42. Dominic
Dominic
“You’re overpacked,” I inform the weekender. “Somebody should audit you.”
The suitcase declines to laugh. Tough room.
It’s four in the afternoon on the worst Sunday of my life, and I’m sitting on my bedroom floor with a bottle of the Japanese whiskey I keep for celebrations and funerals, folding my wife’s clothes into her weekender like each one is a fragile piece of collateral.
I smooth the wrinkles out of a charcoal cashmere sweater—the one she wore that morning in Tokyo when she argued with me over room service.
I fold the sleeves inward, aligning the edges with a sickening, methodical precision.
It takes me three minutes just to place it in the bag.
At this rate, I’ll be finished sometime in the next fiscal year.
I take a pull straight from the bottle of Yamazaki. It burns beautifully, searing a path down my throat and settling like a hot stone in my gut.
My phone has been buzzing on the nightstand every twelve minutes for the last six hours.
I don’t have to look to know it’s the group chat panicking.
Bennett demanding a status report. Logan calculating the exact probability of my emotional collapse.
Caleb threatening me with psychiatric intervention.
I’m ignoring all of them. The perimeter is breached.
The fortress is empty, and there isn’t a damn thing any of them can do to fix it.
I pick up a pair of her yoga pants. They still smell like her—that faint, clean scent of expensive bergamot and relentless ambition.
A sharp, physical ache punches me right behind the ribs, stealing my breath.
I drop the fabric and drag a heavy hand down my face, feeling the rough scrape of a beard since I missed my morning shave.
I squeeze my eyes shut, but the darkness just projects high-definition replays of last night.
“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 grab another shirt—the soft white button-down she wore the morning we negotiated our terms—and fold it.
The courier is scheduled for five to take these bags to Queens.
I’m boxing up my wife’s life into neat, shippable squares because I couldn’t figure out how to just be a man standing next to her.
I had to be the guy who won her. I hate myself with a sudden, violent clarity that cuts right through the eighty-proof haze.
I am the architect of my own goddamn ruin.
Carefully adding the last of the things in her drawer—as well as the hoodie of mine she claimed the first week she spent here—I zip the weekender. One sharp, definitive pull, sealing away the last trace of her in my space.
The doorbell echoes through the house, sharp and demanding.
Four forty-two. The courier is early. Probably wants to beat the Sunday evening traffic.
I push myself off the floor, my knees popping in protest, and grab the handles of the two bags. I carry them down the stairs, my jaw set, mentally rehearsing the frictionless, dead-eyed transaction. Sign here, thank you, keep the bags upright.
I yank the front door open. “You’re early, I just need to grab the—”
I freeze.
It isn’t a courier in a branded polo. It’s Logan, looking exceptionally disheveled in a faded MIT T-shirt, rolling his shoulders in that jerky, twice-over nervous tic he does when he’s stepping outside his comfort zone.
Beside him stands Audrey, her frizzy curls practically vibrating with concern, holding a brown paper takeout bag that smells aggressively like grease and sodium.
“We were concerned you were at risk of alcohol poisoning—based on your radio silence,” Logan says, stepping smoothly past me into the foyer as if he holds the deed to the place. “We brought fries.”
“I didn’t order fries,” I say, my voice raspy, still holding the door handle like an idiot. “And I don’t need a welfare check.”
Audrey slips past me next, her eyes darting instantly to the two packed weekenders sitting at my feet. I see the exact moment her brilliant, statistically obsessed brain puts the data together. Her face softens, a devastating influx of pure empathy that I absolutely cannot handle right now.
“Oh, Dominic,” she breathes.
“Don’t,” I warn, dropping my hand from the door. I gesture vaguely to the bags. “Just waiting on the shipping service. Let’s not pretend we didn’t all expect this.”
Audrey sets the greasy bag on the console table and steps right into my space. She doesn’t offer platitudes. She just looks up at me, her warm eyes entirely too perceptive.
“So it’s true,” she says softly. “It’s over? You two are—it’s actually over?”
“She’s flying home today.” I check my watch, then head into my office with Logan and Audrey trailing behind me.
“To Queens?” Logan asks, stopping just inside the doorway.
I bypass my desk and head straight for the bar cart in the corner, pouring myself a second, highly irresponsible measure of Yamazaki. “Queens. She’s moving back in with her mother.”
Logan adjusts his glasses. “I guess that explains why Bennett is currently having a localized meltdown in the group chat. He found her formal resignation in his inbox when he woke up this morning.”
The whiskey suddenly turns to battery acid on my tongue. She didn’t just leave me; she severed her entire Chicago life. She walked away from the empire she helped build because I made the ground too toxic for her to stand on.
“That was likely my fault, too,” I say, my voice hollow. I drop into my leather desk chair, staring at the amber liquid in my glass. “The speech I gave went down like a lead balloon.”
Audrey steps forward, her brow furrowed in distress.
“I realize none of you could understand why someone as brilliant as her would want to marry a joke like me,” I mutter to the quiet room, summarizing the disaster of my own hubris. “And I guess I just gave you all a firsthand account of why you were right.”
“Dominic, no,” Audrey says, rounding the desk to place a warm, steadying hand on my shoulder. “None of us ever thought that. That’s just some shitty coding in your brain telling you a bunch of lies.”
Logan takes the visitor’s chair. “You are categorically not a joke. And logically, one speech doesn’t negate an entire foundational relationship.”
“It does when the speech was a public execution,” I reply.
Audrey sighs, her fingers squeezing my shoulder. “Layla and I have to take some responsibility for last night, too. We’re the ones who campaigned Willa to put her in the spotlight in the first place.”
I look up at her. She looks genuinely stricken, her hands flying up to explain herself.
“When we initially did it, you and Jenna were still just dancing around each other,” she says, the words tumbling out in a rapid-fire rush.
“We thought if we could make sure you were in the same room together, and that Jenna was being seen as the absolute force of nature she is, it might help her overcome whatever was stopping her from being with you.”
“We genuinely thought we were helping,” Logan adds gently. “It was obvious to all of us you two would be perfect together.”
“Perfect,” I scoff, downing the glass in one gulp.
“We could tell she was in love with you,” Audrey continues, her eyes shining behind her lenses. “We all could. You bring out the best in each other. But it seems our meddling messed things up, and we just pushed her away.”
“No,” I say, the word coming out dangerously quiet.
I set the glass down on the mahogany surface.
When I’m vulnerable, the charm shuts off completely, leaving just the raw, ugly truth.
“It wasn’t your fault, Audrey. None of it.
Willa was already planning on inviting her—your campaigning just confirmed it.
She was enjoying the spotlight up until my speech. And that was all on me.”
I pull the desk drawer open and stare at the manila folder still sitting in there.
“I knew she hated being the center of attention,” I tell them, the confession scraping against my throat as I pull the folder out and set it on the desk in front of me.
“I’ve known it since day one. But I also knew she craved validation.
I got this stupid, arrogant idea in my head that claiming her as my wife in front of everyone would show her how serious I was about her.
I thought the grand public gesture would prove I wasn’t playing a game, and that being seen by a roomful of her peers would only lift her up. ”
I lean back, closing my eyes against the crushing weight of my own stupidity. “It backfired. I turned her into a punchline. And now we’ve all lost her.”
I flip open the heavy card stock cover of the folder. The annulment papers stare back at me, mocking the absolute wreckage of my life. The signature line at the bottom of the final page is a guillotine waiting to drop.
I reach across the desk for the silver Montblanc pen resting by my keyboard.
Before my fingers can even graze the cold metal, Logan’s hand shoots out. His palm clamps down over my wrist, his grip shockingly tight.
“No, Dominic.” Logan’s voice drops into the precise, unyielding register he usually reserves for a catastrophic system failure.
He doesn’t pose it as a question or a suggestion.
He states it as an empirical fact. “Those are fucking annulment papers. You are not executing binding legal documents while you’re drunk and hurting. ”
I try to yank my arm away, but the kid is built like a linebacker when he actually remembers to use his frame, and he refuses to budge. “Let go, Logan. It’s what she wanted all along—for me to undo it—so I’m giving it to her. It’s the last goddamn thing I have left to give.”