Page 35 of Hostile

Not eavesdropping. I told myself it wasn’t eavesdropping because I wasn’t actively trying to hear anything. I was simply standing in a corridor with a slightly open door, and sounds carried.

“I know it’s not what you planned.” Wyatt’s voice—the real one, not the boardroom version, the human one. “And I know the timing is terrible. But Marcus will work with you on the transition package. I’ll make sure of it myself.”

There was an intentional pause. A second voice, male, younger, not quite steady. “I’ve been here eleven years.”

“I know. And you’ve been good at it for all eleven of them. That’s going in the reference letter, and I mean it.” The room fell silent for a moment. “This isn’t a reflection of your work. The restructuring is mine to own, and I’m owning it. What I can do is make sure you land well.”

I stood very still in the corridor.

Eleven years.

A transition package. A reference letter, promised personally, with feeling.

The two phrases landed somewhere very old and very deep because I had grown up inside their opposites. Eleven years was what my father gave the Aldridge name before a missing bottle of bourbon erased all of it in a single Friday. A reference letter was the thing they declined to provide—one page, a formality, the difference between starting over and starting from nothing—yet they withheld it from a man they trusted fifty feet up a live oak and nowhere near a liquor cabinet.

Wyatt didn’t know I was in the corridor. He didn’t know what those two phrases meant in my family’s house, or that his family had written the first draft of this scene twelve years earlier, with every role reversed. There was nothing strategic about that conversation. No audience, no board members, no one to impress. Just Wyatt in a conference room, quietly repairing a family habit he might not even know he’d inherited, one person at a time, with nothing to gain and no one watching.

He would never know I’d heard it.

I quietly moved away from the door, found a seat in the reception area, and looked at the Manhattan skyline through the floor-to-ceiling windows, thinking how much easier the last six weeks would have been if he’d turned out to be the person I’d needed him to be.

My heart was doing something I hadn’t authorized.

I stayed in the reception area chair for another two minutes, with the focused attention of someone who was definitely thinking about the quarterly projections and absolutely not thinking about how Wyatt’s voice had sounded through a slightly ajar door when he thought no one was listening.

It’s not just the business, I admitted to myself, quietly, with no one watching. It hasn’t been just the business for a while.

I straightened my portfolio on my knee. That’s fine, I told myself. You can know something without acting on it. I looked at the skyline. The skyline offered no opinion.

Marcus arrived thirty seconds later, and I stood up and went into the meeting with my face exactly where I’d put it—by every external measure, entirely composed.

The meeting itself took forty minutes. Marcus walked me through the Meridian reporting consolidation with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who had built half the structure himself and audited the other half, sliding schedules across the table one at a time, watching me read each one before producing the next. I asked the four questions I had come to ask and two that occurred to me in the room. He answered all six completely and volunteered nothing, which in Marcus Webb’s dialect was a form of respect.

My face stayed exactly where I’d put it. My voice stayed level. I annotated the margins in my own shorthand, tabbed three pages for Charlie, and performed, flawlessly, the role of a woman who had not just stood in a corridor and heard the man she was dismantling quietly repair the exact wound she was dismantling him for.

If Marcus noticed anything beneath the performance, he declined to bill me for it.

Then, at the door, with my coat over my arm and the elevator already called, he paused with his hand on the frame.

“He’s different from his father,” Marcus said, apropos of absolutely nothing. “In the ways that will end up mattering to you.”

I looked at him. Thirty years of reading rooms looked back, entirely unreadable.

“I’ll have the revised schedules to your office by Friday,” he said, as if the other sentence had never happened, and he held the door.

The elevator bank was empty when I reached it.

It was not empty by the time the car arrived.

“Miss Hale.”

Wyatt came around the corner with his coat over his arm and a portfolio under it, moving with the loose, unhurried stride of a man in his own building—then he saw me, and his stride recalibrated, and something crossed his face too quickly to name. He had come from the direction of a conference room I was officially unaware of.

“Mr. Aldridge.”

“Marcus said the Meridian review was today.” He paused at a respectful distance—something he always did, and I had started to notice, whether I wanted to or not. “He did not say it was this morning.”

“Would you have rearranged your schedule?”