18. Dean
Dean
The apartment was too quiet.
No Fiona humming to herself in the kitchen.
No soft socked steps padding down the hall.
No clatter of her keys in the bowl by the door, or the whisper of pages turning as she read curled up on the couch.
Just the glint of her wedding ring on the entry table—small, final.
He couldn’t bring himself to move it.
He stood in the kitchen and stared blankly at the open cabinet. Reached for two mugs. Caught himself.
Set one back.
The kettle clicked off behind him.
He glanced at his phone, then turned it face-down again. Fiona hadn’t texted. Hadn’t responded to any of his apology messages.
He opened his laptop. Maybe work would distract him. Maybe a slide deck would make the ache shrink.
But the tabs he left open were still there: analytics, branding briefs… and the @shitfionasays dashboard.
Dean closed the laptop. Pushed it away. Rested his forehead against the table and let the weight of the empty apartment settle over him like fog.
He felt itchy under his skin. Like there was something he was supposed to be doing, some lever he should be pulling to fix this. Fix her. Fix them .
That’s what he did. Dean fixed things. He was good at problems. Clients came to him with chaos and he spun it into clarity. Strategy. Deliverables.
He grabbed a pad of yellow legal paper from the drawer near the phone. His hands were already moving before he had a plan. Just that old, instinctive reflex:
CONTROL THE NARRATIVE.
He stared at the words he’d written at the top of the page.
Of course. Of course his first instinct was to minimize. To manage Fiona like a client. God, what the hell was wrong with him? He wasn’t writing a pitch deck—he was trying to convince his wife to come home.
Self-loathing curdled in his gut. He’d hurt her, and instead of feeling that, owning it, he was trying to fix it with a tagline.
He crossed the words out. Thick black lines, over and over, until the paper tore slightly under the pressure.
That instinct—that need to spin, to shape, to manage—was not going to help him win back Fiona.
He clicked his pen once, twice, three times. He wrote: "Get Fiona Back"
He underlined it twice.
Then he stared at the blank lines below, pen hovering.
Where to start?
Grand gesture? No—too cliché. Flowers? Too basic. Show up at her classroom? Too aggressive.
He needed to think bigger. Think like an account director. Think systematic.
Dean started writing:
Apologize properly (in person, not text)
Show her I've changed
Prove I understand what I did wrong
Demonstrate my commitment
Make her happy
He paused, rereading the list. It looked... professional. Actionable.
Reading it, Dean felt like he could breathe.
This was what he was good at—taking impossible problems and breaking them down into manageable steps. This was just another campaign. Even if it was the most important campaign of his life.
He looked at item one. Apologize properly.
He grabbed his keys.
Time to execute.