Page 7 of Hostile

She’d meant it. She’d always meant every single thing she said.

“Pull the research,” I said. “We’ll know more tomorrow.”

Marcus left. The door clicked shut.

I sat alone with the park view, my grandfather’s desk, and the name on the report in front of me, printed in standard twelve-point font as if it were simply a name. As if it were any other Thursday afternoon discovery in a normal week.

Megan Hale.

I said it quietly, to the window and the city and the ten years that sat between that rainy Cambridge night and this one.

The first time I’d said it out loud in a decade.

It didn’t feel like nothing.

It felt like the thing I’d been bracing for had finally arrived—the thing I’d half-expected and half-dreaded and, if I was being completely honest with myself in the privacy of my own office with no one watching, half-hoped for.

She’s coming for me.

I sat with that for a long moment.

Then I sat up straighter, reached for the report, and started reading from the beginning.

If Megan Hale had spent ten years building something capable of this, the least I could do was give it my full attention.

I didn’t sleep.

That wasn’t unusual. I hadn’t slept well in four months—not since taking over the company, not since moving into the kind of life my father had lived and discovering that the weight of it was distributed differently than I’d expected, pressing in from angles I hadn’t anticipated. I’d adjusted.

Tonight was different.

I was at the window at two in the morning, with a Scotch I’d stopped drinking an hour earlier, looking down at the park below without really seeing it. At this hour, the city was the stripped-down version—no performance, just the bones of it, the geometry of light and shadow that existed whether anyone was watching or not.

Megan Hale.

I’d said her name out loud in this office today for the first time in ten years. To the window and the park and the city that didn’t care. And it had felt like the opposite of nothing—like a door opening from the other side, like something that had been held under pressure finally finding the release point.

I set the Scotch down.

Walked to my desk.

I didn’t know exactly why I opened the bottom drawer. Some instinct, some muscle memory from long ago. The drawer held what it always did—files, a spare phone charger, and the rolled-up architectural prints from the Charleston project I kept meaning to have properly framed. At the back, behind the prints, my hand found what it had apparently been looking for before my brain caught up.

A folded piece of paper.

I stood there for a moment before I opened it.

I already knew what it was. I’d put it there the first week I’d moved into this office, not deliberately displayed, but also not thrown away. Just filed. The way you filed things you weren’t ready to deal with directly.

I unfolded it.

A page torn from a notebook. The handwriting was the controlled, deliberate print I’d have recognized anywhere—the handwriting of someone who treated every word on the page as something worth doing correctly.

Three lines.

Primary point—horizontal, not vertical. Branch to association, not sub-list. Your eye should move the way your brain does.

I’d torn the page out of my Harvard Business Law textbook the summer after everything fell apart. I hadn’t been able to keep the book—it had sat on my shelf for a month, radiating an unresolved kind of grief every time I looked at it, so I’d taken the page and put the book in a box and told myself I’d deal with it later.