3. Jenna
Jenna
“Welcome, Mr. Cruz, Ms. Pemberton.” Sato bows to each of us in turn. “We hope your flight was restful.”
The Nakamura conference room is on the forty-second floor, and it’s doing its best to lull me to sleep.
The lighting is soft. The chairs look ridiculously comfortable.
The tea is steaming, and there’s a tray of small, immaculate pastries.
Every detail is a decision. The lacquered table gleams without a fingerprint.
The folders are squared to the same angle.
On the far wall, Carmichael Innovations and Nakamura Biotech sit side by side in white text over charcoal, which is corporate for we are all pretending this is friendly.
Jet lag sits behind my eyes like a second person. I keep my face neutral and watch the room.
“We’re well rested, thank you,” Dominic says, smooth as glass. “We’re grateful for the warm welcome on such short notice.”
We sit. Eight of them across the table—Sato in the middle, three older board men in dark suits, a handful of juniors with composed faces and full notebooks.
Dominic settles beside me looking offensively unbothered by transpacific travel.
He loosens nothing, slouches nowhere, and still somehow projects the ease of a man on his second espresso in his own kitchen.
One of the older board members murmurs something to Sato in Japanese about the schedule being ambitious. Sato answers without looking at us.
I open my notebook.
“Before we begin,” Sato says, and gestures to the assistant at the tea station.
She fills my cup. I take a sip. “Excellent,” I murmur.
Her face warms a fraction. “Sencha,” she says in Japanese, pleased. “From Shizuoka.”
I answer her in the same clean Japanese. “Thank you. It’s very good.”
The temperature of the room shifts by about three degrees.
The assistant freezes mid-pour. One of the older men makes a sound that might be a cleared throat.
Because what I’ve just told the entire Nakamura side of the table, without saying it, is that I have followed every word of Japanese spoken in this room since we walked in, and I intend to keep following it.
Dominic doesn’t react. He thanks the assistant in English and sips his tea like a man who notices nothing.
But under the table, his knee brushes mine.
Once. Deliberate.
My body goes hot at the contact, which I file under problems for later and ignore.
“Shall we begin?” Sato says.
“Please,” Dominic replies.
Sato opens the way we expected—with the supply chain.
He frames the additional equity demand as responsible recalibration in light of new information.
He says partner four times in two minutes and risk a good deal more.
Dominic doesn’t interrupt. He doesn’t flash a smile or deploy one of the small, expensive jokes he uses to take the heat out of a room.
He just listens, tea cooling, hands quiet beside his notepad.
And when Sato finishes, he waits a beat and looks at me.
Holy shit. He’s handing me the room.
Keeping my surprise in check, I set my pen down and open my folder. “Thank you, Sato-san.” I slide a copy down the table. “May I direct everyone to page three?”
Pages rustle as the room does exactly that.
“Your proposal raises Nakamura’s stake in the joint venture by twelve percentage points,” I say, in the voice I use for board summaries Bennett doesn’t want anyone to argue with.
“To justify that, the materials cite supply-chain disclosures from the eighteenth of last month. We’ve reviewed them.
” I tap the column. “They affect three component lines. Two are already covered under the contingency clause we negotiated in October. The third represents roughly one and a half percent of the cost basis.”
A pause.
“We understand the concern,” I add. “We don’t see the math.”
Translation: we know you’re walking us toward strategic fatigue, and we aren’t going.
Sato laces his hands on the table. “What is your counter, Ms. Pemberton?”
“Four additional points. Governance remains untouched. We close before Friday. Mr. Cruz and I will remain through next week to oversee implementation.”
Silence. Glances move down their side of the table.
Beside me, Dominic lifts his tea and drinks. Says nothing.
“We will need to consult,” Sato says. “Twenty minutes.”
“Take thirty,” Dominic says, magnanimous. “We’ll wait right here.”
They come back in twenty-six.
“We will accept five additional points,” Sato says, “with the distribution calendar confirmed within forty-eight hours and governance unchanged.”
He slides the amended page forward.
I read it once. Then again.
“No other revisions?”
“None.”
I put the page down. “Then Mercer can accept.”
Dominic leans back, easy as a man discussing lunch. “Looks like we all get to sleep tonight.”
One of the older men smiles despite himself. The courtesies follow—a date confirmed for the formal signing, and then dinner, suggested the way every post-negotiation meal in international business is suggested: technically optional, socially mandatory, strategically loaded.
“If your schedule permits,” Sato says, “Nakamura Biotech would be honored to host you this evening.”
“We’d be delighted,” Dominic says, at the exact moment I say, “We appreciate the invitation.”
I can feel him enjoying that.
Dinner runs three hours and ends, as these things do, in a flurry of bows and the two-handed exchange of business cards. By the time we step out onto the street, I have eaten far too much and been charming for longer than is strictly survivable.
The night air is cool against the heat of the restaurant. I pull my wrap around my shoulders.
“Do you mind if we walk?” I ask. “I’ve been sitting all day. I need to move.”
“Six blocks,” Dominic says, glancing up the street. “Or we grab the car.”
“Six blocks.”
Tokyo at half past ten is a different kind of quiet—bright, polite, full of people minding their own business.
The neon along the side streets throws color across the pavement, pink and gold and electric blue, and I tell myself the reason I’d rather walk than sit in a town car beside him is the number of hours I’ve already spent in chairs.
“Sato’s wife is intense,” Dominic says.
“Sato’s wife liked you, which means we’re invited back, which means we did our jobs.
” She had taken one look at me over the first course, decided we were going to be friends, and I’d let her, because she was funny and sharp and poured sake like a woman settling a score.
“I think she liked both of us, actually.”
“What’s not to like? We’re a power couple.”
I roll my eyes at him and he grins and nudges me with his shoulder.
“She was also delighted by how tall you are,” he says, and I roll my eyes again. But this time I’m smiling along with it.
“I’m an endless fascination wherever I go.”
He laughs. “She told me she thinks you look like a goddess. I agreed.”
I keep my eyes on the sidewalk so he can’t see what that does to my face. “You’d say anything.”
“I’d say a lot of things. That one’s just true.” He looks over. “What are you, six-one?”
“Around that.”
“So six-three, six-four in heels. When we dance, we’re eye to eye.” A beat. “I love that. My neck loves it too.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Not even close. I’m at the part of the night where the whiskey’s evaporating and my brain is running regression analyses on your smile.”
“You need better hobbies.”
“There are no better hobbies.”
I shake my head, but I don’t speed up. If anything, I let the gap between us close by an inch. He doesn’t touch me. He smirks a little and says nothing, which is somehow worse.
“I heard Sato’s wife asking about your mother. What’d you tell her?” I ask, because it’s safer than the silence.
“That she taught Spanish at a high school in Greenwich for twenty years and once sent a man home from a parent-teacher conference in tears. He had opinions about curriculum design and my mother did not entertain those opinions.”
I snort. “Is that where your gregariousness comes from?”
“Oh no. That would be my father. He’s me, but louder. Runs a hedge fund, cries at every Pixar movie, once rented a cart at the school field day and sold churros at a loss to prove a point about snack pricing, then wrote the principal a letter and cc’d the mayor.”
I laugh before I can stop it. “He sounds exactly like you.”
“Shrink him thirty percent and you get me.” He glances over. “What about your folks?”
I’m not sure why, but I answer honestly.
Maybe because it’s dark and we’re in a country where no one knows either of us.
“Dad’s a plumber. Self-employed. Good with his hands.
Bad with fidelity. Mom worked the post office until she retired, then moved into an ambitious second career in boxed wine and denial.
” I shrug like this is funny. It’s not funny.
“My sister and I were very self-sufficient children. Which is what adults call neglect when they want it to sound like a character-building exercise.”
Dominic is quiet for a few steps.
I can’t tell if it’s pity or sadness, and I instantly regret saying anything and try to take it back. “Please forget I said that. I don’t know why—”
“Are you close with your sister?” he asks, and his voice is genuine. Curious. Not filled with pity at all.
I look at him despite myself.
“Yes and no. Her name is Hailey. Younger than me by six years. She also works as an EA, but it’s for this hotel chain out on Long Island, and she hates it—because she’s good at it and her boss isn’t, and he takes credit for her work, and she’s twenty-nine and broke and tired, and she calls me on her break to vent and then won’t let me help. ”
“Why won’t she let you help?”
“Because she thinks I think I’m too good for them.” I say it lightly. The lightness is the giveaway, and I suspect he hears it.
“Are you?”
He asks it so directly that I look at him. Then I look back at the pavement. “No. But I’ve been folded into your group of billionaires long enough that me showing up to fix things looks like that, even when it isn’t.”