Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
MEGAN: THE PAST
Ihad known Wyatt Aldridge my whole life, in the distant, regulated way the housekeeper’s daughter knows the children of the house—across hedges, across kitchens, across the carefulness my mother enforced and his sister policed.
But the first time I saw him—saw him the way the rest of my life would insist on seeing him—I was sixteen years old, and he was parallel-parking a black truck in the student lot like he’d been doing it his whole life.
Which he probably had. That was the thing about the Aldridge Manor crowd—they arrived at competence early, because competence was something their parents arranged for them as other parents arranged dentist appointments.
Driving lessons at fifteen, ski trips over spring break, the easy physical confidence of people who had never once had to wonder whether they belonged somewhere before they walked in.
I was sitting on the hood of Christine’s car, eating a sandwich because the cafeteria was too loud and I preferred the parking lot. At that moment, I had about zero opinions about Wyatt Aldridge.
Then he got out of the truck.
Oh, I thought, which was not a sophisticated response but was the honest one.
He was tall—I registered that first, then the ease with which he moved, unhurried, as if he had never needed to hurry because the world generally waited for him. Blond. Blue-eyed. The kind of face that belonged on something people looked at on purpose.
He walked across the lot toward the building, slinging his backpack over one shoulder and keeping his eyes on his phone. I watched him in the usual detached, clinical manner—observing from a safe distance without letting the observation turn into anything more.
Christine noticed me noticing.
“Don’t,” she said, without looking up from her own sandwich.
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever you’re doing with your face right now.
” She did look up then, following my gaze to where Wyatt had almost reached the entrance.
“That’s Wyatt Aldridge. His family owns half of Savannah, and Blair Aldridge is his twin sister, so his social circle is a minefield you do not want to step into. ”
None of it was news. Christine had held my coat through every round with Blair since we were six years old. The recitation was a ritual—a warning label read aloud over something we both already knew was poison.
“I was just looking.”
“You were looking the way you look at things you want,” Christine said. “Which is different.”
I picked up my sandwich, took a deliberate bite, and looked into the middle distance rather than at the entrance where Wyatt had just disappeared.
“I don’t want anything,” I said.
Christine made the sound she makes when she disagrees with something and has decided not to argue about it.
She was right, of course. She was usually right about the things I didn’t want to examine.
I had been watching Wyatt Aldridge from across that parking lot since the first week of my sophomore year—his junior year, one class and one entire world ahead of mine—through every passing moment in the hallway where our paths crossed without ever connecting, right up until June, when his class graduated from the building and left mine behind.
Two years, spent with the focused, disciplined attention of someone who had decided the distance was permanent and accepted it.
The distance was what it was. His world and mine didn’t intersect. That was simply the geography of the life I’d been born into, and I had made my peace with it the way you make your peace with the tide.
You didn’t fight it. You learned the tables and planned your crossings.
I planned my crossings every day for two years.
For two years, the tide kept to its tables.
It broke exactly once—a knock on a door, a Tuesday night at the very end of everything—and I filed that night away so deep it would take ten years and my mother to make me open the drawer again.
But in the hallways, in the parking lot, day after day: the distance was law.
The distance also had an enforcer.
I had been managing Blair Aldridge since I started first grade—the ruined homework, the birthday parties I learned about afterward, the small daily tariffs levied on the housekeeper’s daughter for existing too near the family name—and I had learned the central rule for surviving her early years: never let Blair see you want something.
Wanting, when Blair could see it, was how you lost things.
So I admired her brother the only safe way there was.
Silently. From across a parking lot. With my face closed.
It took me years to realize that Blair’s tariffs weren’t truly about cottages, my mother’s aprons, or which side of the hedges I slept on.
Many staff had daughters, but Blair never singled them out.
She only targeted me because she saw what the adults hadn’t yet acknowledged: I resembled someone who could sit at their tables, and I thought more quickly than most of those around me.
Given an opportunity, I would outshine her.
Blair never kept me away for being beneath her.
She excluded me because I was the one thing her calculations couldn’t accept—a rival.
A year later, after graduating from high school, I arrived at Harvard with two suitcases, a full academic scholarship, and the absolute certainty that I was done.
Done with Savannah. Done with the suffocating weight of a last name that meant nothing beyond the city limits of a coastal Georgia town most people had only heard of because of a movie about a man and a box of chocolates.
Done with the invisible fence that had kept my family on one side and the Aldridge Manor families on the other for three generations.
Done with being the girl who watched from afar as people born into the right surname collected their birthright as if it were no more than picking up dry cleaning.
Done with all of it.
I told myself that on the morning I loaded my two suitcases into my aunt’s car, I didn’t look back at the house we’d been staying in since everything fell apart.
I told myself that on the drive to the airport.
I told myself that on the plane, in the cab from Logan, and for every minute of the first week of orientation, as I studied my schedule, memorized the campus map, and introduced myself to my roommate with a smile that didn’t reach my eyes because I was still learning how to make it look like it did.
Done. The word had become a kind of prayer. A mantra. The thing I repeated in the dark when the grief tried to pull me back under.
It almost worked.
Orientation week at Harvard was not designed for people like me.
That wasn’t a complaint—it was an observation, the same detached, clear-eyed kind I’d made my whole life.
The kind you learn to make when you grow up watching people who have everything take it entirely for granted.
The auditorium where they held the welcome address seated five hundred incoming students, and I sat near the back with my notebook open and my pen uncapped, watching the room fill with a familiar, easy confidence I recognized at once.
Old money didn’t announce itself. That was what people who’d never been around it didn’t understand.
It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t loud. It was the girl three rows ahead of me, in a cashmere sweater so understated it had probably cost more than my mother’s monthly salary, laughing at something her friend said, with the total physical relaxation of someone who had never once in her life worried about a bill.
It was the guy beside her, who sat like he owned the chair, not because he was arrogant—he probably wasn’t, not on the surface—but because nothing in his entire experience had ever suggested the chair might not want him.
I sat the way I’d always sat. Back straight. Eyes forward. Pen ready.
Taking notes has been my survival mechanism since I was six.
When you’re constantly working, preparing, and staying ahead of what’s coming, there’s less room for feelings to linger at the edges.
It reduces the risk of overlooking things and helps avoid the kind of grief that isn’t neatly formed and can’t be addressed directly.
That grief presses in from all directions, seeking any crack it can find.
I didn’t leave cracks.
The dean was midway through his welcome address when the auditorium’s back doors opened.
Late arrivals weren’t unusual—I’d watched three other students slip in since the address began, each scanning the room for an open seat with the sheepish hurry of someone who knew they should have been there sooner.
This one didn’t look sheepish.
He stood in the doorway for just a moment—long enough for my treacherous eyes to find him as they always had, as if some frequency in my body were permanently tuned to his—and then he moved down the far aisle with the easy, unhurried stride of a man who had never once believed he was out of place.
The air left my lungs so completely and so suddenly that the girl sitting beside me glanced over.
No. The word detonated somewhere in my chest. No, absolutely not. That is not possible.
Wyatt Spencer Aldridge was supposed to be at his father’s alma mater.
He was supposed to be several states away, locked into a plan made for him before he was old enough to have a say in it.
He was supposed to be a chapter of my life that I had closed, locked, and buried somewhere in the Georgia red clay, along with everything else I’d left behind.
He was not supposed to be here.
He found an empty seat four rows ahead of me and two sections to the left.
He dropped into it with the unselfconscious ease that made me irrationally furious, set a leather portfolio on his knee, and turned his attention to the dean as if this were simply the next item on his list and he were fully prepared to give it his complete focus.
He didn’t look around the room.
He didn’t see me.
I told myself that was a relief.
The dean’s voice continued, rolling through statistics on the incoming class, Harvard’s legacy, and the responsibility that came with a degree from this institution.
I heard none of it. My pen had stopped moving without my permission, and I stared at the back of Wyatt Aldridge’s blond head with the intensity that came from years of practice in looking at someone while pretending you weren’t.
He was different.
That observation arrived with unwelcome clarity.
The boy from that single Tuesday night—the one who’d knocked on my front door after nine o’clock, with his hands shoved in his pockets and his nerves written all over his face—had been beautiful and hadn’t entirely known it yet.
The person sitting four rows ahead of me was something else.
Broader through the shoulders. Stiller. He’d grown into himself over the year since I’d last seen him, and the result was deeply unfair.
I looked back down at my notebook.
Megan. I could practically hear Christine’s voice in my ear, the same fond exasperation she’d been deploying at me for years. Stop staring at him before they see you.
There was no Christine here. No one here knew my name, my history, or the weight of everything I’d lost. That was supposed to be the point. That was supposed to be the freedom.
I pressed my pen to the paper and wrote the date at the top of the page with the careful precision of someone reasserting control over the only thing they could control.
September. Harvard University. First day.
Start over.
The welcome address ended, and the auditorium filled with the sound of five hundred students rising and gathering their things.
I took my time, capping my pen and sliding my notebook into my bag with deliberate slowness, letting the crowd thin before I stood.
It was a habit I’d developed—giving myself a few extra seconds before entering any space where I’d have to navigate people. A buffer. A breath.
When I finally stood and turned toward the aisle, he was there.
Not approaching. Not even looking in my direction, not yet.
He was three feet away, caught in the same slow-moving current of students funneling toward the exit, his leather portfolio under one arm and his eyes on his phone.
And then, with the terrible timing my life had apparently decided was its signature move, he looked up.
Our eyes met.
His recognition appeared gradually—first as surprise, clear and unguarded, typical when the mind faces the unexpected.
Then his expression grew more complex, a feeling I hesitated to name because doing so would admit I had been watching for it.
Some part of me had been noting Wyatt Aldridge’s expressions since I was seventeen and had never truly stopped.
The crowd moved around us. Someone bumped into my shoulder as they passed by and said a quick “sorry” without slowing down. Neither of us moved.
“Megan,” he said softly. Not a question, just my name, spoken in his voice and resting between us like something he’d been carrying for a long time and finally released.
Every wall I’d built over the fourteen months since a Tuesday night on my mother’s porch—every carefully constructed, obsessively reinforced, load-bearing wall—held.
Barely.
“Wyatt.” My voice came out exactly as I needed it to.
Level. Calm. The voice of a woman who had run into an old acquaintance and was mildly surprised and entirely unaffected.
A small miracle, given that my heart was doing something completely unacceptable behind my ribs. “I didn’t know you were at Harvard.”
“I transferred.” Something shifted behind his eyes. “Last minute.”
Last minute. I filed that away without letting it show on my face. “Well.” I adjusted the shoulder strap on my bag. “Good luck with the semester.”
I stepped around him and joined the stream of students heading toward the exit, my pulse loud in my ears, my spine straight as a blade, every instinct screaming at me not to look back.
I didn’t look back.
But I felt him watching me until I walked out the door.