Page 66 of Hostile

Except for the second shelf from the top, slightly left of center, where a slim volume sat at a slight angle against its neighbors, as though it had been pulled out and replaced many times over the years and had never quite settled back into its original position.

I recognized it before I was close enough to read the spine.

Business Law and Ethics: Principles and Practice. Harvard University Press. The textbook from our first semester. The one Professor Harrigan had assigned the week before. Wyatt sat down behind me and told me my cross-reference system was the most interesting thing he’d seen.

I stood in front of the bookshelf and looked at it for a long moment without touching it.

It could mean nothing. He could have kept it the way people kept textbooks—out of the vague sense that you might need them again someday, or out of sheer inertia, the book traveling with him from Cambridge to Savannah to New York as books did when you moved too many times to sort through everything properly.

It could mean nothing.

I reached up and took it off the shelf.

It fell open immediately to a page that had been opened so often it no longer required effort—the spine broken at exactly that point, the pages soft with handling. Page one hundred and twelve. The Brandeis case. The case Wyatt had referenced the afternoon he’d watched me take notes and had asked if he could show him how.

In the margin, in my handwriting—the controlled, deliberate print I’d used since the tenth grade, the same handwriting I’d used the afternoon I’d taken his pen and shown him the branch system in a Business Law classroom because I was constitutionally incapable of watching someone use a system that worked against them—were three lines.

Primary point—horizontal, not vertical.

Branch to association, not sub-list.

Your eye should move the way your brain does.

My own handwriting. In his book. On the page he’d opened so many times, the spine had given up trying to close.

I stood very still. He hadn’t just kept the textbook. He’d kept the page.

The exact page that held the first thing I ever gave him—excluding the Thursday coffees, the rain kiss, or the arrow in the velvet pouch. It was this: three lines of instruction written in a classroom on an October afternoon, when I was trying to help and hadn’t yet realized I had already become, in some way, more than just a classmate with a good note system.

My throat was doing something I strictly controlled.

I heard footsteps in the corridor.

I closed the book, put it back on the shelf at the same slight angle I’d found it, and by the time the door opened, I was standing at the window, looking out at the park.

“You came.”

His voice was behind me. I turned around.

He looked like a man who hadn’t slept well, a detail I noted internally without letting it show on my face. He wore dark trousers and a gray shirt without a jacket—the typical working attire he’d worn since before sunrise, as I expected. What caught me off guard was his expression. It wasn’t composed. It wasn’t the usual boardroom or social demeanor, or any of the other versions I’d observed over the past six weeks.

Just—present. Open in the way he’d been in the rain. Like a man who had decided to stop managing his face and was simply showing up with whatever was there.

It was deeply inconvenient.

“I came,” I said.

He crossed to his desk, not behind it—beside it, leaning against the front edge, as he did when he wanted to be in the room without the desk between us. He picked up a folder from the desk and held it out.

“I was going to find a way to get this to you today, regardless,” he said. “Your email moved the timeline up.”

I took the folder and opened it. The first page was a transaction record I recognized—the BCA payment of forty thousand dollars to Billy Brown’s account, thirty days before the beach house. I’d seen this. I kept reading.

The second page was something I hadn’t seen.

A secondary payment. Same vehicle, different account. Two weeks after the beach house weekend. Fifteen thousand dollars to a number I didn’t recognize at first.

“What’s the second account?” I asked.