Page 49 of Hostile

Megan Hale had files on Blair. I was almost certain—certain enough to have been doing the math on what she knew, when she’d known it, and what she planned to do with it. The acquisition now made a different kind of sense. Not just the Aldridge name, not just her family’s history with the company, but the specific architecture of the company. The way she’d built into the subsidiaries where Blair’s fingerprints were heaviest. The patience of it. The precision.

She wasn’t just dismantling the company. She was building a case.

“She’s further along than we are,” I said.

Marcus absorbed that. “Do we approach her?”

I thought about the conference room. The negotiation table. The hallway outside the boardroom, where I’d told her I wasn’t going to fight her and had watched something shift across her expression before she’d closed it off, so I couldn’t read it fully.

Why.

Because it was the right call.

She’d known I wasn’t telling her everything. She always had. She’d filed it away and walked away, and I’d let her, because the full answer required the full story, and the full story required her to be in a room where she was ready to hear it. She wasn’t ready yet.

I wasn’t sure she was ready yet.

“Not yet,” I said. “Give me a week.”

Marcus nodded and stood. “Wyatt.” He paused at the door. “Whatever Blair did—whatever the full picture turns out to be—this company won’t survive it if it comes out the wrong way. The timing, the source, how it lands with the board⁠—”

“I know.”

“I’m not suggesting you manage the truth. I’m saying the truth needs a context that doesn’t bring the whole structure down with it.”

“I know, Marcus.” I looked at him. “That’s what the week is for.”

He departed, and the door shut behind him. I turned back to the window.

Forty thousand dollars. Thirty days before the beach house weekend. The clean, cold arithmetic of something planned in advance by someone who had decided the outcome needed to be engineered because it wasn’t going to arrive on its own.

Blair had decided Megan needed to disappear from my life. She’d decided it with the calm, methodical certainty she brought to everything she wanted—the certainty of someone who had always believed the right outcome justified the architecture required to produce it.

And I had stood in a hallway at nineteen years old and given her just enough to work with.

No, that’s not me.

I hadn’t known about the camera. Hadn’t known about Billy. Hadn’t known that Blair’s let me handle it had meant a mole camera in a beach house and forty thousand dollars in a personal account and a video distributed to every trust fund kid on a Cambridge campus before I’d had any idea what had happened.

But I’d said the words. And Megan had heard them. And I had let her run.

There was a version of this in which I found a way to explain it to her. Where I put the full picture in front of her—the payment, the camera, Blair’s architecture—and let the evidence do what evidence does and trusted her to follow the logic to wherever it led.

I’d been trying to work out how to get to that version for ten years. I was running out of time to find it.

I reached for my phone and pulled up a name I’d been looking at for two weeks without making the call.

Camille Prescott.

Harvard Law. Megan’s person. The one who’d been there when everything fell apart and had stayed in her life ever since. I’d tracked her down six months ago, when I’d started seriously thinking about how to get Megan into a room where she’d be willing to listen. I’d done nothing with the number because every time I looked at it, I came back to the same problem.

I couldn’t ask Camille to broker a conversation that Megan hadn’t agreed to have. I set the phone back down.

The week. I had a week to assemble the full picture, and then I was going to have to find a way to put it in front of her, whether she was ready or not, because the alternative was watching her finish dismantling the company on the basis of something that was only half the truth, and I couldn’t let that stand.

She deserved the whole truth. She’d always deserved the whole truth.

I’d just needed ten years and a hostile takeover to finally be ready to give it to her.