Chapter 30 #2
It was, I thought, one of the things I’d loved most about him, from the part of my brain that was always cataloging.
Loved. Present tense, apparently.
I looked at my tea.
“The secondary payment,” I said. “The storage facility. Does Nolan have any information on what happened to the footage?”
“That’s the piece I was most afraid of.” He set his coffee down.
“The storage unit was cleared fourteen months ago. The facility has no record of what was removed or where it went. Blair’s contact—the friend of Billy’s—has been unreachable since then.
Nolan thinks it was destroyed, but he can’t confirm it. ”
“But she might still have it.”
“She might still have it.”
I reflected on that for a moment. The footage, likely still in Blair Aldridge’s possession, was the original record of my worst morning, held somewhere out of reach.
I avoided thinking about it for ten years because confronting it directly would break through my defenses, and I couldn’t afford to let that happen.
“Megan.” His voice was quiet. “I need to say something, and I need you to let me say it without interrupting.”
I looked at him.
“What Blair did to you was the most significant act of cruelty I’ve ever had direct knowledge of.
Not because of what it cost the company or what it cost our relationship, or what it cost me.
” His voice was steady and deliberate, as it was when he meant something with every part of himself.
“Because of what it cost you, specifically. Your father. Your sense of safety. The ten years you spent building something extraordinary while carrying the weight of what a nineteen-year-old girl did to you because she decided you were an obstacle and removed you.” He held my gaze.
“I’ve thought about that every day for ten years. I want you to know that.”
The restaurant moved around us. Quiet conversations, the clink of silverware, and the low music from somewhere near the bar.
My throat was doing something that required my full concentration to control.
“I know,” I said.
“There’s more,” he said. “The part that isn’t about Blair.”
I looked at him across the small table with its good natural light and its candle and its corner position far enough from the nearest occupied table that a conversation could breathe.
“I know there is,” I said.
He leaned forward slightly, resting his forearms on the table, with his gaze fixed steadily on mine. He was neither acting nor trying to control the situation—simply being himself, as he always was—which was precisely what made him so disarming from the start.
“I need you to know something before we go any further,” he said.
“Before the board, before Blair, before whatever comes next with the acquisition.” He paused.
“I need you to know that I transferred to Harvard because I couldn’t let the parking lot be the whole story.
That I sat behind you in Business Law on purpose.
That every Thursday coffee was the best hour of my week, and I knew it from the first one.
That the night I gave you the arrow, I’d had it in my jacket pocket for three weeks because I kept finding reasons not to give it to you yet.
” He stopped. Let that sit. “I need you to know that none of it was a plan. None of it was a setup. It was just—you. It was always just you.”
The candle between us was very still in the windless room.
I looked at him for a long moment. At his earnestness, which had been the first thing to disarm me and had remained the most dangerous in every boardroom, conference room, and rain-soaked sidewalk since.
At the man who had kept a textbook open to page one hundred and twelve for ten years, not because he’d planned to show it to anyone, but because he hadn’t been able to close it.
“I know,” I said, quietly, meaning all of it.
Something in his expression shifted—not relieved, not validated, just—settled. The way a thing settles when it’s finally been said out loud after a very long time of being held in silence.
“So,” he said. “What do we do about Blair?”
And just like that, we were back—not to the corporate version of us, the acquirer and the acquired, the positions and the percentages and the architecture of six years.
Back to the version that had existed in a Cambridge café when we’d talked about ideas and meant everything and trusted each other with the most honest parts of ourselves.
The version that had always been the real one.
“We do what we’ve both been doing,” I said. “We finish building the case. We present the full picture to the board before she can establish her counter-narrative. We let the evidence do what it does.” I paused. “Together this time.”
He looked at me. “Together.”
“Together.” I picked up my tea. “But first you’re going to eat something. You look like you’ve been surviving on coffee and folder tabs.”
His quiet laugh settled somewhere in my chest, a place I’d spent ten years trying to empty out and had apparently failed to empty completely.
“Takes one to know one,” he said.
I smiled into my tea.