Page 10 of Hostile

Every sentence of it was true. That was the trick of it. That was always the trick of it. It was true that our father was summoning me. True that the lot was watching. True that Savannah could turn a public kindness into private slander by Monday morning, and true that she would bear the cost of it, not me. My sister handed me four true things, arranged in the only order that led me to abandon the crossing, and let me draw the conclusion myself—and I drew it, because I was seventeen and because being kind by leaving was so much easier than being brave by staying.

It was the first draft of a speech she would deliver again, two years later, polished, over a container of soup.

I looked back across the fifteen yards I hadn’t covered.

Megan’s face immediately shut down, not gradually but suddenly, as if she had corrected a mistake in her expression. Her eyes shifted past me to an indistinct point in the distance, as if the past ten seconds had been a simple miscalculation she’d fixed. She got into the sedan. Christine glanced at me for a moment longer than Megan—an even, unimpressed look that I would not understand for ten years—and then she too got into the other side.

I walked back to my truck.

“Smooth,” Jayce said, and mercifully left it there.

I know now what she saw, because I have had eleven years and one December to assemble it: an Aldridge starting toward her in front of the whole lot, and another Aldridge intercepting him, and the first turning around and walking back to his good parking spot. Not a moment. A demonstration. Proof of the physics she’d already made her peace with—the tide going out on schedule, right when she’d been fool enough, for ten seconds, to look at the water.

She filed it, I’m certain, the way she filed everything. I doubt it even made the permanent record.

I never told her that for me it was the record. That I drove home that Friday with my hands tight on the wheel, replaying the fifteen yards I could have finished in six seconds, hating the version of me who had let kindness be the excuse. That I spent the last six weeks of my senior year constructing elaborate second attempts I never made—the library, the hallway, the lot again—and executing none of them, because Blair had taught me the cost, and the cost was always hers to bear, never mine. What kind of man makes a girl pay for his nerve?

Graduation came. The lot emptied for the summer. I had one August left before my father’s school, and a promise riding around in my chest with nowhere to put itself down:

The parking lot was not going to be all we got.

One warm Tuesday night, three days before I left, I finally drove to the edge of Aldridge Manor, parked where the staff cottages began, walked up a gravel path to a porch with a swing, and knocked.

I said one true sentence to her that night—that she was going to win everything—and left the other one lodged in my throat, where it lived for the next year, through two semesters at a school I never chose, right up until the September afternoon I walked into a Harvard auditorium, late, with no seat assignment and one intention.

Finish the crossing.

CHAPTER FIVE

MEGAN: THE PAST

The professor was forty minutes into his lecture on contract law when I realized Wyatt Aldridge had chosen the seat directly behind me.

Not beside me. Not across the room, which would have been the rational choice given what had passed between us in that auditorium hallway two weeks ago—the five seconds of eye contact and two sentences I had since firmly filed under done, handled, moving on. Behind me. Close enough that when he shifted in his chair at the thirty-minute mark, I felt the faint displacement of air.

I didn’t turn around.

Notes, I reminded myself. Take your notes.

The course was Business Law and Ethics, a prerequisite my academic advisor had scheduled for my first semester alongside Microeconomics and a freshman writing seminar. I’d read ahead through the first three chapters of the assigned text over the summer, partly because I always read ahead and partly because having something concrete to focus on during the weeks after everything fell apart kept me from disappearing into myself entirely. The notes I was taking were therefore a combination of what the professor was saying and what I already knew, cross-referenced and organized by topic in a system I’d developed in the tenth grade and refined every year since.

My notes were immaculate. My handwriting was the controlled, deliberate kind that came from years of treating every word on the page as something worth doing correctly. If I was going to write it down, it was going to be legible. It was going to mean something.

The professor drew a diagram on the board and wrote three words beneath it.

Offer. Acceptance. Consideration.

“The elements of a binding contract,” he said. “Memorize them. You’ll spend the rest of your academic career and, for some of you, the rest of your professional life arguing about them.”

I wrote them down, though I’d already memorized them.

Behind me, a pen scratched against paper. Then stopped. Then—and I noticed it only because I was specifically not paying attention to it—scratched again, at a different angle, like someone crossing something out and starting over.

I kept my eyes on the board.

The lecture ended at four o’clock. I capped my pen, closed my notebook, and was halfway to the aisle when the voice came from directly behind my left shoulder.

“You cross-reference with a two-column system.”