Epilogue #2
And some weekends we drive up to Chatuge. There’s a lot on the north shore we keep circling back to—trees, a slope of clear water, an old oak that would have to stay. I told her once I could do a lake. I’m keeping that one too.
Mr. Hanley still won’t let me pick the peaches.
ANDI
This morning I took Mackenna to the center.
She’s three weeks old. She slept through the entire visit in the carrier on my chest, one small fist pressed against her cheek, entirely unconcerned with the building, the mural, the homework tables, and the door facing the street.
Mrs. Alvarez held her for twenty minutes and didn’t say a word the entire time. She just held her and looked at her with the expression she wears when something is exactly right and doesn’t require comment.
Deja sat across from me at the homework table. She looked at the baby sleeping on Mrs. Alvarez’s shoulder. She looked at me.
“What’s her name again?” she said.
“Mackenna Grace,” I said.
She nodded slowly. Working something out.
“For Mack,” she said.
“For Mack,” I said.
She nodded again.
“That’s good,” she said. “He deserves that.”
Then she went back to her college essay, which she’s been revising for two weeks and which is—I’ve read four drafts—exactly as good as it needs to be.
Better, actually. The kind of writing that comes from someone who has lived the thing they’re describing, hasn’t softened it, and has realized that the not-softening is the point.
I sat at the homework table and looked at the center doing what it does.
Mrs. Alvarez with the baby, Deja with her essay, two kids working at the far table, the afternoon light coming through the windows at the angle it does in August. I thought about what it means to build something in the middle of everything trying to destroy it and have it still be standing.
The door is still there.
Still facing the street.
I think sometimes about what winning cost overall.
Jean, who called too late and died before she could finish her sentence.
The colleague at the bottom of the stairwell.
The man at Grady with no name. The four others whose deaths the federal investigation confirmed, and the ones that may never be confirmed at all.
Maria, who was nine. The girl who disappeared from a family reunification that had no family, whose name is in Daniel’s file but whose face I have never seen.
The girls still inside the system right now who don’t know what I know, who don’t yet have a door to find.
Winning didn’t give any of that back. I knew it wouldn’t.
I just think it’s important to say it out loud, even here, even in this chapter where Mackenna is three weeks old, and the pool is lit at night, and the door is still open.
The accounting matters. The names matter.
You don’t get to call it a victory without also sitting with what victory didn’t include.
I let it all sink in, every last horrible detail we’ve survived, and every beautiful moment we’ve experienced. It all counts. It all matters.
And then I go back inside to my daughter, my husband, and the work that isn’t finished.
The door is still open.
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COMING SEPTEMBER 17!
HOSTILE
A STANDALONE, SECOND-CHANCE, ENEMIES TO LOVERS, FULL-LENGTH ROMANCE
He broke her heart with four words.
Ten years later, she’s coming for his company.
Megan Hale built her career the same way she rebuilt herself after Harvard: quietly, precisely, and without leaving weak points behind.
As the founder of Hale Capital, she’s known for spotting vulnerabilities before anyone else.
And the Aldridge Group, one of New York’s most powerful commercial real estate empires, is finally vulnerable.
What no one knows is that her hostile takeover was never just business.
Wyatt Aldridge was once the boy who knew her coffee order, kissed her in the rain, and made her believe she was loved before humiliating her in front of half of Harvard.
Now he’s the newly appointed CEO of his family’s empire, carrying a legacy that feels more like a debt than an inheritance.
When he discovers someone has been quietly acquiring pieces of his company, the last person he expects to find behind it is Megan.
The woman he never forgot.
The woman who has every reason to hate him.
Some hostile takeovers aren’t about money.
They’re about revenge.
And the one person you were never supposed to love again.
Now the line between revenge and love is disappearing fast.
And when the truth finally comes out, it could cost them everything… the company, their futures, and the second chance they never saw coming.
CHAPTER ONE
MEGAN: PRESENT
Ten years is a long time to wait for anything.
For most people, a decade passes in the blur of ordinary life—marriages, mortgages, children born, teeth lost, and first days of school.
Time moves differently when you spend it sharpening something.
When every decision you make, every dollar you earn, and every relationship you carefully keep at arm’s length serves a single, driving purpose.
Ten years. And today, it begins.
I stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of my corner office on the forty-second floor, watching Manhattan move below me as it always did—indifferent, relentless, alive.
The city had no idea what was happening inside this building right now.
It didn’t care. That was one of the things I loved most about New York.
It never asked where you came from, whose daughter you were, or which side of the iron gate you grew up on. It only asked what you could do.
I could do this.
My phone buzzed on my desk. The alert I’d set up three weeks ago—the one that read Aldridge Commercial—opening bell. His name wasn’t in it. It didn’t need to be.
Wyatt Spencer Aldridge.
I hadn’t said it out loud in ten years. I didn’t say it now. But it moved through me the way it always had when I let it—not like a thought, more like a tide. Something that arrived with its own pull and momentum and passed through whether you wanted it to or not.
I pressed two fingers against the cool glass and waited for it to pass.
It passed.
It always passed.
I’d made sure of that.
“The market opens in four minutes.” My assistant, Dana, appeared in the doorway, her tablet clutched to her chest and her expression carefully neutral.
She’d worked for me long enough to know that when I stood at that window before the bell, I didn’t want conversation.
I wanted confirmation. “Charlie says everything is in position.”
“Tell him to hold until I call.”
She disappeared without another word.
I turned back to the window. Forty-two floors below, yellow cabs muscled each other for position, and a food cart steamed in the October morning air, and a thousand people moved through their Thursday with no idea the world was about to shift.
Their world, anyway. The small, gilded, generations-deep world of Aldridge Commercial Real Estate—the company that bore the name of the family that had shaped my entire life without ever once considering my existence.
That was about to change.
I’d set the alert myself the same day I confirmed that Wyatt Spencer Aldridge had officially assumed control of the company his father had built.
The company that his grandfather built before that.
The company that had absorbed the labor of people like my parents and then discarded them without so much as a reference letter when they’d outlived their usefulness.
I watched the second hand on the clock mounted above my bookshelf.
A gift I’d bought myself the day I passed my Series 7 exam, still twenty-three and hungrier than I’d ever been in my life.
I remembered standing in the store, turning it over in my hands, thinking about all the minutes that had passed since the morning everything fell apart.
How many of them I’d spent in bed, unable to move.
How many I’d spent staring at nothing. How many I’d spent making a promise to myself that got me out of bed and kept me there.
All those minutes had been building toward this one.
“Charlie.” I’d dialed before I realized I’d reached for the phone. “It’s time. Start buying.”
The thing about a hostile takeover is that the most elegant ones look, at first, like nothing at all.
There’s no announcement. No dramatic entrance.
No villain monologue—though I’d be lying if I said the thought hadn’t crossed my mind on more than one occasion.
The best ones are quiet. Methodical. A share here, a share there, acquisitions spread across shell companies and subsidiary accounts until one day the board looks up from their mahogany table and realizes someone has been redecorating their offices while they were busy congratulating themselves on their own brilliance.
That was the plan I’d spent six years executing. If all went according to plan, Wyatt Aldridge wouldn’t know my name was attached to any of it until it was far too late to stop me.
I’d made peace with the fact that what I was doing wasn’t entirely legal in its earliest stages.
Peace might be overly generous—I’d made a calculated decision and accepted the risk, as I had with every major decision I’d made since I was eighteen.
Carefully. Coldly. With my eyes open and my heart locked behind the kind of wall that takes years of practice to build properly.
I was very good at building walls.
By the time I settled into the chair behind my desk and pulled up the live trading screen, the first acquisitions were already in motion. I watched the numbers with the same focused detachment I brought to every transaction, except this one made my pulse do something it hadn’t done in a long time.
It made it slow down.