Page 75 of Hostile

“Partly,” he said.

“Partly,” I agreed.

We looked at each other across the table, and I felt the familiar weight of everything that had always been between us—not just the last six weeks, not just the acquisition, the boardrooms, and the rain, but all of it. The parking lot. The auditorium. Page one hundred and twelve of a Business Law textbook. A silver arrow in a velvet pouch.

“Tell me what you have,” I said. “All of it. Everything you’ve built. And I’ll tell you what I have. And then we’ll figure out what comes next.”

He nodded. He opened the folder he’d brought—not the one from his office, but a new, thicker one. “Nolan’s final report came in at noon. The full picture.”

“How bad?”

“Comprehensive.” He held my gaze. “The property intelligence scheme goes back further than we thought—ten years, not eight. She started before my father handed over the company—she started while he was still running it, which means she was using insider information from a company she had no formal role in at the time.” He took a deep breath. “That significantly changes the legal exposure.”

I absorbed it. Ten years. The same ten years I’d been building toward this moment from the other direction, Blair had been building from the inside. Two parallel architectures moving in opposite directions, neither aware of the other.

“The consolidation clause,” I said. “Does Nolan have the full chain of how it was drafted?”

“Yes. Blair’s attorneys drafted it as part of a broader succession planning exercise. My father signed it without—” He stopped. “Without fully understanding how it could be used. I think he believed it was protecting the family from an outside acquisition. He didn’t anticipate it would protect Blair from an internal consolidation.”

“Or he chose not to think about it too carefully.”

Wyatt fell quiet for a moment. “Yes. That’s possible, too.”

There was no bitterness in it. Just the plain acknowledgment of something he’d sat with, made peace with, and wouldn’t grieve over. His father had made choices. Those choices had consequences. That was the truth, and he was holding it without drama.

It was, I thought, one of the things I’d loved most about him, from the part of my brain that was always cataloging.

Loved. Present tense, apparently.

I looked at my tea.

“The secondary payment,” I said. “The storage facility. Does Nolan have any information on what happened to the footage?”

“That’s the piece I was most afraid of.” He set his coffee down. “The storage unit was cleared fourteen months ago. The facility has no record of what was removed or where it went. Blair’s contact—the friend of Billy’s—has been unreachable since then. Nolan thinks it was destroyed, but he can’t confirm it.”

“But she might still have it.”

“She might still have it.”

I reflected on that for a moment. The footage, likely still in Blair Aldridge’s possession, was the original record of my worst morning, held somewhere out of reach. I avoided thinking about it for ten years because confronting it directly would break through my defenses, and I couldn’t afford to let that happen.

“Megan.” His voice was quiet. “I need to say something, and I need you to let me say it without interrupting.”

I looked at him.

“What Blair did to you was the most significant act of cruelty I’ve ever had direct knowledge of. Not because of what it cost the company or what it cost our relationship, or what it cost me.” His voice was steady and deliberate, as it was when he meant something with every part of himself. “Because of what it cost you, specifically. Your father. Your sense of safety. The ten years you spent building something extraordinary while carrying the weight of what a nineteen-year-old girl did to you because she decided you were an obstacle and removed you.” He held my gaze. “I’ve thought about that every day for ten years. I want you to know that.”

The restaurant moved around us. Quiet conversations, the clink of silverware, and the low music from somewhere near the bar.

My throat was doing something that required my full concentration to control.

“I know,” I said.

“There’s more,” he said. “The part that isn’t about Blair.”

I looked at him across the small table with its good natural light and its candle and its corner position far enough from the nearest occupied table that a conversation could breathe.

“I know there is,” I said.