40. Dominic
Dominic
“Cruz! I thought that was you. Leaving already?”
Thomas Canning is coming up the hotel steps through the rain with an umbrella and no hurry, dinner-jacketed, composed, arriving at his own pace to a party that started three hours ago.
And here is the sick magic trick of being me: my wife’s cab is still visible at the light on Michigan Avenue, my chest is a building coming down in sections, and my face—entirely without authorization—assembles the smile. Boots the machine. Showtime.
“Thomas.” My hand comes out. My voice arrives warm and even. I could kill it for that. “Late entrance. Very fashionable.”
“Strategic.” He shakes my hand, rueful. “I’ll be honest with you—I nearly didn’t come at all.
First one of these since the divorce went through.
I kept picturing it: two hundred people, half of them doing the math on my settlement, the other half lining up sympathetic widows and hungry socialites.
” He tips the umbrella back and gives me a dry, tired smile.
“The vultures can smell newly divorced at a thousand yards, Dominic. I wanted one more year before I became the buffet.”
Newly divorced.
The words go through me like a shard of glass.
Because that’s me. That’s Thursday. That’s the word that attaches to me the moment my wife stops being my wife—Dominic Cruz, newly single, back on the market, the vultures circling, everyone doing the math, and none of it, none of it, mattering, because the only person whose math I care about is in a cab heading north with my whole life inside her.
“—anyway, Willa promised me the auction has a Triumph in it this year, so.” Thomas is still talking.
Kind, wry, decent Thomas, who stood up for David when it counted, whose only crime tonight is arriving with the truth in his mouth.
“Are you heading back in? I hear your wife was one of Willa’s chosen few.
Sorry I missed the speeches honoring her. ”
“I have to go.”
It comes out with no charm on it at all. Naked. Wrong-shaped. Thomas blinks, and something old and perceptive moves behind his eyes—a man who has watched another man’s face do exactly this before, probably in his own mirror.
“Dominic. You all right?”
“Never better,” I say, already moving, the lie so automatic it should have its own payroll number. “Bid on the Triumph, Thomas. Trust me. Everything old can be rebuilt.”
The Phantom takes nine minutes to reach her building, and I spend all of them rehearsing speeches and deleting every draft.
The driver lets me out, and I hand him a hefty tip, thanking him and telling him not to wait. The rain has ramped up to horizontal. I jog to the entry, collar up, and her doorman waves me through with a smile and a “wet one tonight, Mr. Cruz,” because he doesn’t know I blew it.
My heart lurches in my throat.
Fuck. I blew it.
I take the stairs. Every other night, I’d let the elevator ride be a reprieve—a free fifteen seconds to reorganize my thoughts, smooth the exterior, wedge the chaos into the correct drawer. But my hands are shaking and if I stop moving I’ll lose my nerve.
If Jenna hears me let myself in, she doesn’t acknowledge it. I knock quietly on the open bedroom door, then step inside.
I find her by her bed, the gown over a chair like shed armor, and my wife is in leggings and an old Mercer hoodie with her wet hair twisted up, and there are two suitcases open on the bed, piled high with her things.
“Jen.”
“I’m not running away,” she says, not looking up, not stopping.
“OK.” I say it gently, and immediately regret it, because she flinches, and what she does when she flinches is take every feeling and bury it under six feet of professional-grade granite.
“Don’t,” she says. “Not right now.”
She unzips a side pocket, transfers her toothbrush and retainer case, closes it with so much force it nearly takes the zipper tag off.
This is not a woman gathering herself for a dramatic exit.
It’s the opposite. She’s cleaning up after a party that ended hours ago, with nobody left to impress but the ghosts.
I watch her hands, memorize every quick movement—they shake only once, and she tames it fast.
“I’m leaving, Dominic.”
I don’t do anything for a long second. There is a version of this story where I say something sharp, or grand, or weaponized with hurt.
But watching her, I get it. She’s not trying to wound me.
She’s just running the script. She’s unspooling every part of her that got knotted to my name by laying it out, perfectly folded so she can leave to protect what’s left of herself.
I don’t ask her to stop. I don’t crowd her or beg. I just sit on the edge of the mattress, elbows on my knees, and trace the grooves in my palm with my thumb, because if I look at her I’ll lose my last grip on composure.
“You can’t even say it?” Her voice is level, so careful it shames me. “You can’t even ask why?”
“I know why,” I say. “And I know exactly how I fucked it up.”
She gives me a look I’ve seen a hundred times.
The difference is that every other time I was the one running the room—managing the temperature, keeping the ceiling up—and she was watching me do it.
Now there’s no room. Now there’s just her, and there’s me, a giant gap between us, and the weight of an unfinished plan in my breast pocket.
“Dominic,” she says. “This sucks and it’s going to keep sucking, so I’m saying it once and then I’m leaving.
You could have knocked the roof off tonight and it still would have happened the same way.
We—us—this”—she gestures with the flat of her hand, sweeping the shards between us—“was never going to work for more than a little while.”
My jaw twitches. “That wasn’t how it felt from over here.”
She shakes her head, not even angry, just tired. “Because you run on the high, Dominic. The show. The chase, the charm, the jokes. You’re built to set the tempo for whatever room you’re in, and you’ll die before you let the room set it for you. I can’t keep up. I don’t want to keep up.”
“Tonight isn’t about the jokes,” I say. “I was proud of you.”
She breaks, just for a second. Looks at the floor, then at me.
“I know. I know you were. That’s what made it so—” She swallows.
“I wish I could be the woman you need. The one who could let that be enough. But I needed it to be different, and I let myself think that maybe if I worked hard enough, if we were careful, we could keep our chemistry and still build something sustainable. But we can’t.
You are you. And I am me. That part’s never going to change.
We are fundamentally unsustainable, Dominic. ”
I want to talk her out of it. I want to make her laugh, because if she’s laughing she can’t be leaving. But she’s not asking for reasons or reassurance, and she’s six steps further down the road than I ever saw coming.
“That’s not true,” I say. “We’re just—we’re different, but that’s the entire reason it worked.”
She gives a ghost of a smile. “It worked until it didn’t. Compatibility and sustainability are not the same thing. Ask Logan—he’ll chart you a regression.”
“Jenna—” I don’t even finish. I want to fix it, but I know even before the words leave my mouth we’re already past the place for repairs.
She grits her teeth, patient but final. “I spent tonight thinking I could finally belong in a room like that. Then you called me a challenge. ‘Impossible.’ Even if you meant it as a compliment, you put me in a box so you could be the person who opened it. You rewrote my story so you could win me. And people laughed and joked about me, and I felt so fucking small.”
“You’re not small.” The force of it flattens my voice.
She looks at me like she wishes I were even one percent less convincing.
“You say that, but you also need me to be. Because if I’m not a challenge, if I’m not the ice queen, then who are you?
You exist to solve problems, to break the room open, to win.
You don’t know how to let it go. And I’m not—I’m not something to be won. I’m not the next impossible thing.”
“I know that.” I do. Jesus, I do. “You’re not a problem, Jenna. You’re the answer.”
Her bag slides off the bed, lands against my foot. I don’t move. I just watch her, every muscle in my body fighting to stay out of her way and simultaneously screaming at me to drag her back and make her understand.
“You got it backward,” she says, soft. “You say I’m the answer, but what you actually need is the question.” She stands in the narrow space between the suitcases and the dresser. “If I were easy to charm—if I wasn’t the ice queen or the challenge—would you even have been interested in me?”
Her mouth is set, but her eyes shine with the dare of it—she’s inviting me to knock the premise off its axis, to fix it right now or else let her go for good.
I try. God, I try. I run the simulation: what if she was easy, what if she didn’t make me sweat, what if I never felt my pulse hammer sideways when she cracked a smile?
Would I have wanted her? Would it have worked, or would I have gotten bored and pulled the plug before the first month?
I don’t know the answer to that. The woman I saw in Bennett’s office that very first day was tough and brave and entirely unimpressed by me. For her to be anything else is to erase a massive part of her, invent someone else. And I never wanted someone else. Only her. Exactly as she is.
It’s true that I’ve never been bored a day in my life with Jenna. I’ve also never loved anyone more completely, and never more chaotically.
But I don’t say any of that, because if I do, I’m just confirming the very thing she’s trying to name: the dynamic, the impossible, the fucking “challenge.” My language is wars and wins and she’s done being a prize.
I want to promise her I can shift, that I’ll build a whole new lexicon if that’s what it takes, but in this moment, all I can do is show up, unarmed, and hope she’ll see that’s enough.