Chapter 2
DOMINIC
Dominic's tie was crooked.
He could see it in the mirror — a millimeter off-center, the knot listing slightly to the left. It shouldn't have mattered and did. He unknotted it and started again.
"You've tied that thing four times," Maxwell said from the leather armchair in the corner, legs stretched out, a glass of scotch resting on his knee at ten in the morning. "It looked fine the first time."
"It wasn't straight."
"It's a tie, Dom. Not a merger."
Dominic didn't answer. He pulled the silk through, adjusted, tightened.
Checked the mirror. Better. He smoothed his lapels, shot his cuffs, examined himself with the same critical focus he brought to quarterly reports.
The suit was custom: charcoal, peak lapel, cut close through the shoulders.
His dark brown hair was pushed back, jaw clean-shaven, shoes polished to a mirror shine.
He looked exactly like what he was supposed to look like. He looked like a man getting married.
He didn’t look like a man in love.
Maxwell watched him over the rim of his glass.
They'd been friends since Exeter, twenty years of history that gave Maxwell a fluency in Dominic's silences that no one else possessed.
He could read the difference between Dominic's working silence and his avoidance silence, and right now his eyebrows said he was reading the second one loud and clear.
"You good?" Maxwell asked.
"I'm fine."
"Because you look like a man about to negotiate a hostile takeover."
"I look fine."
"You look like you're going to a funeral, is what you look like."
Dominic turned from the mirror. "Are you going to be helpful today, or is this it?"
Maxwell raised his glass. "This is it. This is all I've got." He took a sip. "Seriously, though. You good?"
"Max."
"I'm asking because I'm your best man and it's literally my job, and because you've been checking your phone every thirty seconds since we got here and you haven't once asked if anyone's heard from your bride."
Dominic's jaw tightened. He picked up his phone from the side table.
One new message from Charlotte: I can't wait to marry you.
He typed back a thumbs-up. He set the phone down before he could think about how insufficient that was.
She deserved more. A paragraph, a love letter, something with weight to match what she'd written. He'd do it later. After.
There was also a text from his mother: The Harringtons are seated. Roland says the officiant needs the final version of the program. Handle it. And below that, from his father directly: Don't be late.
No "good luck." No "proud of you." Just don't be late, as if the wedding were a board meeting and Dominic were an employee with an attendance problem.
He handled the program issue with two texts to the wedding coordinator. Checked his cufflinks. Checked the mirror. The tie was fine. Everything was fine.
"I got her something," he said, turning back to Maxwell. "Had it sent up this morning. Diamond earrings."
"Nice."
"Two carats each. The jeweler said they were—"
"Dom." Maxwell set his glass down. "Did you write a note with them?"
Dominic paused. "She knows who they're from."
Maxwell stared at him for a long moment. Then he picked his glass back up and leaned back in the chair and said nothing, which was Maxwell's version of saying a great deal.
The groomsmen's suite was on the twelfth floor.
Two floors below Charlotte's, close enough that Dominic could have walked upstairs and knocked on her door and seen her in whatever state she was in, nervous and flushed.
Probably laughing with Kate, all those brown curls falling everywhere. He could picture it. He chose not to.
He'd chosen Charlotte Elizabeth Hoffman the way he chose most things: with research, clear criteria, and a decisive timeline.
Months ago, his father had laid it out plainly over dinner at the club.
The Weston Group was pursuing a major municipal contract — a redevelopment project that would define the company's next decade — and the selection committee cared about stability.
Family values. Community ties. "They want to know who they're doing business with," Roland had said, cutting his steak.
"They want to see a man with roots. A foundation.
Not a thirty-two-year-old bachelor who shows up in the tabloids with a different woman at every charity gala. "
"I don't show up in the tabloids."
"You will if you keep this up. Find someone, Dominic. Someone appropriate. Someone who signals the right things." Roland had looked at him over his glasses. "You've had your fun. It's time to build something."
The word fun had landed wrong. His father meant the women. The dates, the events, the carefully managed relationships that served a social function and ended cleanly. But what Dominic heard was Jacqueline.
Jacqueline March. The name still made his chest tighten, an old ache that flared at unpredictable moments.
In line for coffee. Driving past the Village.
He'd trained himself to push through it, like learning to walk on a knee that never fully healed.
You compensated. You adjusted. You stopped limping, but you never forgot the injury.
They'd been together for two years. He’d loved her. He was certain of that. A love that made him reckless, that loosened his grip on the careful design of his life.
His mother had called Jacqueline "unsuitable”: a word that did a lot of work in her vocabulary.
The Marches were old money, well-connected, a family the Westons should have been thrilled to merge with, until Jacqueline's father was indicted for insider trading.
It had been all over the financial press for months.
Peter March, the patriarch, led out of his office in handcuffs.
The trial. The conviction. The family name dragged through every headline and cable news chyron in the country.
The name became radioactive, and the Westons were not a family who touched radioactive things.
His mother had delivered her verdict: She's lovely, I'm sure.
But the March name is poison, and with our business dealings, we can't afford the association.
So Dominic had ended it.
He'd sat across from Jacqueline in her apartment and explained that it wasn't going to work. She'd looked at him with those dark eyes and said, Because your mother told you so? He'd said, Because I have responsibilities, and she'd said, You have a leash, Dominic. You just haven't noticed it yet.
He'd told himself it was the hardest thing he'd ever done.
He'd told himself that for years. Through the months of silence afterward, through the news that she'd started seeing someone, through the wedding announcement he'd found online one night at two a.m. and stared at until the screen blurred.
Jacqueline March and David Reeves. She'd looked happy in the photo.
He'd closed the laptop, poured a drink, sat in the dark and told himself the ache in his chest was proof that he'd sacrificed something real for duty.
That he was capable of that kind of love, even if he'd chosen to walk away from it.
He kept that ache like a man keeps a scar. Evidence of depth. Proof that underneath the boardrooms, the tailored suits, and his father's voice, there was someone who’d loved completely and lost.
And then Charlotte.
He'd been at a fundraiser. Some education nonprofit his mother sat on the board of.
Charlotte was there because one of her colleagues had won a grant, and she'd come to support her.
She was standing near the bar in a dress that didn't fit quite right, holding a glass of wine she clearly wanted to abandon.
She'd bumped into him — literally, physically backed into him while trying to escape a conversation with a donor's wife.
Her wine had sloshed onto his shirt, and she'd turned around with her face already burning.
"Oh god, I'm so sorry, I'm — you're — that's — I'll pay for the dry cleaning. "
"It's fine," he'd said.
"It's not fine, please let me—.”
"It's still fine."
She'd laughed. Embarrassed, genuine, with her whole face. He'd noticed her hair first, brown curls escaping from whatever she'd done to pin them back, and then her eyes, brown, warm and completely transparent. And then the fact that she was looking at him like a person, not a last name.
He'd gotten her number. They'd had dinner.
She was easy to be with. Warm, funny, self-deprecating.
Interested in his work without being interested in his money.
She taught fourth grade. She loved her students: she knew which kid was struggling with reading, which one had a parent in the hospital, which one drew pictures of dragons during math.
She talked about them the way other women in his circle talked about portfolios.
She was kind. She was beautiful. She was, in his mother's language, suitable. Good-natured, nice, middle-class family with no scandals. Charlotte herself warm, genuine, she'd never embarrass you at a business dinner, she'd raise children who said please and thank you, and she'd fit.
He'd thought: This could work.
He'd proposed at four months because the municipal contract timeline demanded it.
He'd taken her to the restaurant where they'd had their first date.
He'd gotten down on one knee, and she'd cried and said yes before he finished asking.
He'd slid the ring onto her finger and thought: Good. This is handled.
Then he'd gone home, poured himself a scotch, stood on his balcony and thought about Jacqueline.
But he'd pushed the thoughts down. The way he always pushed them down.
Filed them somewhere deep and told himself that what he'd had with Jacqueline was in the past. Charlotte was the future, and the two things didn't need to touch.
A knock on the door. One of the groomsmen — Trent, from the firm — leaned in. "They're starting to seat. Fifteen minutes."
"Thanks." Dominic checked the mirror one final time. Everything in place. Everything where it should be.
He stepped out of the suite. The hallway was carpeted and hushed.
He walked toward the elevator with Maxwell falling into step beside him.
They rode down in silence. The doors opened onto a corridor that led to the back entrance of the ballroom, and Dominic could hear the murmur of three hundred guests, a string quartet playing something he'd approved on a spreadsheet but couldn't name.
He turned the corner toward the staging area, and that was when he saw her.
Jacqueline.
She was standing near the entrance to the ballroom with a tall, sandy-haired man.
David, her husband, whose hand rested on the small of her back.
She wore a dark green dress, understated, no jewelry except her wedding ring.
Her hair was shorter than he remembered.
She was laughing at something David said.
Dominic stopped walking. He had no idea what she was doing here. He certainly hadn’t invited her, and Charlotte didn’t know her.
The ache hit him like a door swinging open, everything he'd buried for months flooding up at once. Her laugh. He knew that laugh. Had heard it across pillows, dinner tables and crowded bars, aimed at him, because of him, and now it was aimed at someone else.
She turned. Their eyes met across twenty feet of hallway.
Jacqueline didn't flinch. She gave him a small nod: polite, measured, as if they were old colleagues. Then she turned back to David, and they walked into the ballroom together.
She looked settled. Complete. Like she'd found whatever it was she'd been looking for. It wasn't him, and she'd made peace with that so thoroughly it didn't even register on her face.
The ache deepened. He stood there, let it carve through him and told himself this was just the day, just the pressure, just the proximity.
He'd be fine once the ceremony started. He'd stand at the altar, look at Charlotte and the Jacqueline noise would quiet down the way it always did. Submerged, managed, controlled.
Maxwell’s hand landed on his shoulder. "Dom. You ready?"
Dominic blinked. Rolled his shoulders. Adjusted his cufflinks one final time.
"Let's go."
They walked into the ballroom through the side entrance.
He took his position at the altar: mahogany arch, white peonies, candles in glass hurricanes.
Everything tasteful, expensive and selected from a mood board Charlotte had shown him that he'd approved without looking at closely.
The officiant nodded. The guests hushed.
The doors at the end of the aisle opened.
And there she was.
Charlotte. On her father's arm. Her brown curls pinned up with a few loose around her face, her brown eyes bright even from this distance, her smile wide and trusting.
She was radiant. She was beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with the dress or the hair or the makeup.
It came from somewhere inside her, some reservoir of genuine feeling that she'd never learned to hide.
She was looking at him like he was everything she'd ever wanted.
His chest tightened. Emotion swelled, tangled up with the Jacqueline ache, threaded through it, impossible to separate. Charlotte was walking toward him, she was glowing and she believed in this and she believed in him. He couldn't tell where the guilt ended and the feeling began.
He smiled. The public one. The one that worked in boardrooms and at galas and in photographs.
She reached the altar. He took her hand.