Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
MEGAN: PRESENT
The Blair meeting had been Wyatt’s to do alone.
I understood that without being told. Some of the accountings belonged to the person who owed them, and the debt between Wyatt and his sister was one I had no standing to collect.
So I’d gone back to my office, drafted a response to the board’s disclosure request, and tried very hard not to think about what was happening on East Seventy-Third Street.
I was moderately successful.
He called at noon.
“She said no,” he said. “To every version of it.”
“Are you all right?”
A pause that told me more than words would have. “I will be.”
“Come to my office,” I said. “We have work to do.”
He arrived at twelve-thirty with the folders, his expression that of a man who had said what needed to be said and was now ready to take the next step.
We worked through the afternoon—the disclosure response, the documentation package for the board, and the sequencing for a Monday meeting that Blair now intended to walk into swinging.
Marcus joined us by phone at three, and Charlie by four.
By six o’clock, we had everything in order.
By six-fifteen, everyone had gone.
By six-thirty, it was just the two of us in the conference room, the city going dark outside the windows, the work finished, and nothing left unsaid between us about Blair, the board, or the acquisition.
Wyatt was standing at the window, looking at the skyline, when I came back from the kitchen with two cups of tea—his coffee, long since cold, replaced without discussion because some habits reassembled themselves without permission.
He turned when I set the cup on the table.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’d have gotten there without me.”
“Maybe.” He picked up the cup. Looked at it for a moment. “But I’m glad I didn’t have to.”
We settled into our seats, not at the conference table but in the chairs by the window—the ones Dana used when she needed a brief break from her desk. The city spread beneath us, its lights and sharp angles performing its unfeeling routine.
I held my tea in both hands, thinking about everything that had been said over the past twenty-four hours, everything that hadn’t been said yet, and the conversation we’d been building toward since a gala in November.
“There’s something I haven’t told you,” I said.
He looked at me.
“The pregnancy.”
His face changed. Not surprise—something older than surprise, something he’d been carrying and hadn’t expected me to name it.
“I know,” he said quietly. “Christine told me three years later, when I found her again. She said she’d debated telling me for a long time and had finally decided I deserved to know, even if she still thought I deserved to hurt for a while longer.
” He fell silent for a moment. “She wasn’t wrong about that second part. ”
I looked at the city. At the lights going on one by one in the buildings across the skyline, the ordinary mechanics of the city settling into its evening.
“I never named her,” I said. “I’ve never said that out loud to anyone.”
The conference room was very quiet.
“Her?” he asked.
“I don’t know that for certain. I just—I always thought of the baby as a her.
” I pressed my fingers against the cup. “She was barely a pregnancy. Eight weeks. The doctor said it was the stress and the—the not eating. That my body couldn’t sustain it, given everything.
” I paused. “I never blamed you for that specifically. I want you to know that. It wasn’t—it was what it was.
My body was making a decision my mind wasn’t ready for yet. ”
“Megan.” His voice had gone rough at the edges, the way it had in the rain. “I’m sorry. I am so deeply sorry.”
“I know.” I looked at him. “That’s not why I’m telling you. I’m telling you because you deserve to hear it from me directly. not from Christine, not implied in the acquisition or the years of silence. From me.” I held his gaze. “You lost her too.”
He looked at me for a long moment with something in his expression I didn’t have a word for—not grief exactly, not gratitude exactly, something that encompassed both and went further than either.
“Thank you for sharing her with me,” he said, very quietly.
I nodded. We sat with it for a moment, the way you sit with things that are too large and too old to be resolved in a single conversation and don’t need to be—they just need to be acknowledged, named, and given their proper weight in the full picture of everything that had happened.
Then I picked up my tea and said, “Tell me how you found out about Billy.”
He told me everything.
Not the way he’d told pieces of it before—in a hallway, in a conference room, in the rain. The whole thing, in order, the way he’d clearly wanted to tell it for years but had never had the chance.
The morning the video spread. His phone was blowing up with texts from people he barely knew.
Seeing it for the first time on Billy’s phone in that hallway—only a short clip, no faces visible—while Billy said four words he meant one way, with Blair standing six feet away. Watching me hear them. Watching me run.
“I tried to come after you,” he said. “Billy was in the way, and by the time I got past him, you were gone. I walked the entire campus for three hours and went to your dorm twice. Your roommate said she hadn’t seen you.
” His jaw tightened. “Three days. I had no way to reach you. No number, no way to know if you were even still in Cambridge.”
Three days of nothing. While I was in Camille’s apartment, two miles away, I was unable to speak.
“I went back to the beach house,” he said.
“Alone. I tore my bedroom apart. I don’t know exactly what I was looking for—proof, an explanation, something that made sense of how a video I hadn’t taken had been sent from my phone.
That’s when I found it. In the entertainment center, directly facing the bed. ”
I set my tea down carefully.
“A mole camera,” he said. “I took it to my father. The police traced the purchase to Billy Brown.” He looked down at his hands. “My dad knew before he told me. I found out when they went to arrest Billy at school.” His jaw tightened. “I got to him before they did.”
“You beat him.”
“On his front lawn. His father watched and didn’t stop it.
” He paused. “Billy’s father made him answer for it in front of me.
He asked why. And Billy said—” He stopped, took a breath.
“He said he’d always been in love with you.
That you’d never looked at him. That when you fell for me, it was the ultimate betrayal in his eyes, and he wanted to hurt us both. ”
I reflected on it—the particular, crushing smallness of that moment. A decade of my life shifted by the wounded ego of someone I had hardly thought about.
“And Blair?” I asked.
“She said she didn’t know.” His voice was flat.
“She said Billy had snuck out of her room and that she thought he was in the bathroom. She cried. She begged for my forgiveness.” He looked out the window.
“I believed her then. I needed to believe her then. I needed there to be a version in which Blair had been stupid rather than complicit.” A long pause. “I know now she wasn’t stupid.”
“She paid him.”
“Thirty days before the beach house weekend. Yes.” His voice was quiet and final. “She identified the infatuation, gave it structure, positioned herself in the right rooms to watch it detonate, and told me to let you go in the same breath.” He looked at me. “She was nineteen years old.”
She was nineteen years old.
They’d both been nineteen years old, building damage that would take a decade to fully understand.
“You know I’d already given his school a year before Harvard,” he said.
“Two semesters. Then I told him I wanted a different program and let him believe the reasons he wanted to believe. What I never told you was what my first week at Harvard actually looked like. I went to the registrar—they wouldn’t confirm enrollment.
I walked through every building on that campus.
I sat in the dining hall for three hours one morning, watching the door.
” He held my gaze. “I wasn’t late to that welcome address, Megan. I’d run out of buildings.”
I stared at him. The auditorium. The doors opening at the back. The unhurried walk to a seat four rows ahead of me, which I’d spent ten years interpreting as indifference.
“And after,” he said before I could speak. “When my father sent me back there, I lasted two days before I was on the road to Cambridge. I didn’t have a plan. I just drove.” Something flickered across his face. “Christine saw me on a Friday.”
I went very still.
“She was visiting,” I said. “That was the week she came to see my dorm room.”
“She told me to leave,” he said. “She said you’d finally started coming out of the worst depression she’d ever seen.
That you were getting yourself together, had your whole future ahead of you, and that if I showed up now, I’d drag you back into it—back into the grief and the shame and everything you’d come to Harvard to escape.
” He paused. “She said if I cared about you—if I actually, genuinely cared about what happened to you—I’d go.
And I wouldn’t come back until you’d had time to build something that was yours. ”
The city lights highlight the dark December sky stretching endlessly over Manhattan in all directions.
Christine had sent him away.
Christine, who had been my best friend since childhood, who had picked me up off the floor more times than I could count, who had stood beside me through every hard thing, and who had sat across from me in her apartment years later, never once mentioning that she’d found Wyatt on Harvard’s campus searching for me.
She had made a decision for me — driven by love, fierce protectiveness, and conviction that it was right. She wasn’t entirely wrong; I needed that time to build something of my own before I could be in the same room as him and be confident in my thoughts.
She also hadn’t been correct. Over the years, her stance had hardened, and the decision had become fixed. When I finally prepared myself—if I ever truly did—there was no way to reverse it.
“You should have come back,” I said quietly. Not in anger. Just the plain truth of it.
“I know.” He held my gaze. “I should have come back anyway. I told myself I was respecting your space, Christine’s request, and your right to build your life without me in it.
And some of that was true.” He paused. “And some of it was the same as it’s always been.
Being nineteen in that hallway. Being afraid that coming after you would cost you more than losing me already had. ”
I looked at him. At the man I had spent ten years building a weapon against. At the man who had kept a textbook open to a specific page for ten years, had stood on a Cambridge campus in September, asking strangers if they knew me, had beaten a man bloody on his front lawn, and had spent four months learning the weight of an inheritance he hadn’t wanted so he could hold it properly.
“I should go,” he said. He stood and reached for his coat on the chair by the door. Shrugged it on. Reached into his pocket for his keys.
I stood up.
He watched me cross to my desk without asking where I was going. I pulled open the bottom drawer—the one I’d opened and closed ten thousand times over six years without ever doing what I was about to do—and took out the velvet pouch.
I turned around, and he froze when he saw it. I approached him again and showed it to him.
“I’ve been keeping it,” I said. “I told myself I was going to throw it away eventually.” I held his gaze. “I never did.”
He took it slowly from my hand. Turned it over. The drawstring was worn, the fabric soft with years of handling—his hands knew its shape the same way mine did.
His fingers closed around it. When he looked up, the years between us seemed to be sitting right there in his hand.
“Open it,” I said.
Your true north.
I looked at it in his palm for a long moment. Then I reached up and closed his fingers around it.
“You were right,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt.
“You once said an arrow always knows where it’s going and doesn’t second-guess itself.
” I looked up at him. “I second-guessed for ten years. I built everything I built on a certainty that was actually a question I was afraid to ask.” I held his gaze. “I’m done second-guessing.”
He looked at the arrow in his closed fist. Then at me.
“Megan.” My name in his voice. Just that. As if it had always been—a complete sentence. As if it meant something. As if he’d been saving it.
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
He reached up with his free hand and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear the way he had in the rain outside my dorm eleven years ago, his fingers barely grazing my jaw, a touch so light it was almost imperceptible.
I didn’t stop breathing this time. I leaned into it.
He kissed me. Not the urgent kind, not the kind to make up for lost time. The quiet, unhurried kind—the same as the first time, in the October rain, like a man who had decided this was where he wanted to be and wasn’t going anywhere.
When he pulled back, his forehead rested against mine.
“I let you hate me,” he said quietly. “I thought it was the only thing I could give you that didn’t cost you anything. I was wrong about that.”
“Yes,” I said. “You were.”
His quiet laugh against my hair. The real one. The one that had always settled somewhere in my chest and apparently still did.
“What happens now?” he asked.
I thought about twenty-two percent, a board presentation, a disclosure response, and a shadow empire about to be formally dismantled, along with all the architecture of the next several weeks that would require both of us to work at full capacity toward the same goal.
I thought about what happens after.
“Now,” I said, “we finish what we started.”
“The board?”
“Among other things.”
He pulled back far enough to look at me. The real smile. The quiet one that never needed an audience.
“Among other things,” he agreed.
Outside the conference room window, Manhattan moved through its Friday evening, indifferent and relentless and entirely unbothered by the fact that two people had just stopped running in opposite directions and had finally, after ten years and one hostile takeover and a silver arrow and a Business Law textbook with a broken spine, arrived at the same place at the same time.
It didn’t ask what had taken so long.
That was still one of the things I loved most about it.