Page 17 of Hostile

What sat in my chest right now was the look on Wyatt’s face when she’d said it was a family thing. The way he’d gone with her. The familiar, practiced compliance of someone who had been choosing between two things for a long time, wearing the groove of that choice so deep it barely registered as a choice anymore.

I knew that groove. I’d watched it from across a parking lot for years. I was still watching it, apparently.

I was still standing at the counter when I noticed Blair watching me from the living room doorway. Not the way you watch someone at a party—casually, incidentally, with the ambient awareness of a crowded room. This was specific. Focused. The way you watch something you’ve been thinking about since before you arrived.

She wasn’t looking at me with contempt. That was what made it land differently than usual. The contempt I could catalog, manage, and file away. This was something cooler, more considered.

She looked away when she saw me notice.

I filed that too, under the same heading as the word she’d exchanged with Billy Brown, in the section for things I can’t categorize yet.

Later, I told myself. Think about it later.

But the feeling stayed. The faint, specific chill of being assessed by someone who has already decided something and is simply waiting for the right moment to act on it.

“Hey.” A voice beside me—male, unfamiliar, carrying the brand of casual confidence that came from being the kind of person who introduced himself to women standing alone at parties. “You look like you’re doing math.”

I turned. I didn’t recognize him—older than most of the people here, dark-haired, with an easy smile and the kind of practiced approachability that suggested he’d used it successfully before. He was wearing a Harvard Law sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed to the elbows and held a beer loosely in one hand.

“I usually am,” I said.

He laughed. “Billy Brown. Second year law.” He extended his hand.

I shook it. “Megan Hale. First year business.”

“Hale.” He repeated my name the way certain people did—turning it over slightly, filing it away. “You know Wyatt Aldridge?”

“We have a class together.”

He nodded, his eyes flicking briefly toward the living room before returning to me with the easy smile still in place. “Good guy. I’ve known him since I was in high school.” He tilted his beer bottle in a small gesture. “Can I get you something? Something with actual content?”

“I’m fine with this, thanks.”

He stayed for a few minutes—easy, surface-level conversation, the kind that required nothing and gave nothing. But he didn’t leave the kitchen the way you leave a space you wandered into by accident. He left it the way you leave a space when you’ve gotten what you came for. Unhurried. Satisfied in some small, private way.

I watched him go and thought, “That man came in here on purpose.” I didn’t yet know what the purpose was.

He paused on his way out of the kitchen to exchange a word with Blair. Not a greeting. A word. Brief and specific, exchanged with the practiced ease of two people who had a language between them and chose not to speak it aloud.

Blair didn’t look at him when she replied. Just a slight tilt of her head, a word or two, and then her attention slid back to the conversation she was having with her audience.

I filed it. I didn’t yet know what I was filing it under. But I’d learned a long time ago that the details you couldn’t categorize right away were usually the ones that mattered most later.

“Megan.”

Wyatt appeared in the kitchen doorway. Alone. His expression looked like someone who had just finished a conversation they hadn’t wanted to have and was choosing not to show relief.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said.

“You don’t need to apologize for your sister.”

“No. I need to apologize for walking away.” He crossed to where I stood and leaned against the counter beside me, close enough that his arm pressed against mine. He didn’t look at me right away—just looked at the alley window for a moment, as if gathering his thoughts. “She doesn’t get to do that. I told her that.”

“You don’t have to fight my battles, Wyatt.”

“I know I don’t.” He looked at me then, directly, as he’d been doing since the first Thursday coffee—like looking was a decision he’d made and wasn’t reconsidering. “I want to. There’s a difference.”

The same words he’d used in the classroom. I want to. There’s a difference.