Page 99 of Hostile

The parking lot minutes. The auditorium minutes. The Thursday coffee minutes. The library silence minutes. The rain-outside-the-dorm minutes. The ten years of Manhattan minutes, forty-two floors up, building something extraordinary from the wreckage of a misunderstanding that had taken a decade, a full investigation, a hostile takeover, and a silver arrow in a velvet pouch to finally, fully correct it.

All those minutes.

Pointing here.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

I looked at him, recalling the face I’ve been analyzing since I was sixteen in a parking lot in Savannah, and I’ve never stopped.

“True north,” I said.

His smile was slow and quiet and nothing like the social version. The real one. Just for me.

“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

The city moved around us. The light faded as evening approached. Neither of us went anywhere.

Some things, it turned out, were worth the wait.

EPILOGUE

MEGAN

Six months after the board meeting, the Hale Foundation awarded its first scholarships named after someone other than my father.

Thirteen of them. One for each of the twelve annual recipients, plus a new annual award for excellence in financial analysis, named for a Harvard professor who had stood at a board in 1994 and written three words that changed the way at least one student thought about everything.

Offer. Acceptance. Consideration.

I didn’t tell Wyatt about the Harrigan award until the ceremony. He sat beside me in the front row of the small conference room where we held the annual luncheon. When the name was announced, I watched his face do that thing it did when something landed somewhere real. I filed it under things worth doing and moved on before he could see me watching.

He saw me anyway.

He always did.

The Charleston project broke ground in April.

I was there—board member, active investor, the woman with approximately forty-seven opinions about the community consultation process that had preceded the groundbreaking, and I had made all forty-seven known through the appropriate channels over the preceding three months. The development team had stopped flinching when my name appeared on the meeting agenda and had, cautiously, begun treating my presence as an asset rather than a complication.

I considered that a victory.

Wyatt stood beside me at the groundbreaking, wearing a hard hat that didn’t suit him and a smile that did. As the ceremonial first shovel bit into the Charleston ground, he leaned over and said quietly, “Forty-seven opinions and counting.”

“Forty-eight,” I said. “I have thoughts about the community liaison structure.”

His quiet laugh in my ear.

Christine came to New York in March.

She arrived with the easy confidence of someone who had made this trip for years and intended to keep making it. She took one look at Wyatt across my apartment and said to me in a voice pitched for the kitchen, not carrying into the living room: “All right. I can see why.”

“You could have told me,” I said. “When you found him at Harvard. You could have called me.”

She looked at me steadily. “You weren’t ready.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Megan.” Her voice was the same one she’d used since first grade, when I did something she thought was wrong and was going to tell me so, regardless of how I felt. “You could barely get out of bed. You were barely eating. You had just lost—” She stopped. “You needed to build something that was yours first. I made a judgment call.”