Page 3 of Hostile

The elevator doors opened into the lobby, and I stepped out into the last of the evening crowd—analysts, associates, and assistants spilling out of the building with loosened ties and carry-out bags, the relief of five o’clock on a weekday written all over their faces. I moved through them without making eye contact, which was also not unusual. I’d become very good at moving through spaces without leaving a mark.

Manhattan swallowed me whole the moment I pushed through the revolving door and stepped onto the sidewalk. Cold air, diesel fumes, the distant wail of a siren, someone’s music bleeding through their headphones.

Home.

I’d made this city my home. I’d made it into everything Savannah never was or could have been for me—a place where Megan Hale wasn’t the housekeeper’s daughter, wasn’t the scholarship girl, and wasn’t the cautionary tale whispered about at the manor over dinner.

Here, I was the woman who ran Hale Capital. The woman who moved quietly, thought ten steps ahead, and did not, under any circumstances, let anyone see what was happening behind her eyes.

I hailed a cab, gave my address, and sat back against the seat as the city streamed past the windows.

Day one.

All the remaining chapters of this man’s life were still unwritten—and I intended to be the one holding the pen.

CHAPTER TWO

MEGAN: THE PAST

Ihad known Wyatt Aldridge my whole life, in the distant, regulated way the housekeeper’s daughter knows the children of the house—across hedges, across kitchens, across the carefulness my mother enforced and his sister policed. But the first time I saw him—saw him the way the rest of my life would insist on seeing him—I was sixteen years old, and he was parallel-parking a black truck in the student lot like he’d been doing it his whole life.

Which he probably had. That was the thing about the Aldridge Manor crowd—they arrived at competence early, because competence was something their parents arranged for them as other parents arranged dentist appointments. Driving lessons at fifteen, ski trips over spring break, the easy physical confidence of people who had never once had to wonder whether they belonged somewhere before they walked in.

I was sitting on the hood of Christine’s car, eating a sandwich because the cafeteria was too loud and I preferred the parking lot. At that moment, I had about zero opinions about Wyatt Aldridge.

Then he got out of the truck.

Oh, I thought, which was not a sophisticated response but was the honest one.

He was tall—I registered that first, then the ease with which he moved, unhurried, as if he had never needed to hurry because the world generally waited for him. Blond. Blue-eyed. The kind of face that belonged on something people looked at on purpose.

He walked across the lot toward the building, slinging his backpack over one shoulder and keeping his eyes on his phone. I watched him in the usual detached, clinical manner—observing from a safe distance without letting the observation turn into anything more.

Christine noticed me noticing.

“Don’t,” she said, without looking up from her own sandwich.

“Don’t what?”

“Whatever you’re doing with your face right now.” She did look up then, following my gaze to where Wyatt had almost reached the entrance. “That’s Wyatt Aldridge. His family owns half of Savannah, and Blair Aldridge is his twin sister, so his social circle is a minefield you do not want to step into.”

None of it was news. Christine had held my coat through every round with Blair since we were six years old. The recitation was a ritual—a warning label read aloud over something we both already knew was poison.

“I was just looking.”

“You were looking the way you look at things you want,” Christine said. “Which is different.”

I picked up my sandwich, took a deliberate bite, and looked into the middle distance rather than at the entrance where Wyatt had just disappeared.

“I don’t want anything,” I said.

Christine made the sound she makes when she disagrees with something and has decided not to argue about it.

She was right, of course. She was usually right about the things I didn’t want to examine. I had been watching Wyatt Aldridge from across that parking lot since the first week of my sophomore year—his junior year, one class and one entire world ahead of mine—through every passing moment in the hallway where our paths crossed without ever connecting, right up until June, when his class graduated from the building and left mine behind. Two years, spent with the focused, disciplined attention of someone who had decided the distance was permanent and accepted it.

The distance was what it was. His world and mine didn’t intersect. That was simply the geography of the life I’d been born into, and I had made my peace with it the way you make your peace with the tide.

You didn’t fight it. You learned the tables and planned your crossings.