Page 60 of Hostile

But I didn't stop. I hit him until my hands stopped working.

His father came out onto the porch sometime during the fight. I saw him there between punches, one hand wrapped around the porch post, watching his son get beaten bloody on his own front lawn.

He never took a single step toward us.

When it was over, Billy was curled on his side in the grass, coughing blood into the dirt. I stood over him, both hands hanging useless at my sides, my knuckles split to the bone, blood running down my fingers and dripping into the grass. I was breathing as if I were the one who'd been beaten.

Mr. Brown finally came down the steps.

He walked past me and stopped beside his son. Billy looked up at him with one eye, blood covering his mouth and chin.

His father stared at him for a long moment.

Then he asked him a single question. “Did you do it?”

“Of course I did it.” Billy’s voice was weak, but determination underpinned his words.

“Why?” The word didn’t come out as a question. It was a demand, punctuated by the deep bass of his tone.

And Billy, flat on his back on his own lawn, laughed through a mouthful of blood and said, “Because she never looked at me. Not once. All those months—not once. And then she looked at him.” He pointed at me with two fingers, almost casually. “You want to hurt somebody, you don’t hit them. You hit the thing they love.”

The police arrived four minutes later. Nobody on that lawn said one word about my hands.

The Browns’ attorneys and my father’s attorneys did what attorneys for families like ours do. It never made the papers. It barely touched the campus. By the time Megan walked back onto that quad with her spine straight and her armor welded shut, the official record was already being vacuumed clean behind her—which meant the only version she would ever carry was the one she’d heard in a hallway, in four words, from me.

Blair came to my apartment that night with red eyes and a container of soup.

I want that hour on the record, too, exactly as it happened, because I’ve replayed it more than any other hour of my life. My sister sat on my couch and cried. Real tears—I’ve spent ten years deciding whether they were real, and the honest answer is that Blair’s tears are always real. What varies is what they’re for. She said she hadn’t known. She said Billy had come by Sunday night, and she’d snuck him in to avoid a lecture. He’d left her room for a while, and she’d thought he was in the bathroom. She said the word sorry more times in twenty minutes than in the previous nineteen years combined. She asked me to forgive her.

And I did. I need to own that. I forgave her on the spot, completely, with relief—because the alternative was that my sister had aimed all of it at me, and there was no version of my life yet built that could hold that.

Then she dried her eyes, went into my kitchen, and while the soup heated, she laid it out for me. Calmly. Gently. In the cold, precise way she has when she does you a favor you never asked for.

“You have to let her go, Wyatt.”

I said something. I don’t remember what.

“Think it through,” she said. “In every room the two of you enter together for the rest of your lives, someone will have seen that video. You’re not her boyfriend anymore. You’re the caption. You’re the reminder. She has a scholarship, a future, and a name nobody knows yet. If she’s smart—and she is the smartest person either of us has ever met—she will bury this year so deep it never surfaces. She cannot do that with you standing next to her.” She stirred the soup and tapped the spoon twice on the pot’s rim, precise as a metronome. “Stories starve when you stop feeding them, Wyatt. You are the food. If you love her the way you keep saying you do, you’ll starve it.”

Here is what I have learned in ten years of running that speech through my hands: every sentence of it was true. That is what made it work. My sister has never needed to lie to get an outcome. She arranges true facts in the order that serves her and lets you draw the conclusion yourself, so that afterward you will swear the conclusion was your own.

By the time my father delivered the sentence a few days later, her arithmetic had colonized the hotel suite as well. He had stopped talking about the investigation and begun discussing optics, containment, and a fresh start. Much later—years too late to do me any good—I would wonder how much of my father’s reasoning arrived pre-assembled and in whose hands.

“You’ll start at my school in September,” he said. “You’ll finish what you started somewhere the name still means what your grandfather built it to mean.” He paused—the only crack I saw in him all that month. “It’s a good school, son. It was good to me.”

I didn’t fight him.

That is the part I would take back first if trades were available. Not the hallway—the hallway was four words, five seconds, and a nineteen-year-old’s animal panic. This was a decision made over days, with a clear head. I didn’t fight him because Blair’s arithmetic had already closed the case: me gone meant Megan free. I told myself that leaving was the last thing I had left to give her.

Some of that was even true. That is also what made it work.

They took me home to Savannah while the attorneys wrapped up the loose ends. Three weeks after the hallway incident, I flew back alone to close up the apartment and drive my car south.

I parked on her street at four in the afternoon, with everything I owned in boxes in the back seat and her Business Law textbook riding up front because I hadn’t been able to seal it into any of the boxes. Page one hundred forty-one. Three lines of her handwriting in the margin, from an October afternoon when she’d looked at my notes like they personally offended her and had rebuilt how I think in about ninety seconds. The last line: Your eye should move the way your brain does.

I sat there for twenty minutes with my hand on the door handle.

I have given those twenty minutes to exactly two people in ten years, and both times I made them sound cleaner than they were—a man weighing her peace against his own need and choosing her peace. There was some of that. But beneath the noble arithmetic was a nineteen-year-old staring at a door, knowing exactly what would stand on the other side when it opened: the person who said four words in a hallway. The person who didn’t follow fast enough. The person whose family, whose orbit, whose existence had put a camera in a bedroom wall. She would open that door and see all of it wearing my face, and I could not make myself be the thing she saw.