Page 80 of Hostile

For one second—one—I saw beneath the composure something that might have been the sister I grew up beside, the one who taught me to swim at the Cape house and stood beside me at our grandfather’s funeral. Then it closed, as everything in Blair eventually did, and what looked back at me was the architect.

“No,” she said.

“No to which part?”

“All of it.” She stood, smoothed her skirt, and collected the coffee I hadn’t touched, the hospitality ending now that the guest’s cooperation was no longer required. “I decline your exit, I decline your framing, and I decline to be managed by a man who has run that company for four months on the strength of a name I have spent eight years protecting from him. Come Monday, I’ll remind your board whose stewardship kept this family solvent, in fact, not in sentiment. It will not be a resignation, Wyatt. It will be a correction.” She opened the door for me herself. “Give my regards to Miss Hale. Tell her I’ll see her Monday.”

“She’ll be there,” I said. “She’s been there for six years. You just never once looked down the table.”

I stood on the sidewalk on East Seventy-Third in the December cold for a long moment, waiting to feel what I’d expected—grief, maybe, or the vertigo of a family ending. What arrived instead was quieter and took me a moment to recognize, because I had so little practice with it.

It was the feeling of having said the right words in the right room, with the person who needed to hear them still standing there.

Ten years late. But in daylight.

I took out my phone and called the woman my sister had spent a decade trying to erase from existence.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

MEGAN: PRESENT

The Blair meeting had been Wyatt’s to do alone.

I understood that without being told. Some of the accountings belonged to the person who owed them, and the debt between Wyatt and his sister was one I had no standing to collect. So I’d gone back to my office, drafted a response to the board’s disclosure request, and tried very hard not to think about what was happening on East Seventy-Third Street.

I was moderately successful.

He called at noon.

“She said no,” he said. “To every version of it.”

“Are you all right?”

A pause that told me more than words would have. “I will be.”

“Come to my office,” I said. “We have work to do.”

He arrived at twelve-thirty with the folders, his expression that of a man who had said what needed to be said and was now ready to take the next step. We worked through the afternoon—the disclosure response, the documentation package for the board, and the sequencing for a Monday meeting that Blair now intended to walk into swinging. Marcus joined us by phone at three, and Charlie by four.

By six o’clock, we had everything in order.

By six-fifteen, everyone had gone.

By six-thirty, it was just the two of us in the conference room, the city going dark outside the windows, the work finished, and nothing left unsaid between us about Blair, the board, or the acquisition.

Wyatt was standing at the window, looking at the skyline, when I came back from the kitchen with two cups of tea—his coffee, long since cold, replaced without discussion because some habits reassembled themselves without permission.

He turned when I set the cup on the table.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’d have gotten there without me.”

“Maybe.” He picked up the cup. Looked at it for a moment. “But I’m glad I didn’t have to.”

We settled into our seats, not at the conference table but in the chairs by the window—the ones Dana used when she needed a brief break from her desk. The city spread beneath us, its lights and sharp angles performing its unfeeling routine.

I held my tea in both hands, thinking about everything that had been said over the past twenty-four hours, everything that hadn’t been said yet, and the conversation we’d been building toward since a gala in November.