I need everything by Friday.

Then I stood in the rain a moment longer, not thinking about what came next. Just standing on a wet Manhattan sidewalk in December, letting the weight of ten years settle into something I could carry forward rather than sideways.

I was going to give her the truth. All of it. Blair’s payment, the camera, and the architecture of everything that had been done to both of us by someone who had decided the outcome needed to be engineered.