21. Jenna
Jenna
Iwake up alone in a bed that isn’t mine and it feels like proof of concept, like a rigorously tested pilot program that’s been left running just to see what happens when no one is watching.
The sheets smell like him—a woodsy, overdetermined cologne that doesn’t belong in linen, and the faint, mineral scent of man.
The pillow beside mine is dented in a way that says he left recently, or at least not with the kind of finality that would warrant remaking the bed.
For a few seconds I lie still and try not to let my brain spiral into darkness: Dominic Cruz, the apex predator of persistence, finally caught his quarry and then what?
Fucked me silly for an extra week and bailed?
Not even a note or a glass of water on the nightstand?
I stare at the ceiling, at the cracks in the paint, at the way morning sifts through a window statically frosted by the city’s permanent dust, and my brain thorns around the next logical conclusion.
He’s left. He was always going to leave. This isn’t unexpected. The novelty was always going to wear off, because frankly, I’m not that exciting. Especially for a man like Dominic. I’m actually surprised he lasted this long . . .
I shut the thought spiral down. Hard. This is not high school, and I am not the girl who gets dumped before prom. I am in his house, in his bed, and whatever this is, Dominic is not going to disappear out of his own life.
I am not my thoughts.
He is not my thoughts.
I force a breath through my nose.
We agreed to sixty days. He literally negotiated a whole marriage on a deadline. Dominic Cruz—master of the calibrated risk, king of the “tell me what you want and I’ll make it a market”—is not the kind of man to run.
He does not ghost.
He’s not my father, and he’s not any of the men who have pulled clean escape routes from the mess of me.
I twist my fingers in the sheet and force my brain to run the real math.
He spent last night—every minute of it—reminding me in elaborate, inventive detail exactly how much he wants me, and when I woke in the small dark hour to get water, his body was still holding mine.
I’m catastrophizing, and worse, I’m doing it with the emotional range of a woman who only has two of them—controlled and not-in-control.
Get a grip, Pemberton.
I sit up, stretch, and survey the room. The only things out of place are a pair of his jeans and a T-shirt draped over a chair and my own dress folded with neurotic precision on the bench at the foot of the bed.
The quiet is unnerving though, so I get up, pull on the T-shirt, and poke my head out the door. “Dominic?”
All week we stayed at my apartment—my commute is eleven minutes and his is thirty-one, so I ran the numbers and declared mine the more efficient weekday residence.
Which means this is my first morning at his house in Bucktown.
Married almost three weeks, and I’ve never been inside my husband’s home until last night.
I don’t know my way around it save for the kitchen and the main bedroom since Dominic’s favorite care tasks are to feed me and fuck me—not always in that order but sometimes on a loop. I have zero complaints in that department.
The house is an old textiles factory and has the bones to prove it: cement floors, exposed beams, the sort of brickwork that Instagram designers pay to have simulated in condos but which in this case is the actual, workaday grime of a hundred years’ industrial labor.
“Dominic?” The bedroom opens to a mezzanine level that overlooks the massive main floor, so I place my hands on the black metal railing and call down. No response.
I pad my way downstairs and scan my surroundings in the daylight.
There’s a wall of windows that throws a whitewashed plane of sunlight across the living room.
The furniture is heavy and oversized, the kind of pieces meant to be lived in rather than admired.
On the coffee table—a massive, ancient railroad beam—there’s an assortment of remotes, a stack of books, three legal pads, and a dish, presumably for keys, currently occupied by a set of cuff links and a tangle of rubber bands.
I smell coffee. I follow it.
The kitchen is industrial to fit the theme of the place, but it’s not pretentious.
The fridge is covered in a collage of Polaroids: Dominic in a Cubs hat, holding a six-foot sub over his head at what looks like a children’s birthday party; Dominic in a tux with Logan and Caleb, all three of them pulling faces that could be mugshots from an outlaw startup; Dominic holding his brother in a headlock over a chessboard, both of them laughing; his parents holding up drinks in toast and smiling, and there’s a blur of a child—maybe a cousin, maybe a godchild—making a face.
There are more: summer cookouts, holidays, pure civilian moments from college.
If I were being scientific, I’d call it observed evidence of a man whose life overflows with other people, a man who holds his world together not just by will, but by his own kind of gravity.
I stare at them, trying to reconcile the man I’ve known through conference rooms for almost a decade with this history of friends and laughter and family.
It’s not that I didn’t believe he had a life; it’s that I thought it was all performance.
A show. Looking at these photos, the laugh lines, the ridiculous hats, the unguarded joy, I realize I put him inside a box he doesn’t belong in.
It’s easy to ascribe performance to a man who’s made a personality out of being the main event, but there’s nothing staged in the history taped to this refrigerator.
I have a moment’s existential panic that I haven’t taken a single photo in six years—if someone hung up my life in Polaroids, it would be a parade of name tags and event lanyards and a sequence of “congratulations” cards from HR.
No one would know who I loved, or whether I ever let my hair down, or that sometimes I dance, mostly alone, in my living room when no one can see me.
I open the fridge. It is stupidly, offensively stocked, as though the person living here expects to host a battalion at a moment’s notice.
There are not one but two charcuterie tiers.
The dairy drawer alone could feed a child for a month.
On the upper shelf, a jug of cold brew, industrial-grade, and a row of glass bottles with nothing but the word “WHEY” in black block letters.
I take out the cold brew and fill a glass, drinking it and letting the cold cut through the spiral of my morning.
Returning the jug to the fridge, I take my half-finished drink and wander into the next room. Home office, I’m assuming—his laptop open and a black spiral notebook beside it, notes in blocky handwriting, chaotic in the margins.
There is, oddly, no sign of Dominic. Not even the ghostly echo of his voice, which is usually the first thing to permeate any closed space.
I squint at the clock. 9:17 a.m. Saturday.
Not a workday. I know he doesn’t have a meeting; Roz has been sharing his calendar with me to make scheduling between him and Bennett easier for years.
So, unless he was kidnapped between 6:00 a.m. and now (unlikely, based on the state of the kitchen), he’s somewhere in the building.
“Dominic?” I try again.
Nothing.
As I continue poking around inside rooms, I find the old factory is still present everywhere—original floor tiles by the stairwell, a cast-iron column somebody polished instead of boxing in, and a framed length of faded floral fabric on the landing wall with a small brass plate underneath: WOVEN ON SITE, 1948.
He framed the building’s own history and hung it where he’d pass it every day.
I run my finger along the edge of the frame and sigh. I hate being wrong about people. But as I continue perusing this monument to the life of Dominic Cruz, I’m kind of glad I was wrong this time. Perhaps a touch regretful too.
There are so many photographs. I thought the fridge had enough, but they are absolutely everywhere, and I lose whole minutes looking through them.
They can’t be decorator-approved—wrong frames, wrong sizes, hung at heights that suggest a man with a hammer and an opinion.
Dustin and Dominic at maybe ten and seven in matching pajamas, Dustin mid-laugh, Dominic mid-shout.
Esteban asleep under a Sharpie mustache, the photographer’s pride implicit in the framing.
Helena young and lovely on a porch, caught off guard, laughing at whoever’s behind the camera.
The guys—Logan and Dominic holding an enormous fish with identical grins, Bennett and Caleb at some graduation, a shot from David and Nora’s engagement party where Michaela is photobombing with her whole soul.
Thirty-odd years of people, printed and framed and dusted, in a world where everyone else keeps their love in a phone.
I take the stairs down to the next level, following the gallery, and stop.
There, on the shelf at eye level, in a plain gold frame that doesn’t match the others because it’s newer than all of them: Neon behind us. My head thrown back, his mouth against my cheek, both of us laughing like idiots at two a.m. in a city that let us be a different version of ourselves.
Us in Tokyo.
I stand there in his T-shirt with my cold brew in hand, and I let the feeling happen instead of filing it, which is a new discipline I’m practicing with mixed results.
That’s when I hear it—somewhere below my feet, muffled by two floors of old factory: a metallic clatter, and then, faint but unmistakable, Dominic swearing in two languages.
I follow the sound past the second floor, down to the ground level and stop on the bottom step.
The workshop runs the length of the building.
Concrete floors, massive rolling doors, workbenches along the brick, tools hung in outlines.
There’s a battered leather couch that has clearly hosted a hundred naps, a vintage refrigerator humming in the corner, and in the center of it all, under a cone of shop light, a half-assembled motorcycle up on a hydraulic lift—old, elegant bones, tank the color of oxblood.
And bent over it, socket wrench between his teeth, grease to both elbows, in faded jeans and a T-shirt that has given its life to the cause, is Dominic.
My probationary husband, the billionaire, elbow-deep in an engine at nine in the morning, entirely unaware he’s being watched, humming around the wrench to whatever’s playing low on the shop speakers.
There is something startlingly intimate about watching him absorbed in a life that exists whether anyone is looking or not.
I could watch this for a year.
He takes the wrench out of his mouth.
“You’re staring, Pemberton.”