Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
WYATT: PRESENT
I’d been watching Blair’s numbers for three months.
Not because I’d suspected anything specific at first—more because taking over the company had required me to understand every corner of it, and Blair’s consulting arrangements were the one corner that had never been properly explained to me.
My father had waved it off when I’d asked, the year before he handed over the reins.
Blair is an asset to this company. The arrangements are appropriate.
Said in the tone that meant the conversation was finished, which was a tone I’d spent my entire childhood learning to recognize and my entire adulthood learning to push past.
I’d let it go then. I had enough to manage without pulling on threads that might unravel things I wasn’t ready to deal with.
Then Megan Hale walked into my boardroom, and I’d started looking at everything differently.
Not because of the acquisition, or not only because of it.
Because the morning her name appeared in that trading report, I’d sat at my grandfather’s desk and thought about the beach house.
About the weekend that had started everything and ended it in the same forty-eight hours.
About Blair showing up unannounced Friday night with that look on her face—the one I recognized as calculation, wearing the mask of concern.
About the conversation she’d pulled me into while Megan was settling in upstairs, the things she’d said, the logic she’d laid out in that cold, methodical way of hers.
She’s not right for you. You know it. The family won’t accept it. Let me handle it, Wyatt. I’ll make sure she doesn’t get hurt.
I’d said no. I’d said it clearly. I’d gone back to Megan and told her everything was fine because at the time I’d believed it was—believed that Blair’s logic had hit the wall of my refusal and stopped there, as it was supposed to.
I’d been wrong about that. I’d understood how wrong on a Monday morning in a Cambridge hallway, watching Megan’s face go through stages I couldn’t undo, holding four words in my mouth that I’d said because Blair was six feet away and I was nineteen years old and I hadn’t yet understood what my sister was fully capable of.
Three months spent reviewing her financial arrangements had told me more than I’d wanted to know.
“Close the door,” I said when Marcus appeared in my doorway.
He did. Sat down across from my desk with his usual stillness and waited.
I turned my monitor toward him. “Walk me through what you see.”
He leaned forward. He studied the screen for a long moment, with the focused attention of a man who had spent thirty years reading financial documents and knew how to find what wasn’t meant to be found.
I watched his expression—steady, then careful, then a stillness that signaled he’d arrived somewhere significant.
“BCA Advisory Group,” he said quietly.
“Three subsidiaries. Fourteen million dollars over four years. Consulting fees with no deliverables I can identify in any of the operational records.” I pulled up the second screen. “And that’s the clean layer. Below it—”
“A transfer.” Marcus leaned closer. “2013.”
“Forty thousand dollars. Routed through a second vehicle to a personal account.” I’d pulled the name for that account two days ago and sat with it for a long time before I was ready to say it out loud. “Billy Brown.”
The office was very quiet.
Marcus sat back slowly. “Wyatt.”
“I know.”
“If Blair paid him—”
“I know what it means.” I turned the monitor back toward me and stared at the numbers as I’d been looking at them for three months—searching for an alternative explanation, a legitimate reason, any version of this that didn’t mean what it meant.
I hadn’t found one. “I need to know everything. Every transfer, every entity, every account she’s touched, going back to 2012.
I need it documented, sourced, and airtight. ”
“That’s going to take time.”
“I know. Start tonight.”
Marcus nodded slowly. “And Blair?”
I looked out the window at the park. The afternoon light was doing its amber thing this time of year, turning the city briefly, improbably soft.
My grandfather had loved this view. My father had barely noticed it.
I’d been trying to decide which of them I was more like since I was old enough to understand the question.
“Nothing yet,” I said. “Not until I have everything.”
“And Megan Hale?”
I was quiet for a moment.
Megan Hale had files on Blair. I was almost certain—certain enough to have been doing the math on what she knew, when she’d known it, and what she planned to do with it.
The acquisition now made a different kind of sense.
Not just the Aldridge name, not just her family’s history with the company, but the specific architecture of the company.
The way she’d built into the subsidiaries where Blair’s fingerprints were heaviest. The patience of it. The precision.
She wasn’t just dismantling the company. She was building a case.
“She’s further along than we are,” I said.
Marcus absorbed that. “Do we approach her?”
I thought about the conference room. The negotiation table. The hallway outside the boardroom, where I’d told her I wasn’t going to fight her and had watched something shift across her expression before she’d closed it off, so I couldn’t read it fully.
Why.
Because it was the right call.
She’d known I wasn’t telling her everything. She always had. She’d filed it away and walked away, and I’d let her, because the full answer required the full story, and the full story required her to be in a room where she was ready to hear it. She wasn’t ready yet.
I wasn’t sure she was ready yet.
“Not yet,” I said. “Give me a week.”
Marcus nodded and stood. “Wyatt.” He paused at the door. “Whatever Blair did—whatever the full picture turns out to be—this company won’t survive it if it comes out the wrong way. The timing, the source, how it lands with the board—”
“I know.”
“I’m not suggesting you manage the truth. I’m saying the truth needs a context that doesn’t bring the whole structure down with it.”
“I know, Marcus.” I looked at him. “That’s what the week is for.”
He departed, and the door shut behind him. I turned back to the window.
Forty thousand dollars. Thirty days before the beach house weekend. The clean, cold arithmetic of something planned in advance by someone who had decided the outcome needed to be engineered because it wasn’t going to arrive on its own.
Blair had decided Megan needed to disappear from my life. She’d decided it with the calm, methodical certainty she brought to everything she wanted—the certainty of someone who had always believed the right outcome justified the architecture required to produce it.
And I had stood in a hallway at nineteen years old and given her just enough to work with.
No, that’s not me.
I hadn’t known about the camera. Hadn’t known about Billy.
Hadn’t known that Blair’s let me handle it had meant a mole camera in a beach house and forty thousand dollars in a personal account and a video distributed to every trust fund kid on a Cambridge campus before I’d had any idea what had happened.
But I’d said the words. And Megan had heard them. And I had let her run.
There was a version of this in which I found a way to explain it to her. Where I put the full picture in front of her—the payment, the camera, Blair’s architecture—and let the evidence do what evidence does and trusted her to follow the logic to wherever it led.
I’d been trying to work out how to get to that version for ten years. I was running out of time to find it.
I reached for my phone and pulled up a name I’d been looking at for two weeks without making the call.
Camille Prescott.
Harvard Law. Megan’s person. The one who’d been there when everything fell apart and had stayed in her life ever since.
I’d tracked her down six months ago, when I’d started seriously thinking about how to get Megan into a room where she’d be willing to listen.
I’d done nothing with the number because every time I looked at it, I came back to the same problem.
I couldn’t ask Camille to broker a conversation that Megan hadn’t agreed to have. I set the phone back down.
The week. I had a week to assemble the full picture, and then I was going to have to find a way to put it in front of her, whether she was ready or not, because the alternative was watching her finish dismantling the company on the basis of something that was only half the truth, and I couldn’t let that stand.
She deserved the whole truth. She’d always deserved the whole truth.
I’d just needed ten years and a hostile takeover to finally be ready to give it to her.