39. Jenna
Jenna
“—so then my granddaughter informs the entire judging panel that her robot is named Justice Ruth, and that it will be citing case law,” the federal judge on my left says, gesturing with her dessert fork. “Fourteen years old. They didn’t know whether to hand her the trophy or a clerkship.”
“Both,” I say. “Simultaneous offers. Make them compete for her.” The judge laughs and points the fork at me like I’ve passed something, and it hits me that the first thing I think is “I’ll have to tell Dominic about this in the car” because that’s a thing I have now.
A person I save the good parts of the day for.
I steal a glance at my phone, face down.
The temptation to text Dominic a blow-by-blow is strong.
He’s at his table, dead center on the diagonal across the ballroom, caught between Logan and Bennett, the three of them forming the world’s most terrifying triangle.
I watch him tip his chair back during a lull, catch Bennett’s sleeve and steer the conversation, and something in my chest settles, like a glass of water set down gently.
I could probably diagram the entire room’s power structure by the line of sight between Dominic’s table and Willa’s.
I let the judge’s story spin itself out, deflecting the praise with a practiced tilt of my head—elegant disinterest, learned from the best. Still, I like her.
Her smile is sharp, and she laughs with her whole body, not the polite, filtered version that passes for humor at these tables.
I imagine she terrifies prosecutors and charms Supreme Court justices equally.
Across from me, a venture finance partner hyperventilates at every new name-drop, while to my right, Willa holds court with a group of ex-governors and the president of a biotech incubator.
I am, improbably, at the table’s power center.
The judge pulls me aside between courses to ask my opinion on a restructuring clause that’s “just for fun,” and for ten minutes we volley mutual war stories, legal trivia drifting into full-scale gossip about Foundation board appointments.
Past the ambient glitter of other tables, Dominic watches me and occasionally lifts his glass in a pose of disarmingly obvious pride.
I don’t roll my eyes at him; I let him see me glow a little.
It’s a sensation I haven’t calibrated for, this belonging without effort, admired on the merits of my work. I try to bottle the feeling, to remember it in granular detail for the next time the bottom falls out and I try to convince myself I’m an outsider.
When coffee arrives, the room dims and Willa rises.
She steps up to the podium, thanks the donors, acknowledges the collaborations and says, “We are here tonight because of the architects among us—the ones who don’t just imagine the future but roll up their sleeves and build it, brick by brick, code by code, system by system. ”
Willa takes a moment to highlight each of her “special guests,” starting with the judge next to me, “the Honorable Glenda Richter—whose entire judicial career is a case study in fearless innovation and, rumor has it, toppling at least six generations of the status quo.”
The judge grins into her napkin, mortified but game.
Next, a nod to the biotech president, who “has personally sponsored eighteen women through PhDs in the last ten years,” an accomplishment that draws genuine applause.
She threads the honors with tiny, surgical asides—these two revolutionized CRISPR patents together, another re-engineered how Medicaid reimburses for telehealth services.
She even makes time to mention the “venture finance partner whose portfolio saved the public market from three SPAC disasters in a single fiscal year.” Every time, the tableau is perfect: a deft remark, a little humility, a pivot to the higher purpose.
Willa then turns to me. “And at the axis of this table, Jenna Pemberton—the woman whose quick thinking made the Nakamura acquisition, and NeuraTech’s Asia-Pacific rollout, possible.
Jenna is the rare strategist who can read both a contract and a boardroom, and if you haven’t met her yet, I suggest you do so before the next wave of Chicago innovation is named after her. ”
She flashes me a smile.
“But before I embarrass her any further—and before we invite her up to say a few words—I’d like to call on someone who has spent years waiting for the rest of us to understand exactly what Jenna Pemberton can do.”
She gestures, and the entire ballroom tracks her gaze, which lands unerringly on Dominic.
He stands, equal parts amused and exasperated by the attention, and somehow manages to command the whole room’s antennae without so much as a motion.
Logan elbows him—subtle as a freight train—and Bennett doesn’t even bother to hide a knowing smirk.
Dominic straightens his tie, smooths the lapel, and takes his time crossing the floor.
Even now, watching him sweep the room’s attention like he was born for it, I remember the first time I met him.
He arrived in Bennett’s office with an entourage of accountants and a smile that could melt low-grade steel, moving through the air like he owned the lease on it.
I went home that night and told Hailey I’d met the single most exhausting human in the Midwest.
Then he kept showing up. Quarterly reviews, compliance crises, negotiations that ran hours past dinner.
He noticed my contributions in rooms where nobody else did.
He redirected conversations before I lost patience, put me at the head of tables when I was the most qualified person to lead them, and made space without ever pretending he had created me.
Nakamura didn’t begin that story. It only made it impossible to ignore. Dominic pushed, flirted, and irritated me professionally and recreationally, but he never forced the door. He stayed outside it—impossible and patient—until I began leaving it open.
When Dominic takes the podium, the room settles in that way only the best engineers know: every atom aware of the shift in structural load.
He fixes the microphone, thanks Willa, and then looks out at the crowd with the ease of a man who used to work the tailgate circuit and can still remember every handshake.
“Willa James asking me to speak about the true heart of a project is dangerous,” he says. “I’m a finance man. I tend to believe the true heart of a project is whichever line item makes the lawyers sweat.”
The room laughs.
He’s good at this. Disgustingly good. He has the ability to take the room by the throat and make it think it leaned in voluntarily.
“But tonight I’ll behave,” he continues. “Mostly because my wife is sitting at Willa’s table, and Jenna Pemberton has been correcting my behavior for years with nothing but a look and a stern email reprimand.”
More laughter. Warmer this time.
My wife.
The words move through me, still new enough to catch.
Dominic looks at me, and his face softens.
“Most of you know Jenna as Bennett Mercer’s right hand. Some of you may know her by reputation as Mercer Capital’s ice queen—the woman who can make a CEO apologize for breathing too loudly in a conference room and somehow leave him grateful for the correction.”
The room breaks into appreciative laughter.
Ice queen?
My smile holds.
At least, I think it does. But something cold slides under my ribs.
Maybe it’s the years of stereotype, maybe it’s the fact that the phrase has been weaponized in corporate settings by men who can’t stand being corrected by a woman who does her job.
Maybe it’s the ripple in the room—the way even the judge on my left throws me a sympathy glance like we’re all in on the joke—but it tightens the smile on my face, and my knuckles go pale on my coffee cup.
Dominic doesn’t see it. Of course he doesn’t. He’s looking at the room, and the room is his. He knows exactly when to pause, when to let the laughter land, when to step on it before it becomes too much.
“I’ll admit something unflattering about myself,” he says. “Before I met Jenna, I thought there wasn’t a woman in this world I couldn’t charm in ten seconds flat.”
Another laugh.
A woman near the front murmurs, “I believe that.”
Dominic puts a hand over his heart. “Thank you, ma’am. I appreciate being recognized for my gifts.”
The room laughs again.
I don’t this time. I’m frozen in my smile.
What the fuck?
“Then Jenna looked at me like my entire personality was a compliance violation,” he says, “and I realized I had encountered something rare. A woman immune to my best material.”
Bennett laughs at that. So does Layla. So does half the room.
The sound washes across me, and suddenly I’m not sitting in the ballroom anymore.
I’m not on the terrace.
I’m not in Tokyo.
I am seventeen, standing outside in a dress I was stupid enough to love, listening to beautiful people laughing—at me.
Forcing myself back into the room, trying to calm my racing heart as Dominic continues, smiling, oblivious.
“She was, without question, the challenge of a lifetime.”
Challenge.
Sweat pricks my brow as laughter rolls around the room and a voice from my past pushes its way to the surface.
“It was a challenge, Jenna. The guys didn’t believe me when I said I could get you to believe I wanted to date you.”
I remember the boy’s smile, the way he’d memorized my quirks, and the sick, hot sweep of humiliation as I realized every word he’d ever said to me was part of a private dare.
He told me later, in the parking lot after school, that I shouldn’t be so mad about a game everyone played.
But it wasn’t a game for me. I was a person, not a challenge. And he humiliated me.
The ballroom is blurry for a second, my breath caught in the pressure of unshed tears. My fingernails gouge half-moons into my palm. I have fifty thousand hours of composure banked for situations just like this. Still, it’s shockingly hard to remember how to use it.