Page 74 of Hostile

Almost.

“Don’t respond yet,” I said. “I need twenty-four hours.”

“The request has a forty-eight-hour window. That’s fine.” The line fell silent for a moment. “Megan. Whatever you’re planning for tonight⁠—”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

I hung up before he could finish the sentence.

The courier packet from Charlie arrived at ten to five with the disclosure-response exhibits, tabbed and ordered, ready for attorney review the morning. Charlie’s work product bore a signature—tabs equidistant, summary page ruthless—and I went through it with the mechanical satisfaction of watching a plan render itself on paper.

At the back of the packet, behind the last tab, was a folder I hadn’t asked for.

Plain manila. A yellow sticky note in Charlie’s block capitals: YOU DIDN’T REQUEST THIS. PULLED IT ANYWAY. IN CASE.

I opened it. The first line of the first page read: William T. Brown, 29, currently residing in Stamford, Connecticut, where he is employed as⁠—

I closed the folder.

Not because it hurt. That was the thing I noticed, standing there with the folder shut under my flat hand: it didn’t hurt. Ten years ago, the name had been a live wire. Five years ago, I’d have read every page twice and cross-referenced the footnotes. Now it sat under my hand with all the charge of a utilities bill.

Billy Brown had been an instrument. A grudge with access. The architecture had never been his—he couldn’t have designed a birdhouse—and the person who had designed it was going to answer for it in a boardroom, in daylight, in front of the institution she’d spent eight years trying to inherit.

Still, information was capital. I had built a firm on the principle of keeping what you might need where you could find it. I put the folder in the bottom drawer, where it came to rest on top of the velvet pouch. I closed the drawer and picked up my coat.

I made it as far as the door.

I stopped there, hand on the light switch, coat draped over my arm, and looked back across the office toward the desk. The drawer was closed. I knew exactly how they were lying in there together. Ten years of one thing, with the other thing filed on top of it in the dark, as if that were an acceptable filing system.

I walked back. Opened the drawer. Took out the folder, left the pouch where it was, and fed Billy Brown to the shredder, one page at a time, standing over it as the machine did its brief, efficient violence, until the last unread page was confetti in the basket.

I never found out what Billy Brown does in Stamford, Connecticut.

In ten years of keeping meticulous records, it is the only file I destroyed unread, and the only one I have never missed.

Wyatt called my cell and asked me to dinner at the same place where we shared fish. The place where the tables are far enough apart to have a conversation without sharing it with the people at the next table. When I agreed to meet him, my voice was level and sure, with no hint of nerves or uncertainty.

My heart, on the other hand, was beating wildly in my chest.

I left the office at five-thirty, which was two hours earlier than usual, and which Dana noted with a carefully neutral expression that told me she was filing it under significant and would not ask about it.

I returned home, took a shower, and stood in my closet for less time than I had before the gala. I was getting faster at this, which could mean progress or that I’d stopped ignoring that choices matter. I picked the dark green dress I bought in October but never wore because it wasn’t armor or a performance but something I genuinely liked—all I needed for tonight.

I looked at myself in the mirror for a moment.

What are you doing? I thought.

I know what I’m doing, I thought back.

He stood up when I entered, not as a show but instinctively—simply a habitual reflex that remained constant regardless of the situation.

I sat down. He sat down. The waiter appeared, and I ordered the same tea I’d been ordering in quiet restaurants since Cambridge. Wyatt ordered black coffee. We were briefly, startlingly, exactly who we’d always been in these spaces—two people at a corner table who talked about ideas, meant everything they said, and were consistently late to whatever came after.

“The disclosure request arrived at four-seventeen,” I said.

“I know. Marcus called me.” His voice was steady. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was moving today.”

“You couldn’t have.” I wrapped both hands around my tea. “She’s good. She moved before either of us had established a counter-narrative.” I paused. “That’s what this dinner needs to be, at least in part. A counter-narrative.”