36. DOMINIC
I do not pursue her.
That decision hurts more than almost anything else I’ve done in twelve years of making difficult ones, and I make it anyway, because I have finally run out of ways to convince myself that pursuit and love are the same thing.
I send no flowers.
I don’t ask Hayes to find reasons for us to occupy the same room, don’t ask Ingrid to call her on my behalf, don’t construct a single one of the strategic openings I’ve spent a lifetime building for problems I actually intend to solve.
I have solved enough of Piper’s problems for her without asking.
Instead, I send her one message, and then I wait.
The first part isn’t an apology, not exactly, though it contains one.
It’s access, full, complete, unconditional access to every Blackline conversation Atlas and Cassandra ever had, exported and delivered to her directly, along with an offer to close the account permanently the moment she asks me to.
I don’t gatekeep a single message.
I don’t redact the parts that make me look worst.
The apology itself takes me longer to get right than almost anything I’ve drafted in this entire case, because I keep catching myself reaching for justification and forcing myself to delete it every time.
I stayed silent because I was selfish. I knew the truth might take you away from me, and I decided my fear mattered more than your right to choose.
You owe me neither understanding nor forgiveness.
I’m not writing this to earn either one.
I’m writing it because you deserve a complete account of what I did, without me softening it into something more forgivable than it actually was.
On the pregnancy, I am more careful still, because there is no version of this where I get to make a mistake twice in the same category and expect anything except to lose her permanently.
I will be present for our child in whatever way you permit, and in whatever way the law and the child’s welfare ultimately require.
I will not use this pregnancy to pressure you toward a romantic reconciliation you haven’t chosen freely.
It is not another situation for me to manage or control.
I want you to know, honestly, that I want to be an active father.
Saying that plainly isn’t the same as demanding anything from you in return.
I simply don’t want to disappear into careful neutrality and let you believe I don’t have feelings about this, when I do, considerable ones.
I just intend to let you set every term of what happens next.
I write the sentence about the child three separate times, each version stripped further of anything that could read as pressure rather than plain, honest want.
I send both messages that evening and immediately feel the absence of every contingency plan I’d normally have ready, a silence in my own head I don’t entirely know how to occupy.
I wait.
I don’t check whether she’s read them every four minutes.
I sit with the discomfort of having handed someone else complete control over an outcome that matters enormously to me, and I let it sit there, unmanaged, because managing it would simply be one more version of the same failure.
Ingrid calls two days later, and I can hear, immediately, that she already knows something I don’t.
“Piper called me,” she says, careful. “Not about you specifically. She wanted to ask about Jonah. About what actually happened, from someone who knew you before all of this.”
“What did you tell her?”
“The truth. That you built walls around yourself the day he died, and that I’ve spent twelve years watching you mistake competence for connection because competence was the only thing you trusted yourself not to fail at.”
A pause.
“I also told her you finally, for the first time since I’ve known you, did something that cost you control instead of giving you more of it. I don’t know if that matters to her. I thought she should hear it from someone who isn’t currently trying to win anything from her.”
“Thank you,” I say, and mean it fully.
“Don’t thank me yet. I didn’t do it for you.”
Her voice softens slightly.
“I did it because I liked her, Dominic, in the twenty minutes I spent talking to her. I’d like the chance to like her for longer than that, if you two can find your way to something worth building. But that’s her choice to make, not mine, and certainly not yours to force.”
I sit with that for a long while after we hang up, alone in an apartment that feels larger and quieter than it used to, and understand what it actually means to want something enough to stop trying to control whether you get it.
I spend the following days rebuilding what’s left of my practice, slowly, without the frantic urgency I might once have brought to it.
Two of my former clients return once the story settles into its honest final shape, satisfied that whatever they’d initially feared about my judgment doesn’t survive contact with the actual record.
I take the work quietly, and I find, for the first time in twelve years, that I don’t need it to fill every hour of the day the way I once did.
Odette asks to see me a few days later. I nearly refuse, worried that meeting her without Piper will look like exactly the kind of indirect pressure I’ve promised myself I won’t apply.
But Odette makes it clear the request is hers, not Piper’s, and that she has no intention of carrying messages between us.
“You’re not here to ask me to intervene,” Odette says, once I’m seated across from her, sharp as ever despite the walker parked beside her chair. “I can see that much on your face.”
“No. I came because you asked, and because I think you deserve to hear directly from me what happened, rather than whatever version reaches you secondhand.”
She listens to the entire account without interrupting, the same patient, merciless attention I imagine she once gave to men perjuring themselves in courtrooms decades ago, and when I finish, she’s quiet for a long moment.
“You did an unforgivable thing for a very human reason,” she says finally. “That’s not absolution, Dominic. I’m not in the business of granting that on my granddaughter’s behalf, and I wouldn’t if I could.”
Something in her expression softens slightly.
“But I’ve watched a great many men perform contrition in my life. What you just did wasn’t a performance. I recognize the difference, even now.”
“Thank you for saying so.”
“Don’t thank me. Go do something useful with the recognition instead of collecting it like a reward.”
She waves a hand toward the door, dismissing me with the brisk affection she seems to reserve for anyone she’s decided is worth the trouble.
“And Dominic, whatever she decides, you did the right thing sending her the truth without demanding anything back for it. That’s rarer than you’d think. Most people only learn honesty as a tool for getting what they want.”
I leave her apartment with something lighter in my chest than I’ve carried in weeks, not resolution, not yet, but something adjacent to it, the relief of having finally done the difficult thing correctly, regardless of whether it earns me anything at all.