Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MEGAN: PRESENT
The symposium ran long.
Not long in a bad way—the kind of long that meant the room was engaged, the questions kept coming, and thirty investors had walked in with checkbooks and walked out with conviction.
I’d watched from the back of the room, my portfolio closed and my water untouched, as Wyatt held the room for two hours with the focused, unhurried authority of a man who had finally found what he was supposed to be doing.
I’d watched him and thought, against every wall I owned, He’s good at this.
Not inherited-good. Not acting-out-his-father’s-version—good.
Genuinely, specifically, himself-good. The way he listened to questions before answering them.
The way he said I don’t know yet twice, without flinching, instead of papering over the gaps with confidence he didn’t have.
The way the room trusted him—not because of the name on the building, but because of the man standing in front of them.
I’d filed it under irrelevant and kept my face exactly where I put it.
The room cleared slowly. Investors lingered, shaking hands, their satisfied energy that of people who had come to be convinced and had been. I stayed near the back until the crowd thinned, then moved toward the exit with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had somewhere more important to be.
“Megan.”
I stopped.
He was behind me, his jacket draped over one arm, the room nearly empty around him. He looked as he always did after he’d been on for a long time—not tired, exactly, just returned to himself. Present in a way the performance required him not to be.
“Good presentation,” I said.
“You watched the whole thing.”
“I have a twelve percent stake in the project. I was doing my due diligence.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “Stay for a drink.”
Don’t. “I have—”
“One drink. The bar downstairs.” He held my gaze. “Not a negotiation. Not a board meeting. Just a drink.”
I looked at him for a long moment.
Just a drink.
“One,” I said.
The bar was quiet at this hour—a Monday evening, the after-work crowd thinning toward the comfortable emptiness that made conversation easy.
We took a corner table without discussing it, the same instinct guiding both of us.
I ordered club soda because I needed my head clear, and he ordered Scotch neat because, apparently, some things hadn’t changed.
We didn’t talk about the symposium. We didn’t talk about the acquisition, the board, Blair’s fourteen million dollars, or any of the architecture that had dominated every professional interaction we’d had over the last six weeks.
We talked like we used to.
That was the thing I hadn’t planned for.
Not the drink. I’d agreed to the drink with my eyes open, aware of the risk and calculating it manageable.
What I hadn’t planned for was how quickly the professional distance collapsed once the corporate context was removed.
How fast we found the old frequency, the one that had been running between us since a parking lot in Savannah, the one I’d spent ten years insisting I’d turned off.
He told me about the Charleston project.
Not the financials—the real thing. The mixed-use development, the neighborhood it was meant to serve, and the specific problem it was designed to solve for a community that had been overlooked by every developer who’d come before.
He talked about it the way he’d talked about contract law in a Cambridge café—with the focused enthusiasm of someone who had finally found what they were truly interested in and couldn’t quite contain it.
I asked questions. Real ones. The kind that required him to go deeper, to think beyond the presentation version to the substance beneath.
He answered all of them.
At some point, one club soda became a second, and his Scotch became a second, and the bar grew quieter around us, and neither of us mentioned leaving.
“You never asked me why I transferred,” he said.
I looked at him. “I assumed.”
“What did you assume?”
“That it wasn’t an accident.”
He held my gaze. “It wasn’t.” He paused before continuing.
“I transferred because you were there. I told my father I wanted a different program and let him believe the reasons he wanted to believe. I transferred because you were there, and I wasn’t ready to let the parking lot be our whole story.
Two years of watching you from across that lot in Savannah, never once finding the nerve to cross it.
I wasn’t going to let that be all we got. ”
The bar was very quiet.
“That’s—” I stopped.
“I know.” He turned his glass a quarter rotation. “I know it’s a lot to put on someone who hadn’t agreed to any of it. I’m not saying it to—” He stopped, looked at the table. “I just never said it out loud. I thought you should know.”
I looked at him across the small table in the quiet bar, at the man who had transferred colleges to follow a girl from a parking lot and had spent thirty years of his life being exactly who he seemed, and felt something in my chest shift in a way I hadn’t budgeted for.
Don’t, I told myself.
I didn’t listen.
We left together when the bar closed, which was later than I’d planned, stepping out into a December night that had turned wet while we were inside.
Not heavy rain—the thin, persistent kind, the sort that got into everything without announcing itself.
The kind that had been falling the night he kissed me outside my dorm for the first time.
I noticed that. I wish I hadn’t.
We stood under the hotel awning for a moment, the city moving past in the rain, and I became aware that we were standing very close, that neither of us was moving toward a cab, that the evening had altered the professional distance I’d been maintaining, and that I wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened or how to reconstruct it quickly enough.
“Walk with me,” he said.
“It’s raining.”
“I know.” He looked at me. “Walk with me anyway.”
I should have said no. I had a very good reason to say no—several of them, the same reasons I always had, stacked and ready. I said nothing instead, which was its own kind of answer. We stepped out from under the awning into the rain and walked.
The city at this hour was the version I loved best—stripped of its daytime noise, the streets mostly empty, the wet pavement reflecting the light from the streetlamps in long orange streaks.
We walked close enough that our arms brushed occasionally, neither of us pulling away, and I thought about October in Cambridge, the smell of wet leaves, and a boy who had said “I’ve been patient” in a quiet voice and meant it completely.
He wasn’t a boy anymore.
That was the thought I was having—carefully, privately, with the full awareness that I was having it and the full awareness of what it meant that I was—when he stopped.
We were at the corner of a block I didn’t recognize, the rain falling steadily around us, the city quiet enough at this hour that I could hear it hitting the pavement.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at nothing in particular, hands in his coat pockets, as he did when he was organizing something he’d been carrying for a while and had finally decided to set it down.
“I came to Cambridge,” he said quietly. “After. About three weeks later.” He paused, letting it sink in. “I stood outside your dorm for twenty minutes, trying to decide whether I had any right to knock on that door.”
I went very still.
“I decided I didn’t.” He looked at me then. “I went back to Savannah, told myself you were better off, and tried to believe it.” His jaw tightened. “I’ve thought about those twenty minutes often.”
My throat was doing something inconvenient.
“Wyatt—”
“I know you don’t want to hear it yet,” he said quietly, without pressure. “I’m not asking you to do anything with it. I just needed you to know I came. That I tried to come. That it wasn’t nothing.”
The rain fell around us. The city moved. I stood on the wet sidewalk, looked at him, and felt ten years of architecture shift under its own weight, with the word still in my chest like something lit.
Yet.
He’d said yet.
And I was standing in the rain at a random Manhattan corner, feeling something I had spent six years and twenty-two percent of his company’s stock trying to wall off, and the wall was doing something I hadn’t authorized, and I was so tired.
I’m so tired, I thought, and didn’t know exactly what I was tired of, except that it was heavy and had been so for a long time. Standing here in the rain, I felt it was heavier than usual.
“I believed you,” I said. The words came out before I’d decided to say them.
“That’s what I keep coming back to. I believed every single thing you said to me.
Every coffee, every walk, every—” My voice did something I quickly controlled before it got away from me.
“I believed you. And then you stood in that hallway and said four words, and I—”
“I know,” he said quietly. “I know you did.”
“Do you?” Something was loosening in my chest, something I’d kept sealed for a long time, and I wasn’t sure I had the strength to stop it right now, on this sidewalk in the rain.
“Because you say that like you understand what I’m telling you, but you got what you wanted, Wyatt.
You had me, and you used it, and then you—”
“Megan—”
“Was it worth it?” My voice came out low, even, and precisely controlled, the way it did when I was holding something very heavy at arm’s length. “After you got what you wanted from me, was it worth it to you?”
He had gone very still.
“I need you to say that again,” he said.
“Which part?”
“The part where you think I—” He stopped.
Something was shifting in his expression.
Not anger. Not defensiveness. Something I couldn’t quite categorize, moving across his face like a man arriving at an understanding that was costing him something considerable.
“Megan. When you say I got what I wanted, what do you think I wanted?”