Page 46 of Hostile

“He denied it, Camille. In that hallway. I heard him.”

“I know what you heard.”

“Then you know why⁠—”

“I know why you ran,” she said, without judgment, simply stating the plain fact. “I’m asking whether you’ve considered that there might be more to what happened than just four words in a hallway.”

The restaurant moved around us. Silverware clinked, conversation was low, and a melody drifted in from somewhere near the bar.

“He said as much,” I said quietly. “In the conference room. You saw what it looked like. Not what it was.”

“What did you do with that?”

“I told him to save it for someone who wanted to hear it.”

Camille looked at me for a long moment. Not with pity—she never did, and it was one of the things I loved most about her. Just with the steady, clear-eyed attention of someone who had known me long enough to see through the architecture to the person beneath it.

“Do you?” she asked.

“Do I what?”

“Want to hear it?”

I looked out the window at the city moving past in the cold November light, indifferent and relentless, asking nothing.

I’m also not disappearing. Not this time.

“I don’t know,” I said. It was the most honest thing I’d said out loud in weeks, possibly months, and the sound of it in my own voice was mildly alarming.

Camille nodded once, as if that were exactly the answer she’d expected, and it was enough for now. She picked up her menu again. “Eat something. You look like you’ve been surviving on coffee and principle.”

“That’s an accurate assessment.”

“It’s not a compliment.” She didn’t look up. “And Megan?”

“What?”

“Whatever he did or didn’t do in that hallway—the man who stopped a negotiation to protect your position without asking for credit isn’t doing it for nothing.” She turned a page. “That’s all I’m saying.”

I picked up my menu and looked at it without reading it.

The man who stopped a negotiation to protect your position without asking for credit.

I ordered the first thing I saw and spent the rest of lunch listening to Camille talk about her current case, which involved a corporate merger so aggressively mismanaged that it had apparently become something of a legend in New York legal circles. I laughed in the right places, asked the right questions, and, by all outward signs, seemed entirely present.

Underneath that, I was somewhere else entirely.

The thing Camille had once said over drinks at a rooftop bar the summer I’d founded Hale Capital still lingered on my mind.

“You know what the saddest part of this whole plan is?” she’d said, with the directness that made her the only person I’d kept close. “It’s that you would’ve been extraordinary without it. You are extraordinary despite it. But I keep thinking about who you’d be if you’d spent ten years building instead of aiming.”

I’d told her I was building.

“You’re building a weapon,” she’d said. “That’s different.”

I’d ordered another drink and changed the subject.

Sitting across from her now, three years later, with the Aldridge position at twenty-two percent and the weapon nearly loaded and aimed, I thought about that night more than I’d expected to.