Page 98 of Hostile

“She’s coming for Christmas,” I said. “She does every year. I fly her up. She tells me the apartment is too cold and too high off the ground, and we spend three days cooking things I never have time for and watching movies she’s already seen a hundred times.”

“Does she know?” he asked. “About any of this?”

“She knows I’ve been doing something with the Aldridge company. She doesn’t know the details.” I paused. “She wants to meet you.”

He looked at me. “Is that an invitation?”

I looked at him—the December sunlight on his face, the relaxed, unhurried way he navigated the city, and the arrow in his coat pocket—I had known it was there since Friday, and probably always would—and I felt the unspoken truth I've been avoiding for weeks settle into clarity.

Yes, I thought. That’s exactly what it is.

“It’s an observation,” I said. “Which you’re welcome to interpret however you like.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “I’ll interpret it as an invitation.”

“I thought you might.”

We walked.

The city had done its amber-hour thing by the time we found ourselves somewhere I recognized, even though we hadn’t planned to go there.

We were in a park—not Central Park, but a smaller one, the kind that existed in the gaps between blocks where the city had decided green was worth preserving. The trees were bare, as was everything in December. The benches were empty at this hour, and the late-afternoon light did its long-slanted thing across the bare ground.

It wasn’t a parking lot in Savannah.

It wasn’t a Cambridge quad, a rainy Cambridge sidewalk, a Midtown boardroom, or any of the coordinates where our story had been written and rewritten over the past eleven years.

It was just a park in New York in December, cold and bare and entirely ordinary.

Wyatt paused, and I paused beside him. We stood in silence for a moment, gazing at nothing in particular—the sparse trees, the dim light, and the faint city sounds filtering in from the edges of the park, not reaching the interior.

“I’ve been thinking about something,” he said.

“What?”

“The parking lot.” He looked at me. “You know I caught you looking that day.”

I looked at him. “I know.”

“I looked away because my friends were there.” He held my gaze. “I’ve thought about that a lot, about how many times I looked away because someone was watching. I’m done looking away.”

I looked at him. At the man who had stood on the other side of every distance I’d ever put between us and kept showing up anyway—first in the parking lot, then in the auditorium, then eleven years and a hostile takeover—with the patient, unhurried certainty of someone who had decided and wasn’t reconsidering.

I thought about Christine in the parking lot, all those years ago. He’s Wyatt Aldridge. His family owns half of Savannah. I thought about Christine on a Cambridge campus, sending him away with love and the fierce protectiveness that had cost us both something considerable.

I was going to have a very interesting conversation with Christine. But not today.

Today I was standing in a small park in New York in December with the man I had spent ten years trying to hate but had never managed to, and the distance between us was two feet of cold December air and absolutely nothing else.

“I’m not looking away either,” I said.

He reached for my hand. Not dramatically. Not the grand gesture. Just—his hand finding mine in the December cold and holding it, the way you hold something you’ve been careful with for a long time and are finally just—holding.

I let him.

My fingers closed around his.

We stood in the small park in the bare December light, the city moving around us as it always had—indifferent, relentless, entirely unbothered—and I thought about all the minutes that had led to this one.