40. Dominic #2
“You had me at the first meeting, Pemberton,” I say, and it comes out broken, like I’m learning to talk again.
“Who you were in that room—how you didn’t give a shit who I was, how you made me work for every inch—yeah, I loved it.
But I stayed because you were the only person in any of those rooms who ever looked at me and saw past the game. ”
“That isn’t what I asked,” she whispers, tears at the edges of her eyes.
I want to tell her I know. That she isn’t an equation, or a deal, or the best kind of opponent in a room rigged for men.
That she’s the breath in my fucking lungs, and for all the jokes I’ve told, all the angles I’ve played, the only time I recognized the real thing was when she hosed me down with contempt from across a conference table.
But I don’t. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? She doesn’t want another speech. She wants the respect I never learned to give in silence.
“Say something,” she says, so quiet it’s like she’s reading my mind. “Anything that isn’t—I don’t know—damage control.”
I look up. My voice is foreign to me. “I have made a life out of reading people. Of seeing what they want before they know it, and giving it to them so I always get the upper hand. But you—” I shake my head, because there is no spin, not for this.
“I knew what you needed from the first time we spoke, Jenna. You wanted someone who could see you. Who didn’t just use your brain as a power tool or your ambition as a mirror.
You wanted—” I stop, because now her hands are shaking and I can’t touch her, can’t even move.
She’s looking at the floor, but she’s listening.
“I have fucked up a lot of things in my life. Contracts. Friendships. My own family, more than once. I was going to come here tonight and win you over one last time. Some pitch-perfect, grand gesture, a thing that would eclipse your doubts so completely you’d forget to have them.
But I can’t. Not this time. I have to just—”
I swallow it. My mouth feels raw.
“I’m in love with you,” I tell her. “The woman who takes over a negotiation because everyone else is wasting time. The woman who learned to sign because Dustin loves Hannah. The woman who leaves her makeup beside my sink and makes room for my razors beside hers. I know how hard it was for you to even try this with me, and I know I made it worse tonight.”
She sits on the window ledge, hands knotted, legs drawn up. Her wet hair begins slipping from its knot. She is the most beautiful thing in Chicago.
“But none of that matters now. You don’t need my pride, or my devotion, or even my fucking apology. You need someone who can sit here and let you walk away, and not try to win. Even if it kills them.”
Her face is streaked, mascara mixing with fresh tears. She tips her head back, lets it rest against the window, and for a long time the only sound in the room is the rush of rain on glass.
“I know you don’t want to sign the annulment papers,” she says.
Not an accusation, just a stated fact, sized to fit the space between us.
“I know you were probably planning some kind of countermove. A loophole, a delay, a speech that would turn it into a . . . a stunt with a happy ending, or at least a second act.” She wipes at her face with her sleeve. “But you don’t need to do that.”
She looks at me, eyes rimmed red but blindingly clear.
“You can set whatever terms you want in the divorce. I won’t fight you on it and I don’t want anything from you either.
” Her voice shakes but the words don’t. “Just a clean break, on the record the way you want it, Dominic. No erasure of what we did in Tokyo—you win that much. You just don’t win in the way you hoped. ”
She goes back to packing, efficient and relentless and so heartbreakingly herself.
I sit there, hands useless in my lap, wishing for a single grenade of wit or bravado that could un-cord this knot.
I want to scream that I don’t care about any of it, that I would set every dollar in my name on fire if it meant she’d stay, but she wouldn’t believe it and that’s the real crucible—she knows me, so well, that she can call every bluff without even looking at the table.
“Where will you go?” I ask, when I can.
“Home.”
“To your mother’s.” It comes out flat with disbelief. Queens. The kitchen with the cake in the trash. The woman with the dagger tongue. My wife, who built thirty floors of glass between herself and that house, is packing two suitcases to move back into it.
“Yes.” Her chin comes up, daring me to make it strange.
“Hailey’s references are being checked. She’ll be in San Francisco soon.
Eleven years she’s held that house together so I could build a life here.
” She exhales. “Now it’s my turn. Ma’s started going to meetings.
She needs support. Help with the house. Whatever comes next.
Somebody has to be there, and for once it’s going to be me.
” She zips the second case, one clean pull.
“I need time to figure out what I want to do with my life, Dominic. And there’s nothing here for me anymore. ”
Nothing here.
Three feet away from her. That’s where I am.
Three feet, and she just subtracted me from the room without looking up from her suitcase.
I know this feeling—I invented it for her, in a ballroom, in front of two hundred witnesses.
The difference is she’s doing it quietly, just to me, which is the more honest version of the wound.
“I’ll send someone for my things,” she says, quieter now, folding the last of it. “From Bucktown. There isn’t much. The drawer, the closet—some books. I’ll get a service to—”
“No.” It comes out before I know what it’s carrying. She looks up. “No service. I’ll sort your things myself. Pack them properly. Get them to you—wherever you are.” My voice wobbles at the edges. “It’s the least I can do, Jen.”
She holds my eyes for a long moment, and for one breath something in her face almost gives and then the protocol catches her, the way it caught her at seventeen, the way it caught her at the podium, and she nods once, terms accepted, and turns back to the case.
“Goodbye, Dominic.”
I don’t remember deciding to leave. I remember the hallway. The carpet. The door clicking shut behind me with a sound like a decimal point, final and small, and I stand there in my tuxedo in the empty corridor of my wife’s building trying to remember how the hell I got here.
And then I hear it.
Through the door—muffled, wrecked, coming apart in a way she would never, ever permit while a single soul could see her. Jenna. Sobbing.
It ruins me. Literally. There’s the myth that you can feel your heart break, a cartoon chest clutch.
But it’s not like that. It’s all in the gut, pure and undiluted, as if every time I’ve said some dumb thing about “not being able to live without you,” my body was supposed to treat that as a joke, and now the punchline is my large intestine turning itself inside out.
For a second I just stand there, forehead against the door, letting the pressure gather behind my eyes.
I can’t be here, and I can’t go anywhere else.
If I go back in there, it turns into a second argument neither of us deserves.
If I stay, I’ll hear every fraction of her pain, the sound I put there, and it will eat me alive.
I reach into my breast pocket and pull out the box that’s been sitting against my chest all night. Inside are the two rings I wanted to show her when I asked her—properly, soberly—to choose this marriage beyond Thursday.
I tilt them toward the corridor light. Two inscriptions flash along the inside of the bands, suddenly too intimate to look at.
Then I close the box, and put it back over my heart, and press my palm flat to my wife’s door before I force myself to walk away.
“You were never the challenge, sweetheart.”