Page 69 of Hostile

“Megan.”

I paused and turned around.

He was looking at me from beside his desk with the expression I’d been cataloging since a parking lot in Savannah—the one that had never changed, not even across six years of acquisition strategy, boardrooms, rain, and all the distance I’d built and maintained between us.

Like I was the only fixed point in the room.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, quietly, as if the words meant more than they said.

I held his gaze for a moment.

“Thank you for the folder,” I said, and I walked out.

In the elevator, I stood with my spine straight, my coat draped over one arm, and the bookshelf burning in the back of my mind—page one hundred and twelve, the broken spine, my own handwriting in his margins on the page he’d opened so often that the book had stopped pretending it could close.

Your eye should move the way your brain does.

He’d kept it for ten years. Not the relationship. Not the memory of it.

The exact page where I had first shown him something true about himself, because I couldn’t help it, because I was constitutionally incapable of watching someone use a system that worked against them.

He’d kept that.

The elevator opened on the lobby floor. I stepped out into the Midtown morning and stood on the sidewalk for a moment in the December cold, the city moving around me as it always did, indifferent, relentless, and entirely mine.

What happens after?

I still didn’t have a complete answer. But for the first time in ten years, walking toward it didn’t feel like approaching the edge of a cliff. It felt like walking toward a door.

I pulled on my coat and headed back to the office.

I had a dinner to get ready for.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

MEGAN: PRESENT

The cab ride took twelve minutes, and I spent every one of them examining a single fact from every angle: I had issued this invitation myself, out loud, standing in his office twelve hours after learning he had kept my handwriting on his shelf for ten years. No pretext. No agenda. A woman who had not extended a personal invitation to another human being since the first Bush administration of her own life had asked Wyatt Aldridge to dinner, and the invitation had not caught fire on the way out of her mouth. Now there was nothing left to do but attend it.

He was already there.

Early—earlier than me, which had never happened once in four months of scheduled hostilities. The host walked me to the corner table without being asked, which meant Wyatt had requested it, which meant he’d called ahead, which meant he had been thinking about seven o’clock in the same units I had. He stood when he saw me. Not performance—reflex, the kind that survives a decade unattended.

“You’re early,” I said.

“So are you.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Some things don’t change.”

I sat. He sat. The waiter appeared, and I ordered tea. For a moment, neither of us said anything. The morning sat on the table between us—a bookshelf, a broken spine, an invitation issued before I could stop myself—and neither of us seemed to know which part to pick up first.

The silence that followed the order was not comfortable, and neither of us pretended it was. Four months of scheduled hostilities had given us a hundred fluent registers—negotiation, deposition, war council, truce—and precisely zero practice with this one. He turned his water glass a quarter turn. I straightened a fork that was already straight.

“You said ‘tables far enough apart for a conversation to breathe,’” he said at last. “That was the specification. I’ve spent all day wondering what you wanted the room for.”

“And if I don’t know how?” It came out more honest than I’d meant. Ten years of working dinners, and I couldn’t remember the last meal I’d eaten across from another person without an agenda item to hide behind.

“Then we’ll be bad at it together,” he said. “I’ll order the fish. You’ll pretend you didn’t want the fish. We’ll split it. I’m told that’s how it works.”

“Tell me about the parts that weren’t about us,” he said when the plates arrived and the border was well behind us. “Hale Capital. Six years. I’ve read every filing, and they’re missing the only part I actually want.”