35. Dominic
Dominic
By eleven on Friday morning, the Nakamura implementation review is finished and Logan Whitman has claimed the couch in my office, where he’s reading the revised management agreement for his family-office accounts the way other men read box scores—fast, muttering, personally offended by inefficiencies.
“Page eleven,” he says. “You changed the parental-contact protocol.”
“Marginally.”
“If my mother makes another approach through counsel, the notice comes to you first now. Not me.” He looks up. He’s got a red pen in his hand—he annotates his own management agreement like he’s marking my homework. “When were you going to mention that?”
“Ideally never. That was the entire design philosophy.”
For a decade, Cruz Financial has managed the portion of Logan’s fortune that supports the Whitman family machinery—the licensing income, investment distributions, and standing household obligations his parents treat as their birthright.
Caroline and Edmund have been quiet since the confrontation twelve months ago, but quiet isn’t gone.
Edmund sent a Christmas card last year. Typed. Logan analyzed the font for two days.
“Dominic.” Logan sets down the pen with the deliberateness he uses when he’s about to say a feelings thing, which for Logan requires the same preparation as a spacewalk. “You expanded the monitoring scope and buried the cost in my existing management fee. Again.”
“You’re welcome.”
“That’s not—” He exhales through his nose.
“Charge me properly. The same way you would any other client. My parents are a lot.” His hand rakes through his perpetually messy hair.
“It’s my family. My liability. You shouldn’t have to act as my human shield just because my parents view me as a distressed asset. ”
“First of all, I’m an excellent shield. Top tier.
Premium market value.” I lean back in my desk chair, crossing my arms over my chest to lock down the sudden, uncomfortable tightness in my ribs.
I hate this part. I hate when he looks at me with that earnest, analytical intensity, trying to dissect the mechanics of our friendship.
It requires me to acknowledge those mechanics exist in the first place.
“Second, watching you spiral for forty-eight hours over Helvetica wasn’t exactly optimal for either of our schedules. I’m just streamlining our operations.”
Logan pushes his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose, the jerky movement betraying his irritation. “You’re deflecting with corporate jargon. You’re treating my emotional baggage like a cost absorption issue.”
“Because it is.” I pick up a stylus, tapping it methodically against my desk. “You’re building a life with Audrey now. You want to shield her from Caroline’s casual psychological warfare, and you have a habit of unilaterally absorbing that damage yourself. I’m just managing the perimeter.”
“I don’t need you to—”
“Need doesn’t factor into the equation, hermano.” The Spanish slips out, and I clear my throat, immediately shifting my gaze to the monitor. “Your parents are assholes. You don’t deserve assholes for parents. I’m simply doing what I do.”
“And I’m happy for you to do it. Just bill me.”
I smile. “No.”
Logan rolls his eyes. “Then at least let me buy you lunch.”
I check my watch. Hailey is due to land this afternoon and will go straight to her one-on-one final interview with Field at The Metropolitan Club.
Jenna is collecting her afterward for the emergency fitting, then taking her out to dinner for sisterly bonding.
Which means, without my wife to chase around and lust after, I’m forced to focus on work.
I have time before my next conference call anyway.
I snap the stylus back into its magnetic holder on my desk. “Lunch is acceptable,” I say, offering a magnanimous nod. “But if you try to slip my firm a retainer fee disguised as a tip, I’m legally obligated to have you escorted from the premises.”
Logan huffs, standing and brushing invisible lint off his trousers. “I wouldn’t use a restaurant receipt. I’d wire it directly to your operating account. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” I stand, grabbing my suit jacket from the back of my chair. “We’re going to O’Malley’s. I need a burger and a side of cheese curds, and you need an environment where nobody cares about your net worth or your mother’s standing in the ladies’ auxiliary.”
“O’Malley’s is acceptable,” Logan says, already moving toward the door.
His brain is likely already recalibrating his afternoon schedule to factor in grease and cheese curds.
But then he pauses in the frame, turning back with that damn earnestness creeping into his expression again.
“I just . . . I appreciate it, Dominic. The perimeter management.”
My jaw tightens. I hate the sincerity. It itches. I clap a heavy hand on his shoulder as I brush past him into the hallway, physically steering him forward so we don’t have to maintain eye contact.
“Asset protection, Whitman. Standard operating procedure,” I say smoothly, locking my office door behind us. “Now move, before I start calculating the billable hours for this conversation.”
An hour later, I’m chalking a cue under the half-dead neon that has only said MALL for years while a basket of cheese curds does its sacred work between us, and my best friend since college breaks the rack like he’s punishing it for something.
O’Malley’s doesn’t change. That’s its entire value proposition. Sticky floor, taxidermied walleye of dubious provenance, a broken jukebox, and a bartender named Jake who has never once found any of us interesting. I have negotiated in palaces. I’m at my best here.
We play one game in easy silence, the kind Logan and I earned years ago. He wins it. I don’t let him. He’s just gotten better since he started dating a woman who calculates angles out loud for fun.
He’s racking for the second game when he says, “I need to log a grievance.”
“Formally?”
“It’s been in the queue for a while.” He sets the rack, lifts it clean, and stands there turning the cue ball in his hand like it’s helping him load the words.
“You got married, Dominic. And I found out from a group chat, from Jenna, at the same time as everyone else, in the same thread as our taco night RSVP.” He places the cue ball on the felt, very precisely.
“You flew to Boston when my defense committee tried to gut my dissertation. You’re the emergency contact in my phone.
And my information about the most important thing that ever happened to you came through the same channel as Caleb’s legal memes. ”
The cheese curds sit there. The tinny Bluetooth speakers that stand in for the jukebox play Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.
“I’m not angry,” he adds, frowning at the table. “I ran it down. It’s not anger. It’s—there’s a word Audrey gave me. Hurt. It’s hurt. I’m hurt you didn’t come to me.”
“You’re right,” I say, setting my cue down.
“And I’m sorry. I need you to hear the whole shape of it, though, because it wasn’t an oversight.
I wanted to tell you so badly it was bursting out of me.
The night we landed back from Tokyo, I drove past your place.
Twice. I had the whole confession loaded.
” I lean against the table. “And then I thought about what I’d actually be handing you.
A secret. From Audrey. Every dinner, every night you two ran your little probability arguments across the kitchen, every time she said my name or Jenna’s—you’d have been holding it.
Lying by omission to the person you love most, on my behalf, for however long it took for Jenna to come around.
I know exactly what carrying things costs, Logan.
I wasn’t going to invoice you for mine.”
Logan is quiet for a moment. He lines up the break, doesn’t take it, straightens back up.
“I would have carried it,” he says. “You’re the brother I never had.
I would have carried it badly—I’d have developed a facial tic and Audrey would have diagnosed me inside four days—but I would have carried it.
And for the record, she would have understood.
She kept your lipstick evidence out of the group chat for a whole morning once.
She has discretion. It’s selective, but it exists. ”
“I know she would have.” I take a sip of beer.
“And that’s why I love you, kid. Both of you.
And it’s also exactly why I didn’t tell you.
You’re the best person I know, Logan. Holding a secret from the people you care about would have eaten you alive one calorie at a time, and you’d have done it anyway, without complaint, because I asked.
So I didn’t ask.” I shrug, and it comes out heavier than a shrug.
“Protecting people from the cost of loving me is a lifelong habit I’m told I need to work on.
My wife has notes. My brother has even more. ”
“Dustin’s notes are correct,” Logan says. “He told me he’s getting driving lessons. That’s pretty cool.”
I smile, thinking about how happy he was when I found the program for him. “It really is.”
He bends, finally takes the break—clean, brutal, two stripes down—and while I’m still thinking about Dusty and how great Jenna was with my family, he says, “Grievance withdrawn, by the way. Logged, heard, closed. That’s how it works, apparently.
Audrey taught me. It’s an unbelievably efficient protocol; I don’t know why nobody documented it sooner. ”
We play. He runs the table for a while and I eat the curds and heckle, and it’s the easiest hour I’ve had since Connecticut—no room to manage, no volume to set, just the brother I chose in my twenties when he was a friendless kid with a grade-hacking racket and the loneliest eyes I’d ever seen, beating me at pool under a broken sign.
He misses an easy eight-ball. Deliberately. Then he stands the cue on its end, holds it with both hands like a staff, and looks at me like there’s something else he’s not telling me.
“What’s on your mind, professor?”
“I’ve wanted to ask you this for a while, but I wasn’t sure if now was a good time—what with your sixty-day trial marriage almost up and—”
“What do you mean the sixty days are almost up?”
“Next Thursday.” Logan pushes his glasses up his nose, blinking at me as if I’ve just failed a basic arithmetic test. “That’s sixty days after you two started wearing the rings.”
I stare at him, the half-eaten cheese curd suddenly turning to lead in my stomach. Thursday. My brain forcefully reboots, scrambling through the calendar—we’d been so busy with work and family and prepping for the gala that I didn’t even realize . . .
“Next week,” I repeat.
“Yeah,” he says. “But you’re good, right? Audrey said Jenna is the happiest she’s ever been, and you’re preparing the greatest date night in the history of date nights to celebrate her at the gala. The deadline isn’t going to change anything, right?”
I keep my face perfectly blank. It’s a skill that has saved me millions in negotiations, but right now, it’s taking every ounce of my willpower to maintain. Thursday. We have less than a week left.
“Right,” I say, my voice smooth, entirely frictionless. “The gala. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Logan echoes, satisfied. He leans over the table to inspect the remaining solids.
“Audrey said she’d bet a month of her salary you’re planning on making things permanent with Jenna at the gala.
I doubled her wager and said you’d use the gala as the staging room and keep the ask private. ”
I force myself to chew and swallow. I’ve been so deeply entrenched in the daily reality of Jenna—waking up next to her, sparring with her over coffee, watching beautiful hairline cracks form in her bulletproof facade—that I stopped thinking we were operating inside a timeline.
I’ve been treating a probationary lease like a permanent holding.
How did I overlook this?
I turn my beer bottle slowly within the ring of condensation it left on the table.
The gala is tomorrow night. The car, the tuxedo, the flower—every detail is already arranged. I built it to celebrate Jenna. To give her the prom she never had and put her at the center of a room she earned.
Now it has to do something else too.
If I can make her feel certain enough—seen enough, loved enough—then Thursday won’t be a deadline. It’ll be another morning with my wife.
“Dominic?”
I blink. “Huh?”
“About what I wanted to ask you.”
The deadline is still ringing in my skull, but Logan is looking at me with the careful, rehearsed expression of a man about to hand me something breakable.
So I drain the last of my beer, put Jenna, the gala, and next week in a box and shove the lid down.
“What’s on your mind?”
He takes a breath. “Audrey and I set a date. October. Small—forty people, the lake house, Audrey wants the vows before sunset because of the light, and I’ve run exactly one probability that matters, which is that there is a one hundred percent chance I get this next part wrong if I improvise, so I wrote it down.
” He doesn’t take anything out of his pocket.
He recites it, eyes steady on mine, like it’s the one block of code he’s ever memorized.
“You taught me how to human, Dominic. Before Audrey, before any of it—you found me, friendless, and decided I was worth the trouble, and every good thing in my life routes through that decision. So. Will you stand next to me while I marry her? Be my best man?”
The ’90s pop music still plays. The MALL sign buzzes.
And I stand there in a dive bar with a pool cue in my hand and my chest doing something enormous, thinking about a skinny kid at Harvard who wouldn’t make eye contact, who’s now looking at me dead-steady, asking me to stand up for him outside his lake house in October.
“Kid,” I manage. “Try and stop me.”
Logan nods once, satisfied, and then ruins me completely by adding, “Good. You were the only name on the list. It wasn’t even a list, Dominic. It was just you.”