CHAPTER SIX
DOMINIC
April became May.
The project moved. She was extraordinary at the work — he’d known she would be and it was still something to see up close, the specific quality of her intelligence applied to a space.
Rachel reported in their weekly meetings with the specific animation of someone who’d worked with a lot of talented people and hadn’t often worked with one at this level.
He reviewed the materials reports and the design approvals and the structural updates and he told himself he was doing it professionally, as a CEO should, and he was also doing it because every page was evidence of what she was capable of and he wanted to witness it.
He hadn’t seen her in three weeks.
The site visits had overlapped twice but he’d kept his distance — a nod, a brief professional exchange, nothing that required her to manage him alongside the work. He was trying to be a presence that didn’t cost her anything.
His father had told him to work faster.
He was trying to work faster.
He wasn’t sure what faster looked like when the situation required patience.
He had lunch with Marcus Ashford on a Tuesday — his closest remaining friend, which was a category that had narrowed considerably since the divorce, partly because friends had taken sides (reasonably) and partly because he hadn’t been particularly available to anyone for eighteen months.
Marcus was direct. He’d always been direct.
“You look better than last year,” Marcus said.
“Low bar.”
“It is a low bar,” Marcus agreed. “You were—” He made a face. “You were not handling it well.”
“I know what I was doing,” Dominic said.
“Do you?” Marcus looked at him. “Because from the outside it looked like a man understanding, six months too late, the full scope of what he’d done. And processing it by working twenty hours a day and being unavailable to everyone who tried to help.”
“That’s accurate.”
“It was painful to watch.”
“I wasn’t trying to be watched.” Dominic looked at his food. “I needed to do it alone.”
“Why?”
“Because the—” He stopped. Found the honest version.
“Because the nature of the mistake was specific. I’d been leaning on people to manage my feelings my whole life.
The company. My father. Isla.” He paused.
“I’d spent ten years with the idea of Claire as a—as a kind of emotional shortcut.
The road not taken. The thing I could have blamed for everything that went wrong.
” He looked at Marcus. “And then I took it and it led nowhere and I understood that the nothing it led to was built of my own—” He stopped again.
“Your own what?” Marcus said.
“Fear,” Dominic said. “I was afraid of something and I used nostalgia to avoid looking at it directly.”
Marcus looked at him.
“Afraid of what?” Marcus said.
Dominic looked at his plate.
“Being enough,” he said. “Being what someone needed. The specific fear of — Isla was so clear. She always knew what she wanted and what she thought and what was right. And I loved that about her and I was also—” He stopped.
“I was also terrified that I was never going to be able to match it. That I was going to be the one thing in her life that didn’t live up. ”
“So you left before she could discover that.”
“I didn’t—” He stopped. “I didn’t think of it in those terms at the time.”
“But?”
“But that was what I was doing,” Dominic said. “Yes.”
Marcus was quiet for a long time.
“Does she know this?” he said.
“No.”
“Are you going to tell her?”
Dominic looked out the restaurant window at the midday city.
“I’m trying to figure out how,” he said.
“Dom.” Marcus set down his fork. “This is the part where you stop figuring out how and you just do it. The how doesn’t matter as much as the actual telling.”
“She’s not ready to hear it.”
“She said yet,” Marcus said.
Dominic looked at him.
“You told me about the email,” Marcus said. “She said not ready yet. That’s—that’s a door that’s open a crack. You need to be near the door.”
“She knows where I am.”
“Yes,” Marcus said. “She does. She’s known where you are this whole time, which means she’s been choosing to stay on her side of the distance.” He paused. “She might need you to cross some of it.”
“I don’t want to—”
“I know you don’t want to push,” Marcus said. “I’ve watched you be so careful not to push that you’ve become practically invisible. There’s a version of patience that’s just avoidance with better manners.”
Dominic looked at him.
“You sound like my father,” he said.
“Your father is a wise man,” Marcus said. “You should listen to him more.”
The bill came.
Dominic paid.
He walked back to the office and went directly to the site floor.
She was there.
Not alone — she had two junior architects with her, reviewing the flooring installation, and she was focused and efficient and in complete command of the space the way she was in complete command of every space she was in.
She didn’t see him for a moment.
He watched her work.
He thought: this is the thing I was afraid of being enough for. This is what I walked away from because I didn’t believe I could be what it needed.
She looked up.
She saw him.
He said: “I’d like to buy you dinner. Not about the project. Not about us. Just—dinner.” He paused. “If you’re ready.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“Thursday,” she said.
He nodded.
He walked back to the elevator.
He was going to say the things.
Thursday.