Page 82 of Hostile

“Thirty days before the beach house weekend. Yes.” His voice was quiet and final. “She identified the infatuation, gave it structure, positioned herself in the right rooms to watch it detonate, and told me to let you go in the same breath.” He looked at me. “She was nineteen years old.”

She was nineteen years old.

They’d both been nineteen years old, building damage that would take a decade to fully understand.

“You know I’d already given his school a year before Harvard,” he said. “Two semesters. Then I told him I wanted a different program and let him believe the reasons he wanted to believe. What I never told you was what my first week at Harvard actually looked like. I went to the registrar—they wouldn’t confirm enrollment. I walked through every building on that campus. I sat in the dining hall for three hours one morning, watching the door.” He held my gaze. “I wasn’t late to that welcome address, Megan. I’d run out of buildings.”

I stared at him. The auditorium. The doors opening at the back. The unhurried walk to a seat four rows ahead of me, which I’d spent ten years interpreting as indifference.

“And after,” he said before I could speak. “When my father sent me back there, I lasted two days before I was on the road to Cambridge. I didn’t have a plan. I just drove.” Something flickered across his face. “Christine saw me on a Friday.”

I went very still.

“She was visiting,” I said. “That was the week she came to see my dorm room.”

“She told me to leave,” he said. “She said you’d finally started coming out of the worst depression she’d ever seen. That you were getting yourself together, had your whole future ahead of you, and that if I showed up now, I’d drag you back into it—back into the grief and the shame and everything you’d come to Harvard to escape.” He paused. “She said if I cared about you—if I actually, genuinely cared about what happened to you—I’d go. And I wouldn’t come back until you’d had time to build something that was yours.”

The city lights highlight the dark December sky stretching endlessly over Manhattan in all directions.

Christine had sent him away.

Christine, who had been my best friend since childhood, who had picked me up off the floor more times than I could count, who had stood beside me through every hard thing, and who had sat across from me in her apartment years later, never once mentioning that she’d found Wyatt on Harvard’s campus searching for me.

She had made a decision for me — driven by love, fierce protectiveness, and conviction that it was right. She wasn’t entirely wrong; I needed that time to build something of my own before I could be in the same room as him and be confident in my thoughts.

She also hadn’t been correct. Over the years, her stance had hardened, and the decision had become fixed. When I finally prepared myself—if I ever truly did—there was no way to reverse it.

“You should have come back,” I said quietly. Not in anger. Just the plain truth of it.

“I know.” He held my gaze. “I should have come back anyway. I told myself I was respecting your space, Christine’s request, and your right to build your life without me in it. And some of that was true.” He paused. “And some of it was the same as it’s always been. Being nineteen in that hallway. Being afraid that coming after you would cost you more than losing me already had.”

I looked at him. At the man I had spent ten years building a weapon against. At the man who had kept a textbook open to a specific page for ten years, had stood on a Cambridge campus in September, asking strangers if they knew me, had beaten a man bloody on his front lawn, and had spent four months learning the weight of an inheritance he hadn’t wanted so he could hold it properly.

“I should go,” he said. He stood and reached for his coat on the chair by the door. Shrugged it on. Reached into his pocket for his keys.

I stood up.

He watched me cross to my desk without asking where I was going. I pulled open the bottom drawer—the one I’d opened and closed ten thousand times over six years without ever doing what I was about to do—and took out the velvet pouch.

I turned around, and he froze when he saw it. I approached him again and showed it to him.

“I’ve been keeping it,” I said. “I told myself I was going to throw it away eventually.” I held his gaze. “I never did.”

He took it slowly from my hand. Turned it over. The drawstring was worn, the fabric soft with years of handling—his hands knew its shape the same way mine did.

His fingers closed around it. When he looked up, the years between us seemed to be sitting right there in his hand.

“Open it,” I said.

Your true north.

I looked at it in his palm for a long moment. Then I reached up and closed his fingers around it.

“You were right,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. “You once said an arrow always knows where it’s going and doesn’t second-guess itself.” I looked up at him. “I second-guessed for ten years. I built everything I built on a certainty that was actually a question I was afraid to ask.” I held his gaze. “I’m done second-guessing.”

He looked at the arrow in his closed fist. Then at me.

“Megan.” My name in his voice. Just that. As if it had always been—a complete sentence. As if it meant something. As if he’d been saving it.