31. Jenna
Jenna
The coffee shop off Lexington is doing its Friday-morning impression of a stock exchange, and I got here twelve minutes early, which is how I know I’m nervous.
The last time I was in New York, I walked out of my mother’s birthday dinner and didn’t stop until Manhattan.
Hailey and I have texted plenty since—reels mostly, a short exchange about the Canfield position, and one long thread about whether Ma’s “I’m trying” phone call was real or a limited-time offer—but I haven’t sat across from my sister since the day a beautifully made birthday cake went into the trash.
I wasn’t getting on a plane back to Chicago without fixing that.
“OK, what is that,” she says, pointing at my face.
“What’s what?”
“That. On your face. You look—” she narrows her eyes, slides into the chair across from me, and studies me like a bank statement that doesn’t balance. “Rested? No. Happy. Jenna, you look happy. It’s freaking me out. Who died?”
“Nobody died.”
“Then who—” Her eyes drop. To my hand. To the gold band I have stopped taking off and stopped noticing, and her whole face does something seismic. “Jenna Marie Pemberton. Explain to me why there’s a gold band on your wedding finger.”
“So here’s the thing,” I say.
It takes thirty minutes, two coffees, and three slices of cake. I tell my little sister everything: The years of flirtation. Layla and Bennett’s wedding. Tokyo. The yakitori bar. The two kids with the pillowcase veil, and what I said, and how he called my bluff and we were married by sunrise.
And then the part I have to look at the table to get through—me freaking out and leaving Tokyo early. Then the annulment papers I served on my own husband in his own office, then agreeing only a few days later to wear the ring for sixty days.
Hailey doesn’t shriek. I braced for shrieking—she’s a shrieker, it’s genetic on Ma’s side—but she just holds her coffee in both hands and watches me over the rim, and when I get to the annulment she sets it down.
“Why?” she says after I’m done. “Even I picked up on the fact you’ve been half in love with this guy for years, Jen. The way you talked about him—found a way to insert his name into conversations—”
“I did not!” I object, but it’s not even worth the breath. Hailey’s grin is already on the march.
“You did,” she says. “But you only ever complained about him. Like, top-shelf, artisanal complaints. You curated them. It was basically erotic hate speech.”
“I curated nothing,” I say, but my objections are drowning in cake crumbs and nostalgia.
“There’s no point denying it, Nenna. You went and married the guy.” Hailey smiles and reaches across the table, her hand covering mine. “What I want to know now is why? Why’d you try to end things with him the moment it got good?”
And because she’s my sister, and because she grew up in the same house I did, and probably shares the same fears, I tell her the truth.
“Because I woke up the next morning, looked at the ring on my finger, and all I could hear was Ma’s voice.
” My thumb finds the ring and turns it. “He’ll leave you.
He’s just like your father. You’ll end up bitter and alone like me.
” I lift my eyes to hers. “That’s all I could hear, Hails.
Charming. Loud. Everybody’s favorite guy in the room.
And the more it ran on a loop in my head, the more I realized I married the best time I ever had.
I looked at him sleeping and thought: I know how this movie ends.
I watched it from the top of the stairs my whole childhood.
So I got scared, and I did the only thing that made sense at the time.
” I let out a heavy breath. “I left before he could hurt me.”
Hailey cocks her head, looking at me like I’ve grown not only a second head, but an entire second body too.
“My therapist would love this,” she says, not unkindly, and I almost laugh.
What would the billable hours be for two sisters who grew up believing love meant measuring the time between outbursts?
“Honestly, Jen, that makes complete sense.” Her pinkie taps the cup, a tiny nervous tic she’s always had.
“But that guy—he’s not Dad, right? You know that. ”
“I do. At first, I was just telling myself that intellectually. But as time goes on, and I’m starting to feel safe to let my guard down around him, I’m actually seeing it.”
Hailey smiles. “OK. So tell me about him. I mostly know this guy as an over-caffeinated squirrel who’s always up in your business and buying you drinks you don’t want but secretly love. Who’s Dominic Cruz when he’s winning over my big sister’s heart?”
The smile that takes over my lips feels corny and uncontrollable.
And for once, I don’t try and tamp it down.
I just let it take over and add the sigh to go along with it.
“He’s—Hailey, he’s warm. He’s kind in this relentless, organized way, like caring about people is his actual full-time job and the billions are the hobby.
I just watched him spend two days putting two whole families back together.
His brother got in some trouble, and Dominic flew out within the hour.
He calmed his mother, gave his father something useful to focus on, and kept the whole room moving toward a solution when it wanted to become a fight.
And he never made anyone feel small.” I turn my cup a quarter-rotation.
“You expect these wealthy, powerful men to walk into a room, slap their wallets down, and demand a resolution that suits them. But Dominic has this way with people where every meeting ends with everyone smiling and feeling heard. He’s wonderful. ”
“He sounds it, Nen.”
“Dad worked a room so the room would love him. Dominic works a room so nobody in it has to hurt. It took me a long time to see the difference. But it’s the whole difference.”
Hailey smiles, her expression soft and dreamy. “Can I see pictures? Please tell me there are photos of the wedding.”
“Not many,” I say. “But I have a couple.” I pick up my phone and scroll through my camera roll.
Six weeks ago it was screenshots of spreadsheets, a few mirror selfies, and one photo of a parking spot number.
Now there’s a man asleep on a leather couch with grease on his jaw.
A blurry sunroom of Cruzes mid-toast. Roz’s grandchild wearing my sunglasses.
Dustin and me on a staircase, both of us mid-laugh, taken by Hannah.
And the one I open for her: Tokyo, confetti, my head thrown back, his mouth against my cheek, two idiots lit up like the neon behind them.
Hailey looks at it for a long time. Zooms in. Zooms out. Sighs.
“Oh, Jen,” she says finally, and her voice has gone thick.
“Look at your face.” She swipes—I let her—through the couch, the sunroom, the staircase, back to the confetti.
“I’m so happy for you, I could scream, and I’m not going to, because you’d leave.
You know that, right? You deserve this. You deserve somebody who looks at you like that.
You’ve deserved it this whole time, even when you were being a fortress with fabulous hair. ”
“Hailey.”
“I’m serious. Don’t argue with me in front of my city.”
My phone buzzes in her hand, and she glances down before I can take it back. Her eyebrows go up. “Who’s Dustin, and why is he texting you a picture of himself and a girl holding a—” she squints—“a driving school brochure?”
I lean over. Dustin and Hannah, cheek to cheek on the Round Hill porch, brandishing the Stamford adaptive-driving program brochure like a lottery check. The text underneath:
Dustin:
NICKY SIGNED ME UP. REAL LESSONS. Hannah gets to come to my graduation. Tell Jenny.
And then, three seconds later:
You are Jenny. Tell yourself.
“That’s my brother-in-law,” I say, and the word comes out of my mouth for the first time ever, easy as breath, and I have to look at the window for a second. “And the girl in the photo with him is his girlfriend, Hannah. She’s deaf, so the whole family is learning sign language for her.”
“You have a family,” Hailey says, watching me. “Like, a whole aggressively functional family. In-laws who text you. God, what is that like?”
“Loud,” I say. “You’d love them.”
“So where is this husband of yours today? Do I get to meet him?”
“He had some meeting he needed to go to.”
“What kind of meeting?”
“He didn’t say. But he has a bunch of clients in New York. It’s why he has an apartment here.”
Hailey’s eyebrows rise. “Oh my God. It’s just hitting me now—you married a billionaire.”
“I did.”
“Oh my God. I need to be you when I grow up.”
And then her face does the thing I’ve been waiting for since I sat down, because my sister and I run on the same operating system: the joy stays, but something practical moves in behind it, like weather.
“You know Ma’s going to hate him,” she says.
“I know.”
“Not because of anything he does. Because of what he is. Charming, rich, everybody’s favorite—he’s a walking rerun of the worst years of her life, and she’s not going to see the difference, Jen. She’s going to see Dad with better lawyers. She’ll take one look at that smile and start sharpening.”
“I know, Hails. Why do you think I haven’t told her?
” I say it to the table. “I’m scared to even let them in the same room.
He wants to meet her. Of course he wants to meet her—he thinks every problem can be catered.
And all I can think about is that kitchen, and the cake in the trash, and what she could do to this thing I just—” I stop.
Breathe. “It’s new, is all. It’s real, and it’s new, and she breaks things because she wants everyone to feel as unhappy as she is. ”
My sister reaches across the table and grips my wrist, and suddenly she doesn’t look like the girl who cried with me over my prom dress. She looks like a woman who stayed in that house eleven more years than I did and knows exactly what it costs.