12. Dominic
Dominic
Stepping away from Jenna outside her building last night was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
The night had been so close to perfect. In true Jenna fashion, it’d started off cool and gradually warmed until she was putty in my hands.
All I had to do was hold my hand out and demand her keys and she would have dragged me upstairs to spend the night between her thighs.
Instead, I stepped back because as much as I know she melts when I take control, I also know her. Well enough to understand that the only way to get through to Jenna Pemberton is to take my hands off the wheel at the exact moment I want to slam on the gas.
I made it to my car. I made it home. Jacked off twice and still slept like shit.
That fucking folder is haunting me.
It rides shotgun as I make my way into the city, glaring at me like a pissed-off ghost. Part of me wants to torch it. Drop it in the path of a street cleaner, let the wind work on it until it’s pulp and pretend it doesn’t exist.
But my conscience won’t let me.
Morals really get in the way sometimes.
When I reach the city, it’s doing its usual weekend impression—joggers, farmers market totes, a guy walking four dogs without breaking a sweat.
I cruise the block until I find parking near David’s building.
When I head inside, the concierge gives me a friendly, “Mr. Cruz,” and lets me through to the elevators.
Normally, I love coming to visit David and his kid.
But today, the folder under my arm feels like the death of all my dreams. Though it’s hard not to crack a smile when I’m barely halfway down the hall and I can already hear the thunder of paws.
The door opens before I knock. Michaela stands in the gap with a clipboard in her hands, Archie shouldering past her to headbutt my thigh like I owe him money or snacks.
“Uncle Dominic,” she says. “Excellent. I have a proposal for you.”
“Of course you do.” I scratch Archie’s enormous golden head and let them both usher me in. “Sixty seconds. Pitch me.”
A few months ago, the only thing my nine-year-old niece could talk about was dolphins and becoming a Supreme Court justice.
But a disappointing experience with the legal system when her absent mother decided to try and get her parental rights reinstated has her exploring other options.
Entrepreneurialism—or girl bossing, as she likes to call it—is the current flavor.
“Dog-walking cooperative,” she says, walking alongside me.
“Me and two girls from school. We have eleven committed clients, a sliding-scale pricing model, and a waitlist.” She holds up a clipboard that has, God help me, a chart on it.
“We need startup capital for branded bandanas. Fifty dollars. In exchange, I’m prepared to offer you four percent. ”
“Four.” I put a hand over my heart. “You’re valuing a pre-revenue dog-walking operation at twelve-fifty on eleven verbal commitments. You wound me. I want twelve percent.”
“Six, and I’ll stop telling people you cried like a baby at Layla and Bennett’s wedding.”
“That’s old news. I always cry at weddings.”
“Fine. I’ll tell them about that time you slipped in a mud puddle at the park and split your pants.”
“Six,” I agree, shaking her small, merciless hand. “You’re going to run the Fed someday, and I want it noted I was an early investor.”
Nora appears from the kitchen wearing yoga pants and an oversized T-shirt, reading glasses pushed up into her auburn hair. She looks like the front cover of a book depicting the kind of life I’d have said I didn’t want three years ago.
“Dominic. Hi! This is a nice surprise.” She accepts the kiss on the cheek, then narrows her eyes at Michaela. “Did you just close a round before Dominic got his coat off?”
“She got six percent of my dignity and a controlling interest in my weekend. The place smells amazing, by the way. Whatever that is in the oven, I’d annex a small country for it.”
“Brownies, and flattery gets you a corner piece.” She’s already moving toward the kitchen. “Coffee? Tea?”
“Something harder?” I half-joke. It’s nine a.m., but I’m not above drinking to take the edge off shitty legal documents.
David comes down the hall in a sweater with the sleeves pushed up, and there must be something in my face that makes him look up and frown. “Is this about the mysterious paperwork you called me about?” he asks, his voice low and lawyerly.
I hold up the folder. “It is. I’m going to need you to look at this.”
Nora pours two mugs of coffee and sloshes a modest glug of whiskey into mine. She sets them in front of us and doesn’t let go of mine right away. “That’s all I’m giving you at this time of the morning, Casanova.”
I pick the coffee up with two hands and inhale. “Thank you, Nora. This is why you’re my favorite.” I take a sip.
“I thought I was your favorite?” Michaela says, making a sound somewhere between a gasp and a laugh.
“You are. You’re my favorite Michaela,” I say, with pure conviction, “but she’s my favorite Nora.”
Michaela considers this, then nods, magnanimous in victory. “Makes sense,” she says. “I don’t want custody of you, anyway.”
She disappears with Archie, and Nora gives my arm a squeeze before David gestures for me to follow him into his home office.
We leave the kitchen with two mugs and the folder, which I clamp under my arm like it might try to escape.
The office is small and warm—fancy books with gold lettering on shelves and a bunch of crayon drawings of Archie taped on every surface in between.
In the corner is a child-size desk because his daughter is his life and Michaela has a place in every room of this apartment.
He closes the door, holds out his hand, and I put the folder in it, then realize I can’t release my grip.
“Dominic.” David gives the folder a gentle tug and I force myself to let go.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine. Can I look inside now? Or are you gonna slap it from my hand the moment I get a peek?” He’s smiling but I can tell he also thinks this is a possibility.
“It’s fine.” I gesture for him to go ahead. “I need to know if I can refuse to sign.”
He gives me a look, his brows halfway up his forehead, then opens the folder.
I watch him read. I’ve been across enough tables from David Kingsley to know his poker face is his superpower, which is how I know exactly how bad it is when the poker face slips.
He stops. Reads the header again. His jaw goes slack, and then his eyes come up over the top of the page.
“These are annulment papers, Dominic.”
“Technically I think your people call it—”
“A petition for declaration of invalidity of marriage, yes, I can read.” He sets the folder down on the desk with both hands. “Dominic. You’re married?”
“Today makes it ten days of matrimonial bliss.”
“To Jenna.”
“Well, I’m not out here collecting wives, David.”
He sits on the edge of his desk like his knees have withdrawn their support. For a second he’s not my lawyer, he’s just my friend, staring at me with his mouth open. “Tokyo. The trip—Caleb said you came back looking like— How? Were you drunk?”
And there it is. The question everyone will ask—because everyone will assume a woman like Jenna had to be inebriated to marry a man like me that fast.
My gut twists.
“The decision was half-drunk,” I say. “The vows weren’t.”
He waits for me to elaborate.
“It started as a throwaway comment.” I hear how it sounds and I keep going anyway, because if he’s going to advise me, he needs the whole of it.
“Last night in Tokyo. This yakitori counter the size of a hallway, two in the morning, the deal was done and we were—we were happy, David. She was laughing with her whole body. And we saw these two kids walk past—maybe twenty-two, twenty-three, still half-wasted from their own reception. The girl had this white tube dress on and a veil made out of what I’m almost positive was a hotel pillowcase.
The guy was wearing a suit jacket over jeans and they looked so goddamn happy.
It was like they didn’t know the rest of the city existed.
Jenna watched them go by, she finished her drink, and she said—” I have to clear my throat.
It’s not failing me, but I hear the catch all the same.
“She said, ‘Just think, in another life, that could have been us.’”
David stares, not even trying to hide the intensity. “And you said?”
I shrug. “I said, ‘What do you mean, another life? That literally can be us. You want a ring, you’ve got it. Marry me.’” I rub my jaw, remembering the moment like it’s still running on a loop, running hot and bright behind my eyes.
“She laughed and called me an idiot. So I said I was absolutely serious. That if she wanted to, I’d marry her right then and there.
” You and me, Pemberton. To the ends of the earth . . .
David looks at me like I’ve handed him a live grenade.
“Dominic, please tell me you’re not saying what it sounds like—”
“Tokyo doesn’t have a waiting period, David.
” Suddenly the memory is so crisp, it makes my throat damn near ache.
“Thirty-minute cab ride to Shibuya. We hit a twenty-four-hour jewelry place. I bought her a ring. She made me ask her properly, so I did. I got down on one knee, and she said yes, and we did it. I made a few calls—cashed in a favor at the embassy and another at the ward office to speed the paperwork along—and we were legally married before sunrise.”
He blinks at me in total disbelief. “You married Jenna Pemberton in Japan because you—”
“Love each other.” I can hear how pathetic that sounds: a decade’s worth of wanting, collapsed into a single sentence. “Nobody was forced. Nobody was tricked. We stood there stone-cold sober and we meant it, both of us, and everything was fucking perfect. And the very next morning—”
I stop.
“That’s why she came back to Chicago on a different flight,” he says quietly.
“She left a Post-it on the certificate.” I look at the kid’s drawing over his printer because I can’t look at him. “Two words. Undo this.”
The room is quiet for a while. Down the hall, faintly, Michaela is explaining something to Nora with great authority, and Archie’s tail is thumping against a cabinet, and the ordinary Saturday sounds of a home full of people who chose each other drift under the door like heat.
David picks the folder back up. Reads it properly this time, lawyer again, and it steadies us both.
“She’s petitioning on lack of capacity,” he says.
“Her position is she couldn’t validly consent—that she wasn’t in her right mind when the marriage was solemnized.
It’s drafted clean. Her lawyer’s good.” He flips a page.
“The window on those grounds is ninety days from when she knew of the condition she says impaired her consent. Her lawyer will count from the morning she woke up married to avoid any argument about timing. That’s why there’s urgency in the cover letter. ”
“And if I refuse to sign?”
“She doesn’t need your signature to file.
It’s a petition, not a treaty.” He looks up.
“What she needs is for the facts to hold. And you’re the other witness to the facts, Dominic.
If you corroborate—if you tell the court yes, she was impaired, it wasn’t real consent—it goes through quiet and fast, and legally it will be as if the marriage never existed.
If you contest it . . .” He exhales. “Then it’s testimony.
Discovery. A public record of the single most private night of her life, picked apart by strangers.
And from what you’ve told me, a petition that probably fails—because sober vows at sunrise are the opposite of lack of capacity. And if it fails, or the window lapses—”
“Then the only door left is divorce.”
“Then the only door left is divorce,” he agrees.
“Good,” I say, and I feel my jaw set. “Then she can divorce me like a regular person.”
“Dominic. There’s no prenup—”
“I don’t fucking care!” I plant both hands on his desk, and the thing I’ve kept in a straight line all week finally bends.
“Listen to me. A divorce ends a marriage. An annulment says there never was one. She’s not asking to leave me, David.
She’s asking me to swear it wasn’t real.
To sign my name to the story where she was out of her mind and I was a mistake and the whole thing gets erased like it never happened.
And it happened. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done that I genuinely give a fuck about—it’s the realest thing I have.
” I straighten up. “Marriage means something to me, David. I won’t corroborate a lie. Not even for her.”
David watches me for a long moment. Then he drags his fingers through his hair and lets out a sigh.
When he speaks again it isn’t my lawyer talking.
It’s a man who spent seven years raising a daughter alone because the person who was supposed to stay didn’t, who knows exactly what paper can and cannot hold together.
“As your attorney, I’ll tell you your options and draft whatever you decide.
But as your friend?” He laces his fingers together in his lap.
“If she doesn’t want to be married to you, Dominic, you can’t force it.
Not with ninety days, not with nine hundred.
Paper doesn’t keep people. I know that better than anyone. ”
“I’m not trying to keep her with paper.” I tap a finger against the folder. “I’m refusing to lose her with it. She wants out—the door works fine. It’s the eraser I won’t hand her.”
“And if the door is all she wants?”
“Then I’ll walk her through it myself,” I say. “But she’s going to have to end something real. I’m not signing a piece of paper that says it never was.”