Page 94 of Hostile

“What time?”

“Twelve-thirty.”

“I’ll be there.”

I walked out of the boardroom, down the corridor, into the elevator, and stood with my spine straight, my coat over one arm, and something in my chest that had been empty for ten years doing something unauthorized yet completely welcome.

The lobby. The revolving door. The December cold.

Manhattan swallowed me whole the moment I pushed through and hit the sidewalk. Cold air, diesel fumes, the distant wail of a siren, someone’s music bleeding through their headphones.

Home.

I hailed a cab, sat back against the seat, and watched the city stream past the windows, not, for once, telling myself to get it together.

I let it be what it was.

Which was, it turned out, the best thing I’d felt in ten years.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

MEGAN: PRESENT

Iflew to Savannah on Wednesday morning, three days after the vote and a few days before the story would reach readers of the business pages at kitchen tables along the Eastern Seaboard.

My mother did not read the business pages. But Savannah eventually read everything, and the version that reached her had to be mine.

The house off Waters Avenue looked as it always did in December: tin roof, tidy porch, camellias blooming against the fence as if they didn’t know what month it was. The swing my father hung the summer I turned nine still sat level after all these years because he’d measured twice. My mother had lived in this house for more than a decade and had allowed me to do only one thing to it, which was to buy it. Everything else—the furniture, the routines, the pride—remained hers.

She opened the door before I knocked. Mothers hear gravel.

“You didn’t say you were coming.”

“I know.”

She looked at me for a moment, reading me as she read everyone—quick, thorough, without seeming to do so at all. Whatever she found made her step back from the door.

“I’ll put tea on,” she said. “You’ll want to sit down for whatever this is.”

The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and Lemon Pledge. My father’s chair sat at the head of the table, pushed in square, as it had for nine years. Neither of us had ever once sat in it. Neither of us had ever once discussed not sitting in it.

She set sweet tea in front of me in December because seasons were New York’s problem, sat across from me with her hands folded, and waited. My mother has never rushed anyone toward a hard thing in her life. She simply removes every excuse not to face it.

“I bought a company,” I said. “Control of one. It’s done, and it’s going to be in the news.”

“Which company?”

“Aldridge Commercial Real Estate.”

My mother set her glass down without making a sound. Her stillness was different from mine. Mine was armor, built and maintained. Hers was geology.

“Say that name again,” she said quietly.

“Aldridge.”

She looked at my father’s chair for a long moment. Then she got up, wiped her hands on the kitchen towel out of habit rather than need, and stood at the counter, her back to me. When she turned around, she wasn’t looking at her daughter anymore. She was looking at the only other person alive who kept the same ledger she did.

“Do you know what they said your father stole?”