CHAPTER TWO The Flowers He Brought Too Late
Dominic — POV
The penthouse was dark.
That was the first thing. The dark. He had walked through that door a thousand times after midnight and the dark had never felt like this — weighted, specific, the kind of darkness that meant something rather than simply meaning the lights were off.
He reached for the switch.
The lights came on.
The table was set.
That stopped him in the doorway. Fully stopped him, the flowers going still in his hand, because Serena did not set the table like this — the good china, the crystal she kept in the cabinet above the refrigerator, the candles that had burned themselves completely down to nothing, wax pooled in silver rings around the bases of the holders.
She had set a table for a dinner that no one had eaten.
Two plates. Two glasses. A bottle of wine breathing in the middle.
He had completely forgotten it was their anniversary.
The realization hit him the way very few things hit Dominic Ashford — without warning, without the buffer of preparation, directly into the part of him he kept most carefully defended.
He stood in his own doorway with flowers going soft in his left hand and understood, in the space of a single breath, what this table meant.
She had been here. She had cooked. She had set this table and lit these candles and put on something — he noticed the dress, folded over the back of her chair, the deep burgundy thing she'd bought in the fall that he had not once told her she looked beautiful in — and she had waited.
And he had not come.
He set the flowers on the kitchen counter.
He sat down in his chair. The plate in front of him was cold. Whatever she had made — he could smell remnants of something with garlic, something careful and deliberate, a meal that required hours — had been plated and covered and gone entirely to waste.
There was an envelope on the table.
He picked it up.
His name was written on the outside in her handwriting.
The handwriting he knew as well as he knew the Ashford Capital logo — precise, slightly leftward, the capital D that looped back on itself.
He had fallen in love with her handwriting before he had finished falling in love with her.
He had seen it on a proposal she presented at a charity board meeting seven years ago and thought, irrationally, that a person who wrote like that was worth knowing.
He opened the envelope.
The papers were clean. Crisp. The language was formal in the way of things prepared by people who were very good at their jobs.
He read the first paragraph. Read it again.
The words assembled themselves into meaning with a slowness that had nothing to do with comprehension and everything to do with refusal.
Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.
Serena Marie Ashford, Petitioner.
Dominic James Ashford, Respondent.
He set the papers down.
He picked up the notecard beside his wine glass.
Happy anniversary, Dominic. I'm done.
He read it three times.
Then he did something he had not done since he was twenty-six years old and watching his first acquisition fall apart on a conference call — he had no response.
Nothing in him moved. The part of Dominic Ashford that was always already formulating the next step, the strategy, the countermeasure, the precise sequence of actions that would resolve the situation — that part was completely silent.
She was gone.
He called her.
Her voicemail picked up on the second ring, which meant she had declined the call. The sound of her voice on the recording — warm, professional, the voice she had before he made her into someone who answered for Ashford Capital events — hit him somewhere low and undefended.
You've reached Serena Ashford. Please leave a message and I'll return your call.
He called again.
Voicemail.
He put the phone flat on the table and looked at the room.
He had not looked at this room in a long time — actually looked at it the way you look at a place you are trying to understand rather than simply occupy.
It was a beautiful room. He had made sure of that.
Forty-second-floor penthouse in a building he partly owned, interior designed by the firm that had done three of his hotel properties, every surface chosen for its aesthetic coherence and its signal.
But it was Serena's room.
That was the thing he noticed now, in the strange, arrested silence of her absence.
The throw blanket on the couch in the dusty green she loved — he had no idea where it came from, he had never bought it, she must have brought it from somewhere.
The shelf along the north wall with its rows of novels, paperbacks mostly, their spines cracked and softened from reading.
He knew she re-read things. He had made some remark about it once, something offhand about the inefficiency of reading something twice when there was always something new, and she had looked at him with an expression he now recognized as the specific sadness of a person realizing they are not known.
The framed photograph on the shelf beside the books: the two of them in Tuscany, their honeymoon.
He was laughing at something she had said.
She was looking at him. Not at the camera — at him.
The expression on her face in that photograph was the most private thing he had ever seen of her, and it was hanging on a shelf in their living room, entirely visible, and he had walked past it six hundred times in four years and never once stopped to really see it.
He stopped now.
He looked at her face in that photograph for a long time.
Then he called Jade.
Jade Voss answered on the third ring with the particular alertness of a woman who had been waiting for this call and had prepared accordingly. "Dominic."
"Where is she?"
"She's with me."
"Is she alright?"
A pause that contained multitudes. "She's safe."
"I need to talk to her."
"I know you do." Jade's voice was quiet.
Not unkind, which surprised him. He had expected fury from Jade — her default mode with him these past two years had been a barely contained hostility she made no effort to disguise.
This was something worse than fury. This was the voice of a woman who had given up being angry on someone else's behalf.
"She doesn't want to talk to you tonight, Dominic. "
"It's our anniversary."
Another pause. "I know."
"Jade—"
"She doesn't want to talk to you tonight," she repeated. And then, with the specific gentleness of someone delivering a terminal diagnosis: "She might not want to talk to you for a while." A beat. "Goodnight, Dominic."
She hung up.
He sat with the dead phone for a moment.
Then he opened his calendar.
He was not entirely sure why. Some impulse toward data, toward evidence, toward the version of problems he knew how to solve. He opened it and went back three months and began, methodically, to count the nights he had come home after midnight.
He stopped at thirty.
He kept going.
He passed forty.
He was somewhere around forty-eight when he closed the calendar and set the phone face-down on the table, because the number was no longer information. It was a verdict.
His phone rang.
His mother's name appeared on the screen. Victoria Ashford, with the contact photo he'd assigned her years ago — a formal shot from a foundation gala, her in pearls, impeccably composed. He stared at it.
She would have heard. He did not know how — he had not called anyone, the papers had been sitting on this table for less than an hour — but Victoria had a network of knowing that operated below the visible frequency of normal human communication. She always knew.
He answered.
"Dominic." Her voice was warm with the particular warmth she deployed when she was pleased about something. "I heard about Serena. Honestly, darling, I think this might be for the—"
He hung up.
He did not throw the phone. He set it down very carefully, the way he set things down when the alternative was destruction, and he went to the kitchen and stood at the counter where the flowers were wilting beside the sink.
He had bought them on Fifty-Third Street.
A woman selling them from a cart, white peonies, Serena's favorite — he knew they were her favorite, he had always known that, it had never once translated into action until tonight when it was too late.
He had been in the back of the car and something had moved through him, some abrupt recognition that it was their anniversary, and he had told his driver to pull over and he had bought flowers from a street vendor and felt, for approximately four blocks, like a man who was doing the right thing.
He had been forty minutes late and he had thought flowers would fix it.
He put his hand flat on the counter and pressed until he could feel the cold of the stone.
He needed to think.
Richard Holt, his attorney, would need to be called in the morning.
The papers would need to be responded to, because Serena had — and this detail kept surfacing, kept insisting on its own significance — she had prepared these papers in advance.
Weeks, at minimum. She had sat with this decision long enough to find a lawyer, to file a petition, to have papers prepared and held and brought here tonight.
She had made this decision while they were still living together.
While he'd slept beside her. While she'd made coffee in the mornings — she always made coffee, he could not remember the last time he had made coffee for both of them — and asked about his schedule.
She had already left before she left.
He went to the bedroom.