Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
MEGAN: THE PAST
The party was in a brownstone three blocks off campus, and I almost didn’t go.
That was the thing I thought about later—how close I came to staying in my dorm room with my economics textbook and a lukewarm cup of tea, and how differently everything might have looked if I had.
Not better, necessarily. Not worse. Just different.
The kind of counterfactual that has no productive answer, and that I therefore spent years training myself not to pursue.
I went because Wyatt asked me to, because I was eighteen years old and eight weeks into allowing myself to want things again, and because I was tired—genuinely, bone-deep tired—of treating every invitation like a threat assessment.
It’s just a party, Megan. I’d told myself that as I changed out of my study clothes and into the dark jeans and the black cashmere sweater Christine had talked me into buying at the end of August. Two hours. You can do anything for two hours.
In fact, I had done far harder things than attending a party.
I had watched my father lose eleven years of work because of a missing bottle of bourbon and start over without a reference letter.
I had sat across from a financial aid officer at eighteen and methodically argued that my scholarship should cover the full cost of attendance.
I had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, knowing no one, with two suitcases and the deliberate decision to start over from nothing.
A party in a brownstone full of business school students was not going to be the thing that undid me.
I found Wyatt near the kitchen, talking to a group of people I recognized from our Business Law section.
He saw me the moment I walked through the door—I’d noticed he always did.
He watched the entrance whenever he expected me and never let me cross a threshold without acknowledging it.
That was either a deeply ingrained habit or something more deliberate.
I hadn’t decided what to do with it yet.
He crossed the room without excusing himself from the conversation and handed me a bottle of sparkling water he’d clearly been holding in anticipation.
“You came.”
“I said I would.”
“You say a lot of things.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Sometimes you mean them.”
“I always mean what I say. I’m selective about what I say.”
He smiled at that—the quiet one, the real one, not the social version—and fell into step beside me as I moved deeper into the party.
We’d been doing this for six weeks. The Thursday coffees, which had stretched past an hour in defiance of my own stated boundary every single time.
The walks back from class that somehow covered twice the necessary distance.
The habit he’d developed of finding me in the library, sitting across from me without speaking, and working in the same focused silence I’d established alone, as though silence were something you could share if both people were fluent in it.
I hadn’t named what it was. Naming things made them real, and real things could be lost.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said. “Caldwell—he’s pursuing his MBA and knows more about derivative markets than anyone I’ve ever talked to. I think you two will—”
“Wyatt.”
The voice came from behind us, and I sensed him still beside me for a moment—subtle and hidden from afar, yet close enough for me to detect. That quiet stillness that develops when someone has spent years conditioning themselves to listen for a particular sound.
I turned around.
Blair Aldridge looked exactly like her brother, as fraternal twins sometimes do—same coloring, same structure, same blond hair and pale Aldridge blue eyes—and absolutely nothing like him in any way that mattered.
Where Wyatt’s face in repose was simply still, Blair’s was arranged, every expression precisely calibrated.
She wore a cream-colored blazer over a silk blouse that probably cost more than my monthly grocery budget, and she looked at me with the exact same expression she’d been perfecting since we were six years old.
Polite contempt. The kind that required an audience to fully appreciate.
She had one. Three girls stood behind her, drinks in hand, their expressions interested, watching the way people watch something they’ve been told to watch.
“Blair.” Wyatt’s voice had gone careful. “I didn’t know you were going to be here.”
“Tatum invited me.” She gestured vaguely behind her without breaking eye contact with me.
“It’s been ages since I’ve seen you. You don’t call.
” Her tone carried the practiced injury of someone who knew exactly which notes to play and in what order.
Then, as though noticing me for the first time despite having looked directly at me for the past ten seconds, she said, “And you brought company.”
“You remember Megan,” Wyatt said. Not a question. Flat and deliberate.
“Of course.” Blair’s smile arrived and never reached her eyes. “Megan Hale. My God, you haven’t changed at all. Still very—” she paused, giving my outfit a slow, thorough once-over, then looked back up with an inspection-like look—”natural.”
Behind her, one of her girls smiled into her drink.
Natural. In Blair’s vocabulary, it meant the same thing it always had—insufficient. She’d been finding new containers for that word since we were children, and she’d perfected the art of making it sound like a compliment in front of anyone who might be watching.
I looked at her with the expression I’d developed over years of exactly this—not cool, not cold, not the flushed and flustered reaction she was shopping for, but something more like indifference worn so comfortably it almost passed for warmth. “Blair. You look exactly the same.”
It wasn’t a compliment. She knew it wasn’t a compliment. The girls behind her didn’t know it wasn’t a compliment, which was the point.
“What brings you to Harvard, of all places? Wyatt mentioned you were here, but I have to say I was surprised.” Her smile didn’t falter. “A long way from Savannah.”
“Full academic scholarship,” I said with a pleasant tone. “I imagine that’s how most people get here.”
Wyatt made a sound beside me that he converted, smoothly, into a cough.
Blair’s smile thinned by about two millimeters.
“Of course.” Blair’s expression didn’t change.
“I only hope the transition hasn’t been too taxing.
Acclimating to changes of this scale can be…
consuming. It’s easy to lose perspective when something becomes personal.
” A brief, perfectly timed pause. “I say that with genuine concern, Megan. I’ve always thought you were exceptionally capable.
I’d hate to see that clouded by old history. ”
She reached out and touched Wyatt’s arm with the easy familiarity of someone reminding the room of a prior claim.
“Wyatt, I need to borrow you for just a moment. Family thing.” Her eyes flicked back to me with the same practiced pleasantness.
“You don’t mind, do you, Megan? I’m sure you can find someone to talk to. ”
The implication was so precisely constructed—you are alone here, you don’t belong here, and I am removing the one person who vouches for your presence—that I almost had to admire the engineering of it.
Almost.
“Not at all,” I said pleasantly. “Take your time.”
I turned away from them both before Wyatt could say anything and headed toward the kitchen, keeping my pace unhurried and my spine perfectly straight.
Behind me, I heard the low murmur of Blair’s voice, not the words, just the tone—the musical lilt of someone accustomed to getting the last word by simply continuing to speak after the other person has stopped listening.
In the kitchen, I found a spot at the counter by a window that looked out onto the back alley and stood there with my sparkling water and my composed expression, my pulse doing something considerably less composed beneath it.
Natural.
I took a slow breath. Held it. Let it out.
It was fine. This was fine. Blair Aldridge was predictable—I had been watching her tactics since I was in first grade, and she hadn’t shown me anything new.
I didn’t need Wyatt’s help; I was managing it on my own.
I’ve always managed it, with or without anyone beside me.
What was pressing in my chest now wasn’t that pattern but something heavier and sharper.
What sat in my chest right now was the look on Wyatt’s face when she’d said it was a family thing.
The way he’d gone with her. The familiar, practiced compliance of someone who had been choosing between two things for a long time, wearing the groove of that choice so deep it barely registered as a choice anymore.
I knew that groove. I’d watched it from across a parking lot for years. I was still watching it, apparently.
I was still standing at the counter when I noticed Blair watching me from the living room doorway.
Not the way you watch someone at a party—casually, incidentally, with the ambient awareness of a crowded room.
This was specific. Focused. The way you watch something you’ve been thinking about since before you arrived.
She wasn’t looking at me with contempt. That was what made it land differently than usual. The contempt I could catalog, manage, and file away. This was something cooler, more considered.
She looked away when she saw me notice.
I filed that too, under the same heading as the word she’d exchanged with Billy Brown, in the section for things I can’t categorize yet.
Later, I told myself. Think about it later.
But the feeling stayed. The faint, specific chill of being assessed by someone who has already decided something and is simply waiting for the right moment to act on it.
“Hey.” A voice beside me—male, unfamiliar, carrying the brand of casual confidence that came from being the kind of person who introduced himself to women standing alone at parties. “You look like you’re doing math.”
I turned. I didn’t recognize him—older than most of the people here, dark-haired, with an easy smile and the kind of practiced approachability that suggested he’d used it successfully before.
He was wearing a Harvard Law sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed to the elbows and held a beer loosely in one hand.
“I usually am,” I said.
He laughed. “Billy Brown. Second year law.” He extended his hand.
I shook it. “Megan Hale. First year business.”
“Hale.” He repeated my name the way certain people did—turning it over slightly, filing it away. “You know Wyatt Aldridge?”
“We have a class together.”
He nodded, his eyes flicking briefly toward the living room before returning to me with the easy smile still in place. “Good guy. I’ve known him since I was in high school.” He tilted his beer bottle in a small gesture. “Can I get you something? Something with actual content?”
“I’m fine with this, thanks.”
He stayed for a few minutes—easy, surface-level conversation, the kind that required nothing and gave nothing.
But he didn’t leave the kitchen the way you leave a space you wandered into by accident.
He left it the way you leave a space when you’ve gotten what you came for.
Unhurried. Satisfied in some small, private way.
I watched him go and thought, “That man came in here on purpose.” I didn’t yet know what the purpose was.
He paused on his way out of the kitchen to exchange a word with Blair. Not a greeting. A word. Brief and specific, exchanged with the practiced ease of two people who had a language between them and chose not to speak it aloud.
Blair didn’t look at him when she replied. Just a slight tilt of her head, a word or two, and then her attention slid back to the conversation she was having with her audience.
I filed it. I didn’t yet know what I was filing it under. But I’d learned a long time ago that the details you couldn’t categorize right away were usually the ones that mattered most later.
“Megan.”
Wyatt appeared in the kitchen doorway. Alone. His expression looked like someone who had just finished a conversation they hadn’t wanted to have and was choosing not to show relief.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said.
“You don’t need to apologize for your sister.”
“No. I need to apologize for walking away.” He crossed to where I stood and leaned against the counter beside me, close enough that his arm pressed against mine.
He didn’t look at me right away—just looked at the alley window for a moment, as if gathering his thoughts.
“She doesn’t get to do that. I told her that. ”
“You don’t have to fight my battles, Wyatt.”
“I know I don’t.” He looked at me then, directly, as he’d been doing since the first Thursday coffee—like looking was a decision he’d made and wasn’t reconsidering. “I want to. There’s a difference.”
The same words he’d used in the classroom. I want to. There’s a difference.
I looked at him for a long moment. At his earnestness, which had been the most disarming thing about him from the beginning—this man who had been handed every conceivable advantage and had somehow remained in possession of a sincerity so genuine it almost made me angry, because sincerity that real had no business existing under a name like Aldridge.
“She was talking to Billy Brown,” I said. “Before that. They seemed to know each other.”
Something shifted across his expression. Too fast to read clearly. “They’ve crossed paths. Through me.” His jaw shifted slightly. “Billy’s—” He stopped. “He’s complicated.”
“Most people are.”
“Not the way Billy is.” He said it quietly, more to himself than to me, and then seemed to set it aside. “Are you ready to leave? I’m ready to go.”
I looked at him for another moment, at the detail I’d filed—Blair and Billy Brown, a word exchanged, eyes averted—and at the man beside me who’d come back to the kitchen to find me rather than stay where the party was.
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We left without saying goodbye to anyone, which should have felt like an exit but felt more like a beginning. He kept his hand at the small of my back as we stepped out onto the sidewalk, just a light pressure through the cashmere, and I let him.
Some things, I was learning, were harder to guard against than others.