9. Jenna
Jenna
“I’ll just take the sparkling water and a club sandwich,” I say, handing the waiter back the wine list because alcohol and I don’t have a wonderful track record when it comes to Dominic Cruz—especially when I can still feel his fingers between my thighs.
“Nice dodge,” Serena says, propping her chin on one hand as she gives me her full attention. “But you can’t call the waiter over every time you don’t want to answer a question.”
“What question?” My napkin is folded on my lap so severely it’s become a starched defense mechanism. I can feel the heat already rising in my ears, the truth orbiting every atom but refusing atmospheric entry.
“Are you kidding me, Jenna?” Audrey gestures at me with her mimosa, and a droplet jumps and lands in a perfect, furious dot on her dress. She doesn’t blink. “You’ve been home from Japan for four whole days. Ignored the girl group chat asking how it was. Left the main one—”
“Twice,” Layla adds.
“—and when Layla asked how your trip was just now, you said, quote, ‘Busy, thanks, next topic.’”
Serena nods, a slow and predatory tilt. “We’re your friends, not your enemies. You can just say you got railed by Dominic Cruz on every surface between here and the Pacific.”
“We’d likely applaud,” Nora adds, glancing at her watch because she needs to be back at the school in an hour. “If only to see you blush for once.”
My face heats further, which seems physically impossible but here we are.
“Nobody ‘got railed,’” I say. “The only thing I was between here and the Pacific was sleep-deprived and chemically dependent on mini-bar wasabi peas.” I try for dismissive, professional, old-reliable Jenna, but even to my own ears it sounds threaded through with panic.
Layla puts her chin in her hand, peering at me over her glass. “Jenna.” There’s something in her voice—patient, unyielding, like she’s already forgiven me for the lies she knows I’m telling.
I stare at the silverware on the table. “It was business,” I say. “I spent ten days in Tokyo working.”
“With Dominic Cruz,” Audrey says, pushing her glasses up her nose. “The man who has actively been pursuing you as long as I’ve known him. Which is what? Two years now? Three?”
“They’ve known each other a whole decade,” Layla points out.
“Only a matter of time before it detonated.” Nora nods slowly, knowing.
“And you two seemed so close at Layla’s wedding,” Serena adds.
“You laughed,” Audrey says. “A lot.”
“And they danced.” Nora smiles, and if I didn’t like her so much I’d toss something across the table at her.
“That’s your evidence. Time, laughter, and dancing.”
“You laughed with your head back,” Audrey says. “I’d never seen your molars until that moment.”
“I’d had champagne.”
“Don’t blame the champagne,” Serena says, waggling a single finger at me. “You literally switched seats with someone so you could sit with him.”
They saw that? Fuck.
“And then you both vanished from the reception,” Layla adds, delicately, the way you’d set a mousetrap with a ribbon on it. “At the same time. For a while.”
Four faces arrange themselves into expressions of supportive patience. This is worse than hostility. Hostility I can work with. Hostility has exploitable weaknesses. Supportive patience just sits there, refilling its wine glass, prepared to wait me out until the heat death of the universe.
I never had a girl group. In high school, I ate lunch in the library with a paperback propped against my milk carton and watched female friendship happen across the cafeteria like it was happening in a distant country.
Borrowed lip gloss. Saved seats. Notes passed hand to hand.
I was the tall girl, the too-big girl, the girl by the window who’d learned that if she couldn’t be invisible, outside was the next best thing.
College was polite roommates. Business school was study groups that dissolved after finals. Then I walked into Bennett Mercer’s office at twenty-six and found the workaround: become useful enough, and nobody wonders why you’re there or cares about how big you are.
Competence is a magnificent substitute for intimacy. The woman who fixes everyone’s problems never has to be one herself.
Then these women happened to me.
Layla decided we were friends and treated every refusal as a scheduling conflict.
Audrey added me to a group chat without consent and cites my absences like data anomalies.
Nora arrived last and is the most emotionally fluent of us all.
Serena put me on the happy hour calendar like belonging was administrative.
I’m grateful. At an atomic level, I’m grateful.
I just don’t know what to do with it.
Useful, I can do. Reservations, contracts, a notary at nine p.m. on a Sunday. Friendship, as performed by me, is operations. Affection expressed in logistics.
But this booth is asking for something else. Me.
And I have been Jenna Pemberton—Bennett’s overly capable executive assistant, the woman with the answers, the one who handles everything—for so long that it’s become the only me I have.
Nora is the one who breaks the silence. “You know you can tell us anything, right?” She says it so gently I almost believe her, her eyes crinkling like she’s an empathy bomb about to detonate in my direction. “We’re not going to—”
I clear my throat, ready to weaponize sarcasm, then see the look on her face and abort.
“There’s nothing to tell,” I say, but even I can hear the thinness in my own voice. I will never be able to fake openness; I don’t even speak the language. “But I am concerned that we’re forty minutes into this lunch and nobody has asked the newlywed a single question.”
The table goes quiet.
Layla blinks. “Oh—no. No, we’re talking about you—”
“Two weeks married.” I level my gaze at her. “Honeymoon in Portugal. Far more interesting than my business trip with the over-caffeinated squirrel. Tell us everything. Is that new necklace a gift from Bennett?”
Layla touches the chain resting against her collarbone.
Audrey’s head swivels. “That is a new necklace.”
“It’s nothing—”
“It’s Art Deco,” I say. “It’s platinum. And she’s blushing.”
“I’m not blushing.”
“You’re the color of Pinot,” Nora says, delighted.
And that’s all it takes. The full weight of the table’s attention swings off me and onto Layla like a searchlight changing targets, and I take a slow, relieved breath.
“OK, so there’s a story about the necklace,” she says, and the booth practically contracts around her.
The story involves a vineyard in the Douro Valley, a locked tasting room, a proprietor with a convenient tendency to disappear, and a husband who had apparently been carrying the necklace in his jacket pocket waiting for—her words—“the right level of golden hour.” There’s a subplot about a rowboat.
An incident with a hotel bathtub that makes Nora put both hands over her face and Audrey ask a follow-up question so clinical that Layla chokes on her wine.
“He what?” Nora says, through her fingers.
“Twice,” Layla says, radiant and shameless.
“That’s a structural bathtub concern,” I offer.
“It really was.”
Audrey raises her glass. “To well-installed bathroom fixtures.”
We drink to the fixtures. Our food is delivered. We eat and Layla tells us about the morning Bennett got up at five to learn how the espresso machine worked so she’d wake to coffee, and got it so violently wrong the hotel sent an engineer—and my chest does a tiny, uncomfortable flutter.
I wish I could laugh and mean it. That I could drop a casual “sounds like true love” and clink glasses, but there’s something in my throat that won’t clear.
In my head I see Dominic, grinning at me over the divider of a ramen shop, asking if I want to try the spicy tare and not waiting for me to say yes.
I see his face in the stupid reflective elevator doors, watching me tie my hair up, and the sound he makes when he pushes my hands away and watches my hair spill freely down my back.
The way he looked at me in the mornings, before the world started up, like I was all it took to make his life feel complete.
Maybe that’s all it is: raw nerves, the hangover of intimacy after a lifetime of none. Maybe you don’t get to go from emotional zero to a hundred and expect the transmission to survive.
The check arrives and is dispatched with the usual protocol: Layla tries to pay for everyone, Serena physically restrains her, Nora leaves the tip because she’s the only one who still believes in cash.
On the sidewalk there’s the flurry of coats and cheek-kisses and calendar promises.
Nora has a staff meeting she describes as “avoidable but politically necessary.” Audrey’s due back at the lab.
Layla hugs me two seconds longer than standard and says, into my ear, “You know we love you, right?” which nearly undoes me right there on Rush Street.
“I know,” I say, and mean it, and let her go.
And then they’re gone, scattered to their happy lives, and I’m digging for my phone, finding four unread messages on the screen and a missed call. “Oh fuck.”
“Fuck what?” I’m not alone.
Serena falls into step beside me, hands in the pockets of her red coat.
“Oh. Just a difficult vendor.” I darken the screen. “I thought you had a client meeting.”
“I do. It’ll keep.” We walk half a block in easy silence, our heels striking the pavement in accidental sync. “That was nicely done, by the way. The necklace.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Forty minutes of coordinated interrogation, and you flipped the entire table with one piece of jewelry.”
“Layla’s honeymoon was an objectively more interesting topic than my business trip.”
“Mm.” We stop at the corner. The light is red. She turns and looks at me. “I’m in crisis PR, Jenna. That’s all I’m saying. I know a tactic when I see one.”
My pulse taps, hard, at the base of my throat. “Serena—”
“You don’t have to.” She says it easily, no weight on it at all. “It’s cool if you don’t want it to be everyone’s business. I get that better than anyone at that table, believe me. When Caleb started pursuing me, I hid it like a bad diagnosis.”
“Hid it? From who? Layla knew. I’ve heard the stories.”
“Layla knew he was texting me,” she corrects. “Everyone knew he was texting me. The man flirted via legal precedent and signed off Respectfully yours, Caleb, with a smiley face. Subtlety is not a Kingsley trait. No—what I hid was that it was working.”
“Ah,” I say, like a woman with no relevant case history.
“You have to understand the timing.” She watches the crosswalk count down instead of me, which somehow makes it easier to breathe.
“I’d been in shitty relationship after shitty relationship.
And just when I’d sworn off men, Caleb set his sights on me.
But I wasn’t ready for what he was offering, so I ghosted.
” She sighs and shifts her attention back to me.
“Then Luminous handed my entire life to the press with a bow on it. Framed for espionage by my own protégée—it was brutal.” She shakes her head.
“But it’s the thing that made me finally face what he meant to me.
” Her mouth curves, then settles. “And finally accept what I meant to him.”
The light changes. Neither of us moves.
“My point is,” she says, “nobody could have argued me into seeing what I had before I was ready. Not Layla, not a licensed professional, not the man himself standing in my apartment telling me he wasn’t going anywhere.
I had to get there myself. So I’m not going to push you, and I’m not going to report back to the table.
I just wanted you to know that I see what you did today, and that I once did it better and for longer, and it cost me almost a year with a man I love.
” She shrugs, elegant and unbothered, like she didn’t just hand me something with her chest cracked open.
“If there ever comes a day you need to say something out loud—to make sure it’s real, or to dissect why it isn’t—I’m around. No shrieking. No follow-up questions.”
And it’s the strangest thing. Out of all of them—Layla with her support, Nora with her warmth, Audrey with her spreadsheet of my behavioral anomalies—it’s Serena, the one who didn’t push, who gets closest to cracking me open on a street corner at one in the afternoon.
Because she’s not offering to fix anything.
She’s just opening a door in case I want to step through.
For one reckless second, I almost do it. I can feel the whole ridiculous confession climbing my throat—Tokyo, the deal, the texts, the promises we made when we should have known better—
“There’s nothing to say, Serena.”
My phone buzzes in my hand.
We both look down at it. DO NOT ANSWER glows up from the screen, bright as a signal flare.
Serena reads it. Looks back up at me. One eyebrow rises, slow and eloquent, and the corner of her mouth curves into something that isn’t quite a smirk and isn’t quite mercy.
“Interesting vendor name,” she says.