15. Dominic
Dominic
Northern Boulevard slides past the window in strips of neon and shutter-gate steel, and I’m looking for a tall woman in a cashmere coat the way other men look for exits.
“She said near a laundromat with a mural,” I tell Rodney, who has been driving me around New York for eleven years and has never once asked a follow-up question, which is why I pay him a handsome retainer. “Cartoon skyline.”
“That’s half of Queens, Mr. Cruz.”
“Then drive past half of Queens.”
I have never wished teleportation existed more than I did in the moment I heard Jenna’s sob break over the phone.
When she texted Mom’s birthday this morning, I was still at David’s, standing in his kitchen drinking my spiked coffee while Michaela went over her dog-walking operation with me.
My first thought was Tokyo, two a.m., her voice gone soft at the edge of sleep, telling me about her relationship with her mother.
She never said anything as unguarded as my mother hurts me.
She said things like visits can be strained and I do my best to keep the conversation light, and then she sighed and said that nothing is light if her mother is drinking and then abruptly changed the subject.
Most adults drink on their birthdays.
I called my pilot the moment she said she was “fine.”
I don’t even bother pretending that was rational.
Rational is for quarterly reports and board votes and deciding whether a five-percent concession opens you up to a predator clause.
Rational is not for the woman you accidentally-on-purpose married in Tokyo, who has spent ten days trying to legally erase you and then whispers I need you like her whole world is collapsing inward.
If she hadn’t called, I’d have flown home tomorrow morning and she would never have known I was here.
That was the deal I made with myself at the gate.
This wasn’t a play. There was no next move.
It was just—if the day went the way her sigh said it might go, I wanted the distance between us to be twenty minutes instead of a two-hour flight.
She called.
My only regret is that I chose to wait in the apartment I keep on Sutton Place for when I’m in town doing business. I’d fought against my instinct to sit in a car across from her mother’s place like a stalker. And now I wish I’d given in. I’d have gotten to her a hell of a lot faster.
“There.”
Rodney is already pulling over. She’s exactly where she said she’d be, across from the laundromat mural, overnight bag at her feet, arms crossed like she’s holding a version of herself together with upper-body strength.
Streetlights catching her cheekbones. Chin up, of course. Even now, even shaking, the chin is up.
I’m out of the car before it fully stops.
“Jen.”
She turns. And I watch it happen—the thing I will think about for the rest of my life.
The chin holds for one more second, professional to the last, and then her face just .
. . falls. All of it. The composure, the armor, the thirty-odd years of practice, sliding off her like a coat with all the stitching cut, and underneath is a woman on a sidewalk of her childhood neighborhood, looking at me like she can’t decide whether I’m real.
“You came.”
“Of course I did.”
I wrap her in my arms and she makes a sound against me—small, cracked, furious at itself—and grips the back of my coat with both fists.
She’s tall enough that her face fits into my neck, which I have thought about more than I’ll ever admit, and she’s trembling in that fine, suppressed way of someone who has been using every bit of their energy keeping themselves together.
“I’ve got you,” I say into her hair. “I’ve got you, sweetheart.”
We stand there while Queens moves around us—a bus, a man shouting into his phone, a delivery bike threading the gap between parked cars—and I hold the most controlled woman in Chicago while she comes quietly apart on a street corner.
And I swear to myself that whatever her mother said tonight, I will spend a lifetime saying otherwise.
I press a kiss to the top of her head. “Let’s get you off the street.”
In the car she doesn’t talk. She sits pressed into my side, her hand in mine on my knee, watching the boroughs change out the window. Rodney takes the bridge instead of the tunnel, because the bridge has the skyline and the tunnel has nothing, and I make a note to raise his retainer again.
The apartment is on the eighteenth floor in a limestone building with a doorman who remembers everything and reacts to nothing.
It isn’t flashy. No glass walls that make a place look like a terrarium in the sky.
Just old wood, brass, thick rugs, tall windows, and the East River sliding black beneath the Queensboro Bridge.
I bought it because my New York money men all orbit Midtown and kept it because the place has discretion baked into the plaster.
I’ve never brought a woman here. Not once.
I have no intention of telling Jenna that and every intention of enjoying the fact for the rest of the night.
She stands in the middle of the living room with her coat still on, city light all over her, and surveys the place with a flicker of the old Jenna. “Of course you have a fancy New York apartment.”
“Technically it’s a crash pad.”
“It has a Steinway, Dominic. Do you even play piano?”
I cock my head slightly. “Have you met me?”
“Of course you do. You’re probably amazing at it too.”
“Amazing might be pushing it.”
That gets me the ghost of a laugh, which is the entire strategic objective. I take her coat, put whiskey in her hand, order from the Italian place downstairs, and then I sit next to her on the couch, close but not crowding, and I do the hardest thing a man like me can do.
Nothing.
I don’t negotiate for information like it’s trapped value.
I don’t make a joke about Italian food being a superior coping mechanism, even though there’s one right there and under normal circumstances I’d have put a flag in it.
I just sit there with my forearms on my knees, close enough that if she leans an inch she’ll hit me, far enough that she doesn’t have to.
Jenna holds the whiskey with both hands and stares at it like it has offended her personally.
“This glass is very heavy,” she says after a while.
“It’s crystal.”
“Of course it is.”
“You want a mug?”
“No.” She takes a small sip, winces, and then looks faintly annoyed at herself for wincing. “This is excellent whiskey.”
“It should be. I pay a man in Scotland an unreasonable amount of money to feel emotionally superior to other rich men.”
Her mouth twitches.
Then her eyes lift to meet mine. “Thank you for coming to my rescue.”
I nod. “Ends of the earth, Pemberton.”
She sips the whiskey again. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s not really Pemberton anymore. It’s Cruz.”
“Is it?”
Her lips press together and she lets out a slow breath, her eyes back on the amber liquid in the glass. “My mother would accuse me of having daddy issues and marrying my father,” she says after a moment, her voice barely a whisper.
I sit there for a moment, but she doesn’t elaborate. “Why would she think that?”
And more importantly, why do we care what a woman who just brought you to tears thinks?
She looks up at me now. “Because my dad left. And kind of like you, he was—charming. Handsome. Everybody loves you.”
“I don’t mistake attention for love, Jenna.” I hold her gaze. “And there’s only one woman I want that kind of love from.”
She nods, wipes at a stray tear. “She was drunk before I even got there today.” She sips again, her grip steady now.
“It’s not that she said anything I haven’t heard before.
It’s just . . . the way she says it. Like failure is my only inheritance.
” She looks up, and for the first time since I pulled her off that curb, the anger in her is hotter than the grief.
“I don’t know what she wants from me. Everything I do is either wrong or somehow belittling.
She found out Dad’s moving in with another woman, and decided to accuse Hailey and me of being just like him.
We’re all my father. Always abandoning her, using her up.
She basically called me a whore when I told her I went to Tokyo for work.
Because what else would a woman like me do in another country besides whoring?
” She swipes at her tears angrily. “I left when she threw the beautiful cake I bought her in the trash.” She downs the last of the whiskey and tips her head back, closing her eyes.
“I’m sorry. I know I’m not making sense. I’m just . . .”
“Hurting,” I say.
Her throat works. “And I’m scared, Dominic.
Of becoming her.” She bites the inside of her lip, blinking back more tears.
“She was so beautiful—back when she and Dad were still together. Her whole body lit up whenever he was in the room. Like he was the sun and she was just . . . something that only knew how to bloom if he looked at her.” Her laugh is small and shredded.
“And then he left, and she went out like a match.”
I don’t move.
Every instinct in me wants to. Wants to put the glass down for her, pull her into my lap, tell her she is nothing like that woman, that I would cut off my own hand before I let needing me make her smaller. I want to build a whole department, a life plan, a fortress with her name on the deed.
Instead, I stay still.
Barely.
“She loved him so much it destroyed her,” she says.
“Or maybe he just ruined her and she called it love because that was easier. I don’t know.
I was a kid. I just know that one day she was dancing in the kitchen, singing into a wooden spoon, and then she became bitter.
Mean. Small.” Her voice catches. “I look at her and I think, is that what happens? Is that what love does if you let too much of it in? Does it hollow you out until all that’s left is a woman screaming at her daughters over a cake? ”
“No,” I say.
It comes out before I can stop it.
Jenna’s eyes find mine. “You don’t know that.”
“Of course I do.”
“You don’t.”
“I do,” I repeat, because there are very few things in this life I’m willing to state without a hedge, and this is one of them. “Your father hurt her. Alcohol gave her somewhere to hide. And she chose to pass that hurt on to you and your sister. None of that is love.”
She looks at me like she wants to believe me and hates me for making it available.
“Love destroys people. All the time. I spent my whole life watching it.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” I say, and I gather her in my arms, let her body sag against my chest. “Is this why you’re always fighting so hard? You’re scared I’m going to destroy you?”
She nods against my chest, a tiny, terrified movement.
“Yes,” she whispers, the word catching on a jagged breath.
And there it is. The thing I’ve been negotiating against for three years without ever once seeing it across the table.
It was never the marriage. It was never even me.
It’s that every charming thing I’ve ever done—every room I’ve run, every laugh I’ve pulled out of a crowd—has been a warning bell in her head.
A sequel to the same act her father used right up until he walked.
I press my cheek against the crown of her head. “I’m not your father, Jen. And you sure as hell aren’t your mother.”
The difference is her father worked a room to feed himself. I work a room so the people I love don’t get eaten.
I pull back just enough to frame her face with my hands. Her eyes are shining, completely stripped of their usual armor . . . and it wrecks me.
“I’m not going to ruin you,” I assure her, my voice dropping to a register that leaves absolutely no room for debate. My thumbs sweep the dampness from her cheeks, gentle and slow. “If anything, Pemberton, you’re the one who’s going to ruin me. And I’m going to let you.”
It’s not something I expect her to believe tonight. Facts don’t fix fear. Time does. Time, and a man who keeps showing up until showing up stops being remarkable.
However long it takes—however hard she fights—she’s going to watch me stay.
She lets out a shaky exhale, her hands still fisted in the fabric of my shirt. “You’re too good at this.”
“At what?”
“Saying exactly what I need to hear.”
“I’m just telling the truth.” I press a soft kiss to her forehead. “You don’t have to believe me tonight.”
She closes her eyes and leans into my palm, finally too exhausted to argue.
The intercom chimes, cutting through the heavy quiet of the apartment.
“Food,” I tell her. “You’re going to eat, and then you’re going to sleep. No family. No work. No worrying about the future. Just you, me, and a bed that’s far too big for one person.”
She opens her eyes, a faint, combative spark returning. “Why are you always so bossy?”
“Because I’m right. And deep down, you fucking love it when I tell you what to do.”
She fakes a gasp, but it doesn’t hide the blush.
“Come on, Pemberton.” I stand and offer her my hand. “Let’s get you fed.”