Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MEGAN: PRESENT
The Aldridge board meeting was on a Thursday, and I arrived late on purpose, as planned.
Not rude late. Strategic late. The kind when everyone is already seated, the room has settled into its pre-meeting rhythm, and then the door opens and the energy shifts.
I’d learned that move in my first year on Wall Street from a woman who ran a hedge fund from a Tribeca loft and wore the same expression at every meeting—the one that said I already know how this ends.
I’d been practicing it ever since.
Charlie was already inside, seated two chairs down from the chairman. The rest of the board—seven men of a certain age, the kind who had sat in rooms like this since before I was born—looked up as I walked in, their collective expression one of deciding whether to be impressed or unsettled.
Both worked for me.
Naturally, the only seat left at the table was the one to Wyatt’s right.
I took it without breaking stride, set my portfolio on the table, and smiled at the chairman, with the full radiant setting dialed up. “Good morning, gentlemen. I apologize for keeping you waiting.”
“Not at all, Miss Hale.” The chairman rose to shake my hand—elderly, kind-eyed, the sort of man who had been doing this long enough to find most things mildly amusing. “We’re glad you could join us.”
I didn’t look at Wyatt. But I felt him looking at me.
The meeting proceeded as these things always did—formal, deliberate, the careful language of people discussing large sums of money in polite company.
The chairman laid out the current state of the Aldridge Group’s share structure, acknowledged the unnamed investor’s position, which had been quietly growing for weeks, and then turned the floor over to Marcus Webb to walk through the financial implications.
I sat with my hands folded over the portfolio and listened with the focused attention of someone hearing information they already knew, waiting to see how accurately it had been summarized.
Reasonably accurately, as it turned out. Marcus was good.
“Miss Hale.” The chairman turned to me after Marcus finished. “Given the size of your current position, the board felt it was important to open a direct dialogue. We’d like to understand your intentions regarding Aldridge Commercial.”
Every head at the table turned toward me.
Every head except one, which was already turned and had been since I sat down.
“Of course,” I said pleasantly. “My intentions are straightforward. Hale Capital has been building a position in Aldridge Commercial because we believe in the portfolio’s long-term value. We intend to be active, engaged investors.”
Active and engaged was the corporate equivalent of we are inside your house, and we’ve changed the locks, and everyone in the room who knew anything about anything understood that perfectly well.
The chairman nodded slowly. “And the stake in the Charleston development? The disclosure was somewhat… unexpected.”
“Timing is everything in acquisitions,” I smiled. “I’m sure Mr. Aldridge would agree.”
The silence that followed had a very specific texture.
Wyatt broke it. “Miss Hale.” His voice was steady, a detail I noted with a mix of respect and irritation. “Perhaps you and I could step outside for a moment. I think a direct conversation might be more productive than a boardroom discussion.”
I looked at him for the first time since I’d sat down.
He met my gaze with the infuriating calm of a man who had spent the last forty-eight hours deciding exactly how he would handle this and had reached a conclusion I hadn’t anticipated. Which, frankly, was becoming a pattern I needed to address.
“Of course,” I said.
The hallway outside the boardroom was empty, carpeted, and very quiet—the engineered hush of a space meant for serious conversations. Wyatt closed the door behind us and turned to face me, his hands in his pockets, a sign he was thinking rather than acting.
I’d always been able to read that.
Stop reading him, I reminded myself.
“How long have you been planning this?” he asked.
“I answered that question in the conference room yesterday.”
“Six years.” He said it as if he were still turning it over, still finding new surfaces on it. “You were buying pieces of my company for six years before I even took over.”
“Your family’s company,” I corrected. “There’s a difference.”
Something shifted in his jaw. Not anger—something more careful than anger. “Megan—”
“Miss Hale,” I said. “In a professional context.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “You really going to do that?”
“I really am.”
He exhaled slowly through his nose. “Fine. Miss Hale.” The way he said it made it sound like the most patient form of argument I’d ever heard.
“Do you want to tell me what you actually want here? Because the position you’ve built—this isn’t a passive investment.
This is a siege. And I think you know that, and I think you’ve known it for six years, and I’d like to understand what the endgame looks like from where you’re standing. ”
The hallway was very quiet.
What do I want? A question I could answer in my sleep—had answered, in my head, about ten thousand times over the past decade.
I wanted the Aldridge name to know what it felt like to lose something it couldn’t buy back.
I wanted the company that had employed my parents and then discarded them without a second thought to understand that the people they overlooked had longer memories than they had counted on.
I wanted ten years of grief, loss, and rebuilding to mean something beyond the walls of my chest.
I wanted justice.
What I said was, “I want what any active investor wants. A say in how my investment is managed.”
He looked at me with those blue eyes that had always seen through whatever expression I put on, reaching for the thing beneath. Stop that, I thought. You don’t get to do that anymore.
“You’ve never been good at lying,” he said quietly. “Especially to me.”
The anger hit me before I could stop it—not the cold, controlled kind I’d been running on for years, but the hot, real kind, the kind with teeth. “That’s interesting, coming from you.”
“I know you think—”
“I know, Wyatt. I don’t think. I was there. I heard you.” My voice stayed level with the effort of someone holding something heavy at arm’s length. “I heard you deny it in that hallway. I watched your face when you saw me standing there, and I know exactly what I saw.”
“You saw what it looked like,” he said. “Not what it was.”
“And what was it?”
He held my gaze. Steady. Unblinking. The way he’d always held it when he meant what he was about to say with every part of himself. “Something I’ve been trying to explain to you for ten years. Something I should have found a way to say a long time ago.”
My pulse was doing something completely unacceptable.
“Save it for someone who wants to hear it.” I reached for the boardroom door handle. “We should get back inside.”
“Megan.”
I stopped with my hand on the door. Didn’t turn around.
“I’m not going to fight you on this.” His voice came from just behind my shoulder, close enough that I felt the warmth of it.
“I’m not going to lawyer up and play hardball and pretend I don’t know exactly what this is.
You want a war, but I’m not giving you one.
” I feel him intentionally pause for emphasis.
“But I’m also not disappearing. Not this time. ”
Not this time.
He reached past me to push the door open, his hand briefly covering mine on the handle before I could pull away. Not aggressive. Not calculated. Just a half-second of contact, warm through the thin fabric of my sleeve, that neither of us had planned and neither of us acknowledged.
I felt it in my spine.
I felt it, and I didn’t move. For one completely unscheduled moment, we stood in a corporate hallway with his hand over mine on a door handle, the board waiting twelve feet away, and ten years of everything pressing in from every direction. Neither of us said a word about it.
My grip on the door handle grew stronger. He released his hold. My hand still felt warm from his touch. I dismissed it and pushed the door open. We entered as two professionals—no longer friends or lovers, just two individuals focused on how the business functioned and made a profit.
Last time, the traitorous part of my brain reminded me, he went with Blair into that hallway, and you never saw him come back.
The board looked between us with the interested, careful expressions of people who had correctly assessed that something significant had just happened in the hallway and were too well-bred to say so.
“Shall we continue?” I said pleasantly, then took my seat.
The meeting wrapped up by noon. I was the first one out the door, coat already on, portfolio under my arm, moving through the lobby with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had somewhere more important to be even when she didn’t.
I made it all the way to the sidewalk.
“Miss Hale.” His voice came from just behind me, and the amusement in it was so familiar that it made something in my chest clench. “You forgot something.”
I turned. He was holding my phone. I must have left it on the conference table—the first time in ten years I’d walked out of a room without it, which was infuriating on approximately three different levels.
I walked back and took it from his hand.
“Thank you,” I said stiffly.
“Have you eaten?” he asked.
“That’s not—”
“It’s a yes or no question, Megan.”
I looked at him. At the complete absence of strategy on his face—no angle, no play, just the straightforward question of a man who had noticed I probably hadn’t eaten breakfast and was asking about it the same way he always had. As if it were the obvious next thing. As if ten years hadn’t happened.
Like ten years hadn’t happened.
“I have a full afternoon,” I said.
“So that’s a no.” He fell into step beside me before I’d agreed to the arrangement. “There’s a place two blocks over. We’ll be in and out in forty-five minutes.”
“Wyatt—”
“You have to eat sometime.” He glanced sideways at me, and the corner of his mouth twitched. “Some things don’t change.”
I wanted to argue. I had a very good argument, in fact—several of them, stacked and ready, each one more reasonable than the last.
I’m not interested in you. I’m not interested in being your friend. I’m not interested in working with you.
The words were right within reach. At that exact moment, my stomach growled so loudly that a passing businessman glanced over. Wyatt looked at me. I kept my gaze fixed straight ahead.
“You still don’t eat when you’re working,” he said.
Not an accusation. Just a fact, observed and filed away, as he always did with things about me.
“You used to do the same thing in the library. On the third Thursday of every month, like clockwork, I’d find you at eleven p.m., an empty coffee cup in hand, with no sign of dinner. ”
I looked at him despite myself. “You tracked that?”
“I tracked everything about you,” he said plainly, without any show. “I still do, apparently.”
The admission hit me in a place where it shouldn’t have.
Stop it, I thought. But my mouth had already done what it did when I was tired, and my guard was down, and someone said something that was precisely, specifically true.
“The third Thursday was always the derivatives seminar,” I said. “It ran long, and I kept meaning to eat beforehand.”
His quiet smile altered the air between us.
That’s the most dangerous kind of familiarity, I thought. The kind that reassembles itself without permission.
“Fine,” I said. “Forty-five minutes.”
His quiet laugh settled somewhere in my chest, a place I’d spent ten years trying to empty out.
Damn him, I thought, falling into step beside him. Damn him for making it so hard.