Page 81 of Hostile

“There’s something I haven’t told you,” I said.

He looked at me.

“The pregnancy.”

His face changed. Not surprise—something older than surprise, something he’d been carrying and hadn’t expected me to name it.

“I know,” he said quietly. “Christine told me three years later, when I found her again. She said she’d debated telling me for a long time and had finally decided I deserved to know, even if she still thought I deserved to hurt for a while longer.” He fell silent for a moment. “She wasn’t wrong about that second part.”

I looked at the city. At the lights going on one by one in the buildings across the skyline, the ordinary mechanics of the city settling into its evening.

“I never named her,” I said. “I’ve never said that out loud to anyone.”

The conference room was very quiet.

“Her?” he asked.

“I don’t know that for certain. I just—I always thought of the baby as a her.” I pressed my fingers against the cup. “She was barely a pregnancy. Eight weeks. The doctor said it was the stress and the—the not eating. That my body couldn’t sustain it, given everything.” I paused. “I never blamed you for that specifically. I want you to know that. It wasn’t—it was what it was. My body was making a decision my mind wasn’t ready for yet.”

“Megan.” His voice had gone rough at the edges, the way it had in the rain. “I’m sorry. I am so deeply sorry.”

“I know.” I looked at him. “That’s not why I’m telling you. I’m telling you because you deserve to hear it from me directly. not from Christine, not implied in the acquisition or the years of silence. From me.” I held his gaze. “You lost her too.”

He looked at me for a long moment with something in his expression I didn’t have a word for—not grief exactly, not gratitude exactly, something that encompassed both and went further than either.

“Thank you for sharing her with me,” he said, very quietly.

I nodded. We sat with it for a moment, the way you sit with things that are too large and too old to be resolved in a single conversation and don’t need to be—they just need to be acknowledged, named, and given their proper weight in the full picture of everything that had happened.

Then I picked up my tea and said, “Tell me how you found out about Billy.”

He told me everything.

Not the way he’d told pieces of it before—in a hallway, in a conference room, in the rain. The whole thing, in order, the way he’d clearly wanted to tell it for years but had never had the chance.

The morning the video spread. His phone was blowing up with texts from people he barely knew. Seeing it for the first time on Billy’s phone in that hallway—only a short clip, no faces visible—while Billy said four words he meant one way, with Blair standing six feet away. Watching me hear them. Watching me run.

“I tried to come after you,” he said. “Billy was in the way, and by the time I got past him, you were gone. I walked the entire campus for three hours and went to your dorm twice. Your roommate said she hadn’t seen you.” His jaw tightened. “Three days. I had no way to reach you. No number, no way to know if you were even still in Cambridge.”

Three days of nothing. While I was in Camille’s apartment, two miles away, I was unable to speak.

“I went back to the beach house,” he said. “Alone. I tore my bedroom apart. I don’t know exactly what I was looking for—proof, an explanation, something that made sense of how a video I hadn’t taken had been sent from my phone. That’s when I found it. In the entertainment center, directly facing the bed.”

I set my tea down carefully.

“A mole camera,” he said. “I took it to my father. The police traced the purchase to Billy Brown.” He looked down at his hands. “My dad knew before he told me. I found out when they went to arrest Billy at school.” His jaw tightened. “I got to him before they did.”

“You beat him.”

“On his front lawn. His father watched and didn’t stop it.” He paused. “Billy’s father made him answer for it in front of me. He asked why. And Billy said—” He stopped, took a breath. “He said he’d always been in love with you. That you’d never looked at him. That when you fell for me, it was the ultimate betrayal in his eyes, and he wanted to hurt us both.”

I reflected on it—the particular, crushing smallness of that moment. A decade of my life shifted by the wounded ego of someone I had hardly thought about.

“And Blair?” I asked.

“She said she didn’t know.” His voice was flat. “She said Billy had snuck out of her room and that she thought he was in the bathroom. She cried. She begged for my forgiveness.” He looked out the window. “I believed her then. I needed to believe her then. I needed there to be a version in which Blair had been stupid rather than complicit.” A long pause. “I know now she wasn’t stupid.”

“She paid him.”