Chapter 10
DOMINIC
Dominic sat in a plastic chair designed for someone significantly shorter and waited for Charlotte to walk through the door.
Amrita had been surprised by his interest. "Most corporate donors just want to know the tax implications and the photo ops," she'd said.
Dominic had said, "I want to know what the kids need," and meant it, and the meaning had felt strange in his mouth — unfamiliar, like speaking a language he was learning late.
He'd also prepared himself for Charlotte.
Or tried to. He'd rehearsed what he'd say, how he'd sit, where he'd put his hands.
Professional. Respectful. No ambush, no manipulation, no angle.
He was here for the grant. The fact that the grant connected to her school, her classroom, her world…
that wasn't a coincidence, but he was trying to make it more than a strategy. He was trying to make it genuine.
The door opened.
Charlotte walked in carrying a folder and a coffee cup with a lid that didn't fit properly, and his preparation evaporated like water on a hot pan.
Her hair was down. All of it. Curls past her shoulders, loose and unmanaged, the way he'd never seen it during their engagement because she'd always pinned it up for his events, tamed it into something sleek and appropriate.
This was Charlotte unpinned. Charlotte in her natural state.
She wore a cardigan over a blouse, dark jeans, flats.
No jewelry except a watch with a leather band.
No makeup that he could detect, though her cheeks were flushed: from the stairs, or from knowing who was waiting in this room.
She looked beautiful. Less polished and more devastating. She looked like a woman who'd stopped trying to be someone else, and the person underneath was so vivid it hurt to look at her directly.
She saw him and stopped. One beat. Two. Her brown eyes went hard, and then she crossed the room, sat down across from him, opened her folder and said, "Let's get this over with."
"Charlie—“
“Let’s just keep this professional. The Gallison Foundation proposal outlines a three-year arts integration initiative with six pilot schools.
P.S. 34 is one of them. I've reviewed the scope of work.
" She pulled a sheet from her folder without looking up.
"What I need to understand is the funding structure and the reporting requirements. "
She was treating him like a vendor. Like a line item in a budget spreadsheet.
Her voice was professional, clipped, stripped of every trace of the warmth he'd taken for granted for six months.
This was Charlotte in her element — competent, organized, in control — and she was using that competence like a wall between them.
"The funding is structured as an annual grant," he said. "Fifty thousand per school per year, renewable based on outcomes. The Weston Group provides the capital. Gallison handles program design and teacher training. The school liaison manages implementation on-site."
"And the school liaison would be me."
"If you're willing."
She looked up. Her brown eyes met his, and the force of her gaze nearly pushed him back in his plastic chair.
Six months of blocked calls, unanswered texts and silence.
Now she was feet away and looking at him, and everything he'd filed, managed and controlled came flooding up his chest and into his throat.
"If I'm willing," she repeated. "That's interesting phrasing. Did you engineer this, Dominic? Did you find this foundation and steer it toward my school so you'd have an excuse to be in this room?"
"The Gallison Foundation was already partnered with P.S. 34 before I got involved."
"That's not what I asked."
He held her gaze. Didn't flinch. "I saw the proposal. Your school was on the list. I could have passed it to my grants team and never looked at it again. I chose not to."
"Why?"
"Because it matters to you. Education. These kids. This work. It matters to you. I never paid attention, and I'm paying attention now."
She was quiet. Her jaw worked: a micro-movement he recognized from the altar, the tightening that preceded something she was deciding whether or not to say. He waited. He was learning to wait.
"You don't get to use my school as a redemption project," she said. "You don't get to walk in here with a checkbook and act like funding art supplies makes up for—" She stopped. Drew a breath. "This isn't about us. This is about my students."
"I agree."
"So we keep it professional,” she repeated.
"Agreed."
"No flowers. No letters. No... us.”
He had to force the word past his lips. “OK.”
"Good." She looked back at her folder. Flipped to a new page. "The proposal mentions a spring showcase as a capstone event. My students would participate?"
"All six pilot schools. The showcase would be hosted at a public venue — gallery, community center, something accessible. Student artwork on display, performances, presentations. Gallison handles logistics. The school liaisons coordinate student preparation."
She was writing notes. Fast, focused, her pen moving in the tight, efficient handwriting he'd seen on lesson plans, grocery lists and the folded paper in his desk drawer.
He watched her hand move and remembered the way it felt in his — trembling at the altar, offered before he reached for it, always meeting him more than halfway.
"The funding covers supplies?" she asked.
"Supplies, guest artist stipends, field trip transportation, and a per-school budget for the showcase."
"What about teacher compensation? If I'm coordinating this, it's on top of my existing workload. I'm not volunteering extra hours so the Weston Group can put 'community investment' on their annual report."
He almost smiled. Almost. She was fiercer than he'd ever seen her. This wasn’t the accommodating, adjustable Charlotte who'd practiced fork placement from YouTube videos, but someone sharper, harder, forged in the months since he'd broken her.
This version of her didn't smooth things over.
She didn't fill his silences, manage his feelings or make herself convenient. She pushed back. She had edges.
He liked the edges. He more than liked them. The realization moved through him with a force that made him grip the underside of the table.
"Teacher compensation is built into the budget," he said. "Stipend for every participating teacher. I'll make sure it's in the final agreement."
She wrote that down. Underlined it.
They spent another twenty minutes on logistics: timeline, milestones, parent engagement strategies, student selection criteria.
Charlotte was thorough, detailed, relentless.
She asked questions he hadn't anticipated and challenged assumptions he'd made without examining them.
She was better at this than anyone on his corporate team, and she was doing it in a public school conference room with a water stain on the ceiling and a motivational cat on the wall.
He was in trouble. He knew it the way you know weather is about to turn — a shift in pressure, a charge in the air, the knowledge that what's coming can't be controlled.
He'd come to this meeting telling himself it was about the grant, about the work, about becoming someone who deserved having known her.
And it was. But it was also about the way she held her pen, and the curl that kept falling across her forehead, and the flush on her neck when she caught him looking.
"I think that covers it," she said, closing her folder. She stood. Extended her hand across the table. A handshake. Formal, appropriate, distancing. "I'll review the proposal with Principal Delaney and send our feedback through the Gallison Foundation."
He stood. Took her hand. Her fingers closed around his and the contact sent a current through his arm that he was completely unprepared for.
Her hand was warm. He could feel the ridges of her knuckles, the calluses from where she held a pen for hours every day grading papers. A teacher's hand. Charlotte's hand.
He didn't let go. She didn't pull away. The handshake stretched into something else. A pause, a held breath, two people standing on either side of a scarred conference table with motivational posters watching them.
"Charlotte." It came out before he could stop it. The old name. The formal one.
She flinched. "Don't."
"I miss you."
"That's not my problem."
"I know it's not. I know. But I need you to hear it anyway."
Her eyes were bright, but not with tears. Anger, or grief, or something tangled between the two that she was actively, visibly fighting to keep below the surface. She was still holding his hand. Her grip had tightened.
"You don't get to do this," she said. Her voice was low, raw.
"You don't get to walk into my school, fund my classroom and say you miss me like that makes any of it okay.
Do you understand? I built a life without you.
I like my life without you. I don't need you, Dominic. I don't need anything from you."
"I know."
"Then why are you here?"
"Because you were right. About all of it. I didn't choose you. I didn't see you. I didn't know your favorite color or your students' names or anything that mattered, and I want—"
"It's sage," she said. "My favorite color is sage green. I painted my bedroom with it. Kate helped. We got it in our hair and ordered pizza and it was the best Saturday I've had in years, and you weren't part of it, and I don't want you to be part of it."
She was close. They'd moved without meaning to.
The handshake had become something gravitational, pulling them around the corner of the table until they were standing a foot apart.
He could smell her shampoo. Citrusy, different from what she'd used when they were together.
A new scent for a new life. A life he wasn't in.
"Sage green," he said. "I'll remember that."
"I don't need you to remember. I need you to leave me alone."
But she wasn't moving. Her hand was still in his, her eyes were on his mouth, and her breathing had changed.
Faster, shallower. He recognized the pull because he was caught in it too.
The space between them was charged, magnetic.
His body was moving before his brain cleared it, leaning toward her, his free hand rising toward her face—
She dropped his hand. Stepped back. The distance opened between them like a door slamming.
"No," she said. One word. Definitive. Her voice shook on it, but it held. "We talk about business. That is all we talk about. The grant, the students, the showcase. Nothing else. Do you understand?"
"I understand."
"Good." She gathered her folder, her coffee cup with its ill-fitting lid, her pen.
She was reassembling her armor piece by piece.
He watched her do it and ached with the knowledge that she'd gotten good at this, at building walls, at shutting doors, at protecting herself from him.
He'd taught her that. His carelessness had made her careful, and the irony was awful.
She walked to the door. Stopped with her hand on the frame.
"Thursday afternoons," she said without turning around. "That's when I'm available for liaison meetings. The conference room is booked from four to five. Be on time and bring the revised budget."
She walked out. Her footsteps echoed in the hallway: quick, determined, putting distance between them with every step.
Dominic stood alone in the conference room. The motivational cat stared at him from the wall. BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. The carved initials in the table, J.R. inside a lopsided heart, caught the fluorescent light.
His hand was still warm where she'd held it.
His chest was full of something he couldn't name and couldn't file away.
He'd spent six months learning to pay attention, and now the thing demanding his attention was her.
The curl across her forehead, the calluses on her fingers, the fury in her voice when she said I don't need you in a tone that sounded, underneath everything, like a woman trying very hard to mean it.
She'd almost kissed him. Or he'd almost kissed her.
The distinction didn't matter, what mattered was the moment before the pulling away, the fraction of a second when her eyes dropped to his mouth, her breathing hitched and the wall she'd built trembled.
She'd caught it. She'd held it. She'd walked out.
But it had trembled.
He sat down in the plastic chair. Pulled out his phone. Called his assistant.
"The Gallison Foundation meeting," he said. "I need the revised budget by Wednesday. And clear my Thursday afternoons. All of them."
He hung up. Looked at the empty chair where Charlotte had been sitting. At the water stain on the ceiling. At the anthropomorphic pencils on the wall, insisting that teamwork made the dream work.
He didn't know if this was a dream or a disaster.
He knew he'd been in a room with her for thirty minutes and the world had narrowed to the space between their hands.
When she'd pulled away the world had gone wide and empty again, and he was going to spend every Thursday afternoon in this conference room with its plastic chairs and motivational posters learning whether he could become the man she needed.
Whether she'd ever let him be.
Thursday at four. Revised budget. Be on time.
He could do that. He could start there.