Page 77 of Hostile

“Okay,” I said. “Blair first. Then the board.”

He nodded. He looked at the table for a moment—at the spread of documents, the two laptops, the empty coffee cups, and the evidence of four hours of work that had produced something neither of us could have built alone. Then he looked at me.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “For doing this with me.”

I held his gaze. “Thank you for the folder.”

It was what I’d said in his office that morning as I left. We both recognized it. The corner of his mouth moved slightly.

He began gathering his materials, and I did the same, the smooth parallel effort of two people accustomed to shared spaces. The conference room resembled a late-night workspace—overhead lights too bright, the city outside the windows transformed into a mosaic of light and shadow, and a stillness settling after hours of focused concentration.

“I’ll walk you out,” he said.

The building lobby was empty at this hour, with the security desk staffed by a guard who nodded at me and gave Wyatt a brief, professional glance. We pushed through the revolving door into the December night—colder than it had been, the kind of cold that arrived after midnight and meant it.

We stood on the sidewalk.

The street had the quiet Midtown takes after midnight—not empty, never empty, but reduced to its essential self. A cab moved through the intersection at the end of the block. Someone’s music from three floors up. The city breathing.

“I’ll get a cab,” he said.

“Wait.” The word came out before I’d decided to say it.

He waited.

I looked at the street for a moment. At the wet pavement and the orange streaks of light and the December cold and the sum of a night that had been many things and was now arriving at the one thing I’d been circling since the rain.

“You came to Cambridge,” I said. “Three weeks later. You stood outside my dorm for twenty minutes.” I looked at him. “And then you walked away.”

He was very still. “Yes.”

“Why?”

Not why did you say it in the hallway—I understood that now, had understood it since the rain. Not why didn’t you come after me immediately—the three weeks were accounted for, the shock and the shame, and the trying to understand what Blair had done before he knew what Blair had done.

Why did you stand there for twenty minutes and then leave?

That was the question. The specific, remaining, load-bearing question.

He was quiet for a long moment. Not constructing—the stillness of someone deciding how much of the most honest answer to offer.

He gave all of it.

“Because I stood on that sidewalk for twenty minutes and thought about knocking on that door,” he said, “and every time I started to move, I thought about what you would see when you opened it.” He paused. “You would see the person who had been standing next to Blair in that hallway. Whose voice had said those four words, whether he’d meant them the way you’d heard them or not. Whose failure to come after you immediately had already told you something about who I was under pressure.” His jaw tightened. “I thought—if I knock on this door, she opens it and she sees all of that. And she’s already destroyed, and I’m the person who destroyed her, even if I didn’t mean to, even if I didn’t know the whole of it yet. And what gives me the right to stand on her doorstep and ask her to hear me out when what I’m really asking is for her to do something hard so I can feel less terrible about something I did?”

The night was very quiet around us.

“So you left,” I said.

“So I left.” He looked at me. “And I told myself it was for you. That giving you space to move on and rebuild, without me standing in the way, was the decent thing to do. The unselfish thing. I’ve wondered for ten years whether that was true. Whether I walked away because it was right for you or because it was easier for me.”

“What did you decide?”

“Both,” he said simply. “It was both. And neither one of those things makes it right that I left. I just—I need you to know that I knew I was leaving. It wasn’t negligence. It wasn’t indifference. It was a choice, and it was mine, and I’ve owned it every day since.”

I stood on the sidewalk in the December cold and let his words sink in.

He hadn’t tried to make it better than it was. Hadn’t dressed it up in the language of selflessness, sacrifice, or love, as someone might if they were trying to reframe a cowardly act as noble. He’d said both, and he’d said neither makes it right. He’d stood in front of me and held it.