Chapter 8
DOMINIC
The vows lived in Dominic’s desk drawer.
Top right, beneath a stack of contracts he hadn't looked at in weeks.
Charlotte's folded paper, blue ink, smudged at the corners where she'd cried on it while writing.
He'd carried it in his jacket pocket for a month after the wedding before transferring it to the drawer, where it sat like a letter he kept meaning to answer and couldn't.
He opened the drawer now. Unfolded the paper. He'd read it dozens of times — enough that the creases were going soft, the folds threatening to separate — and every time he found something new. In himself. In what he heard when he read them.
I didn't grow up in your world.
He'd heard that line at the altar and thought: charming. A nice contrast. The schoolteacher and the executive. It played well, it read well, it was part of why she was suitable.
He read it now and heard what she'd actually been saying: I’m telling you who I am. I’m asking you to see me. I’m standing in front of you, and I’m handing you the truest version of myself and hoping it's enough.
It had been enough. It had been more than enough. He just hadn't been paying attention.
I choose you, Dominic. Today and tomorrow and every day I'm lucky enough to get.
He folded the paper along its worn creases, put it back in the drawer. He stared at the skyline through floor-to-ceiling windows of his office.
Six months. Charlotte had been gone for six months, and the city looked different without her in it.
He kept finding her in gaps and absences.
The coffee mug she'd brought from her apartment, yellow, chipped at the handle, the word TEACH printed on the side, was gone from the kitchen cabinet.
The throw pillows she'd picked for the couch were gone.
The faint scent of her shampoo in the bathroom had faded weeks ago, but he still caught himself inhaling when he opened the shower door, searching for a trace that wasn't there.
He'd come home to the spaces where Charlotte used to be: a half-empty closet, a bathroom shelf with a single toothbrush, a bedroom that looked like a hotel room because everything that made it personal had belonged to her.
He’d sent her her things and she’d sent back her engagement ring.
He'd stared at it for a long time. A four-carat diamond on white gold, placing it down on the cold marble countertop beside a fruit bowl he never filled.
He'd picked it up, held it and waited to feel the loss.
What came instead was a memory: Charlotte at the kitchen counter on a Sunday morning, grading papers in her pajamas, hair piled on top of her head, reading a student's essay out loud to him because it was funny and she wanted to share it.
He'd been on his laptop. He'd said "that's great, babe" without looking up.
She'd gone quiet. Kept grading. He hadn't noticed.
He noticed now. Six months of distance had given him a catalog of moments like that.
Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, each one he'd been too busy to feel at the time.
Charlotte talking, Charlotte laughing, Charlotte trying, and Dominic elsewhere.
Present in the room but absent from the conversation.
Occupying space beside her without inhabiting it.
Throughout all this time, he'd kept texting her.
Once a week at first, then every other week.
Measured, careful messages drafted and redrafted in his notes app before sending.
Charlotte, I know you need space. I respect that.
But when you're ready, I'd like to talk.
And: I've been thinking about what you said.
You were right about a lot of it. And, at three a.m. one early morning, half a bottle of scotch deep: I miss you.
I don't know how to say it any better than that.
None of them delivered. She'd blocked him.
He hadn't shown up at her school. He'd driven past it once — P.S.
34, a squat brick building with a mural of a rainbow painted across the front entrance and construction paper animals taped to every window.
He'd slowed down, looked and tried to imagine Charlotte inside, standing in front of her classroom, reading to her students, laughing at their jokes.
She was probably good at that. He'd just never cared enough to witness it.
The resentment had arrived in month three, slithering in alongside the guilt like a vine growing through a wall.
It wasn’t toward Charlotte. He couldn't resent Charlotte, though he'd tried, briefly, in the first raw weeks.
She'd walked away. She'd refused to hear him out.
She'd shut every door, sealed every crack and given him no avenue for redemption.
And for a while he'd told himself that was unfair, that a relationship deserved more than a unilateral ending, that she owed him at least a conversation.
That delusion had lasted about two weeks before the mirror showed him what he actually looked like holding it.
No, the resentment was for his family. For his father, who'd sat across from him at the club and said find someone appropriate like he was ordering from a catalog.
For his mother, who'd assessed Charlotte's warmth and genuineness and found them suitable the way she found table linens suitable.
Functional, appropriate, serving the desired purpose.
For the entire machinery of expectation that had turned marriage into a business decision and left him standing at an altar with the wrong name in his mouth because the right woman had never been the point.
The wrong name. Jacqueline's name.
It occurred to him that he hadn't thought about Jacqueline. The ache he'd carried so carefully for years wasn't there. He couldn't even locate where it used to be.
He'd not even registered Jacqueline or her husband’s reaction that disastrous day. Maxwell later told him that Jacqueline had gone pale with shock, her husband tight with fury, and they’d quietly left the venue amidst the chaos. He'd been so consumed with chasing Charlotte, managing the fallout.
What he could recall, with nauseating detail, was the look on Charlotte's face when she'd pulled her hand from his.
He also felt now, he realized, resentment toward himself. For breaking Charlotte’s heart.
He'd sat through a board meeting last week and watched his father deliver a presentation about the municipal contract.
The one that had required a stable, married Dominic, the one that had started all of this, and a wave of revulsion swept over him that was so complete it had taken physical effort not to stand up and walk out.
The contract had gone to a competitor. All of it: the wedding, Charlotte, the public humiliation, for a deal that didn't even close.
His father hadn't mentioned it. The lost contract, the wasted strategy, the daughter-in-law who'd been selected and discarded like a draft that didn't make it past review.
Roland Weston had moved on to the next opportunity, and Dominic had sat in his leather chair and understood, with a sickening lurch, that he'd been trained to do exactly the same thing.
Charlotte wasn't a draft. Charlotte was a person who ate cereal for dinner, fixed leaks with duct tape and cried while writing her vows during recess.
Charlotte was a person whose favorite color he didn't know, whose childhood memories he'd never listened to, whose students' names he'd never learned.
Charlotte was a person, and he'd treated her like a line item, and his family had taught him how.
The anger was useful. Cleaner than guilt, more energizing than grief. He let it move through him and tried to point it somewhere productive instead of letting it curdle into the self-pity that Maxwell kept warning him about.
"You don't get to be the victim in this story, Dom," Maxwell had said, gentle enough to take the sting out but not enough to soften the truth. "You did this. Not your dad, not your mom. You. You chose to go along with it, and you chose to hurt her, and now you have to choose what comes next."
What came next arrived on a Thursday afternoon, buried in a stack of grant proposals his assistant had flagged for review.
The Weston Group funded charitable initiatives — tax strategy, mostly, but also reputation management, the public-facing generosity that offset the private-facing ruthlessness.
Dominic usually skimmed the proposals and signed off on whatever the PR team recommended.
But he'd been reading everything lately.
Slowly. Paying attention he'd never paid before, as if attention were a skill he was teaching himself from scratch.
The proposal was from a nonprofit called the Gallison Foundation.
Education-focused. They ran after-school programs, literacy initiatives, teacher development grants.
They were requesting funding for a new program: arts integration for underfunded public schools, bringing professional artists into classrooms to work alongside teachers on interdisciplinary curricula.
The proposal was thorough, full of passionate, slightly over-earnest language that Charlotte would have loved.
He could hear her voice in the margins — Dominic, look at this, they want to put painters in math classes, how amazing is that?
— and the phantom sound of her enthusiasm was so vivid he set the document down, pressed his palms against his desk and breathed.
He picked it back up. Read the whole thing. Then read the appendix, which included a list of partner schools.
P.S. 34 was on the list.
He stared at it. Charlotte's school. Her classroom, her students, her world.
The one he'd never entered, never valued, never understood.
And here it was, in a grant proposal on his desk, asking for exactly the type of investment he should have been making all along.
In the things Charlotte cared about. The things that had made her who she was while he was busy turning her into someone else.
He could have passed the proposal to his team. He could have signed off on a check and let the PR department handle the photo op and never thought about it again. That was the old playbook.
Instead, he picked up his phone and called his assistant.
"The Gallison Foundation proposal," he said. "The education one."
"Yes, sir. Do you want me to forward it to the grants team?"
"No. I want a meeting. With whoever runs it. This week if possible."
A pause. "You want to take the meeting yourself?"
He looked at the proposal on his desk. At the list of schools. At P.S. 34, printed in twelve-point font.
This wasn't about getting Charlotte back. He was past the point of thinking he could strategize his way into her forgiveness, or at least he was trying to be past it, which was a different thing. It was a harder thing, a thing that required constant vigilance against his own worst instincts.
This was about becoming someone who deserved the words she'd written on that folded paper. Someone who paid attention. Someone who showed up. Someone who knew the name of the boy who drew dragons during math.
He wasn't that person yet. But the Gallison Foundation was a place to start, Charlotte's school was on the list, and for the first time in six months, Dominic was interested in building something that wasn't about him.
"Yes," he said. "Set it up."
He hung up. Opened the drawer. Looked at the folded paper one more time.
I choose you, Dominic.
He closed the drawer and turned back to the Gallison proposal. He started reading it again from the beginning.