Page 58 of Hostile

He hadn’t sent the video. That was what he’d said in the rain, his face a mask of devastation I couldn’t look away from. Blair had been standing six feet away. He’d been nineteen years old. He hadn’t yet understood what his sister had done.

He had failed me. That was real, too. The hallway was real. The three weeks of silence were real. The twenty minutes outside my dorm when he’d turned around and walked away were real.

However, he hadn’t sent it. He hadn’t sent the video. He transferred to Harvard to finally cross a parking lot he’d been afraid to navigate for two years. He paused a negotiation to defend my position without seeking recognition. He also stood in the rain and said it wasn’t nothing, speaking with the honesty of a man willing to bear personal costs to tell the truth.

I picked up my phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.

I didn’t call him. It was five in the morning, and I wasn’t ready, and there were things I still needed to know—the full picture, the complete documentation, everything Charlie was still digging for. I wasn’t going to walk into whatever came next without the full picture.

But I opened my email and typed a single line to Charlie.

Prioritize the timeline of Blair’s involvement. I need to know when it started, what she knew, and when she knew it. Everything.

I sent it before I could talk myself out of acting on the urgency.

Then I sat back in my chair, looked at the velvet pouch on my desk, and thought about direction. About what it meant to know where you were going when the map you’d used for ten years turned out to be missing a road.

The acquisition was still running. Twenty-two percent. Twelve percent of Charleston. The architecture of six years, moving on its own momentum now, a machine I’d built and set in motion, one that didn’t stop just because the woman running it had stood in the rain last night and felt the ground shift beneath her feet.

I didn’t stop it. I wasn’t ready to stop. Not yet. Not until I had everything. But for the first time since day one, I sat at my desk in the pre-dawn quiet and let myself ask the question I’d refused to ask for six years.

What happens after?

Not what happens to Aldridge Commercial. Not what happens to the acquisition, or the board, or the Charleston project, or any of the architecture I’d spent six years building toward this moment.

What happens to me?

I’d never asked that. The plan had always been the answer—the thing that made the question unnecessary, the forward momentum that meant there was always a next step, and that next step meant you didn’t have to stop and look at the space where the answer was supposed to be.

The city outside my window was beginning to lighten. That thin, early gray that preceded the sunrise, the color of a city catching its breath before the day began.

I put the velvet pouch back in the drawer. Closed it.

I opened the acquisition model. I had work to do. But the question remained where I’d left it, quiet and persistent, as the important ones always did. What happens after?

I didn’t have an answer yet. For the first time in ten years, I thought I might want one.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

WYATT: THE PAST

For ten years, everyone who knew a piece of this story has asked me some version of the same question. My father asked it with a look rather than in words. Marcus asked it exactly once and accepted the answer. I’ve asked it myself at two in the morning more times than I can count.

Why didn’t you go after her?

I did.

I want that on the record, for whatever a record is worth when you’re the only one keeping it. Four words left my mouth—four words I meant as a denial of a text, which I watched become something else entirely on her face—and then she was moving, and I was moving, and Billy Brown was standing between us, his phone still raised like a trophy.

He was deliberately positioned between us. I understand that now. At the time, I only knew I had put both hands on his chest and shoved him into the wall hard enough to change the pitch of the crowd’s laughter. By the time I reached the end of the corridor, she was gone.

Not walking-fast gone. Gone.

I looked for her for three hours. The quad. The library, both reading rooms. The coffee shop on the corner where we’d spent every Thursday since October—I stood in the doorway, scanning tables, while the girl at the register asked if I wanted the usual, and I couldn’t answer. Her dorm, twice. Her roommate opened the door the second time with her arms crossed and said she hadn’t seen her. I believed her. I stood in that stairwell afterward with my forehead against the cinder block, trying to think like Megan thought. Methodically. In systems. Where does a person go when every building on campus has a screen in it?

I didn’t know. That was the answer. For all the Thursdays, the walks, and the nights in the library, I didn’t know where she went when the world caved in, because in the eight months since she’d finally let me know her, she had never once let the world see her cave.

I kept calling until my phone died. On Monday, it went to voicemail. On Tuesday, it rang twice and then stopped. By Wednesday, a recorded voice told me the number was no longer in service. I sat in my apartment and listened to that recording four times, as if it might reconsider.