CHAPTER TEN The First Attempt
Dominic — POV
Marcus told him not to send the letter.
Marcus read it in twelve minutes. He set it on the desk. He removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose with the expression of a man containing a very specific response.
"Well?" Dominic said.
"I need you to hear something."
"Tell me."
"This reads like a merger proposal," Marcus said.
Dominic stared at him.
"You have sections," Marcus said. "You have subheadings, Dom.
You have an itemized breakdown of every specific failure you've identified with a column that could generously be described as action items for remediation.
" He pushed the letter back across the desk.
"You've analyzed your marriage like a distressed asset. "
"I needed her to see that I understand—"
"She doesn't want your analysis," Marcus said.
"She wants to know you broke. Not that you identified the fracture points and developed a corrective strategy.
That you broke." He held his gaze with the steady directness of someone who had earned the right to say this by twelve years of watching Dominic succeed at everything while failing at this.
"She lived with the managing version of you for four years.
She doesn't need the managing version to show up and manage the end of the marriage. She needs the real one."
Dominic looked at the letter.
He had been proud of the letter.
He was beginning to understand that this was part of the problem.
He had Marcus send flowers instead — two dozen white peonies, no card except her name, because he was not ready to send a card that wasn't the letter and wasn't nothing.
He had Richard Holt's office send a formal message to Elliot Crane requesting, in careful legal language, that any upcoming property decisions be deferred pending discussion.
He had, on an impulse he managed to suppress before acting on it, looked up whether the brownstone Serena had once wanted — the one on Garfield Place in Park Slope that she had shown him listings for in year one with a brightness in her eyes that he had overruled without adequate thought — was still on the market.
It was not, currently, on the market.
He had asked a real estate contact to monitor it anyway.
On Thursday afternoon he booked Carino's.
The restaurant where he had proposed, on a Tuesday evening seven years ago when he had been so nervous that he'd arrived forty minutes early and drunk two glasses of wine waiting for her.
He had not been nervous about many things in his life.
Serena Voss, sitting across from him at a table in that restaurant with her hair down and her laugh taking over her whole face, had made him nervous in a way that felt, then, like a gift.
He had the invitation delivered to Elliot Crane's office with a note: Serena — I'm not asking for reconciliation. I'm asking for one dinner. I want to listen. That's all.
He waited.
He waited the way he had not waited for things in fifteen years — without engineering the outcome, without the contingency plan, without the backup approach ready. He waited plainly, which was the most uncomfortable thing he had done since deciding not to contest the papers.
The flowers arrived at her apartment. He knew this because Chloe — who had become, in three weeks, the most improbably useful person in his life through no strategy of his own — mentioned casually that she had received a text from someone she was in contact with confirming delivery.
A text arrived from Serena. Not to him directly. To Chloe.
Please thank him for the flowers. They're beautiful.
He read the forwarded message and noted the routing — she had thanked him through his assistant, which was not the response of a woman who wanted to engage directly but was also not the response of a woman who felt nothing.
He held that.
She did not come to Carino's.
He sat at the table for an hour with a glass of wine and the same view he had proposed across seven years ago, and the ma?tre d' who had been there for twenty years gave him the particular sympathy of someone who understood the situation without being told and did not mention it.
Dominic ate alone and did not feel sorry for himself, which surprised him.
He felt, instead, the specific rightness of sitting with the consequence of his own behavior.
She owed him nothing. He had no claim on her time or her presence.
The fact that she didn't come was not a rejection of his effort.
It was a woman protecting herself from a man who had not yet demonstrated that the effort meant something.
He understood that.
He tipped extravagantly and drove to Greenwich.
He had called ahead. His father knew he was coming. Victoria was home.
He had prepared for this version of the conversation less carefully than the letter — deliberately, because preparation, in this context, felt like armor he should not be wearing.
He parked and walked to the door and Nathan let him in.
Victoria was in the sitting room. He went there directly.
He did not sit.
He put the letter — the one Marcus had rejected, the one he had not sent, his own document of reckoning — on the table beside her chair.
"Read it," he said. "Not tonight. Whenever.
I don't need a response." He paused. "I need you to understand the full scope of what I now know about your involvement in my marriage.
Because I am not going to ask you again to account for it.
I'm not interested in your accounting. I'm interested in making sure you understand that I know. "
Victoria looked at the document. Did not touch it.
"I've been speaking to my lawyers," she said. "The settlement I offered Serena was generous—"
"It was an attempt to buy her silence," Dominic said. "And it was an insult. Serena is not for purchase and she has never been for purchase, which is one of approximately a thousand things about her that you have systematically misunderstood."
"She is not right for—"
"She is the best person I have ever known," he said.
"She is more intelligent and more resilient and more genuinely good than anyone in this family, including me.
And she wasted four years in a marriage where I failed her and you dismantled her and neither of us will ever fully answer for what that cost." He looked at his mother with a clarity that was entirely without heat, which was the most dangerous kind.
"I will not be making acquisition decisions that require your oversight.
I will not be attending family functions where your social management of my professional relationships is operative.
I will not be involving you in any aspect of my personal life going forward.
" He paused. "This is not a punishment. It is a boundary. There is a difference."
Victoria looked at him.
Something crossed her face — not guilt, he had given up expecting guilt, but something more complicated. The expression of a woman looking at the architecture of her own choices and finding it inhabited differently than she intended.
She said nothing.
He went to find his father.
Nathan was in the study. The pipe tobacco smell. The old books. His father, in the chair he always occupied, looking up with the steady, patient quality of someone who had been expecting this visit.
"She didn't come to dinner," Dominic said.
"No."
"The flowers went."
"That's something."
He sat down. "Marcus said the letter was too managed. That I need to stop approaching her like an acquisition."
Nathan looked at him for a moment. "Is he right?"
"Probably." He put his elbows on his knees. "I don't know how else to approach things that matter to me."
"Yes, you do," Nathan said. "You did it once.
Seven years ago, when you were so nervous before proposing that you arrived at the restaurant forty minutes early and drank wine alone at the table.
You did it like a man who didn't know the outcome and was terrified and showed up anyway.
" He paused. "Do that. Without the analysis.
Without the strategy. Just show up and mean it and don't know what happens next. "
Dominic looked at his father.
This man — this quiet, complicated, failing man who had made the errors that made Dominic possible and who was, late and inadequately, trying to do the thing he should have done decades ago, which was simply be honest.
"She has a job now," Dominic said. "At the Foundation. They offered her the position that Victoria buried."
"I know. Your mother told me."
"How did she—"
"Your mother knows everything that happens in this family within twenty-four hours of its occurring," Nathan said dryly. "That particular skill has never been the problem."
"She's going to be extraordinary at it," Dominic said.
Not wistfully. Plainly. As a fact, stated without the management of how it made him feel.
"She was extraordinary at everything she touched.
The nonprofit work. The Foundation strategy.
Everything. I should have been proud of that in ways I actually showed. "
"Yes," Nathan said simply. "You should have."
No mitigation. No softening. Just the fact, stated by a man who had done the same thing and was old enough to know that the kindest thing he could do now was not to soften it.
Dominic sat with that.
On the drive back to Manhattan, his phone lit up. A message from Elliot Crane's office — a formal notification that the divorce proceedings were moving forward on schedule, and that Serena had confirmed her interest in proceeding without delay.
He read it at a red light.
He put the phone down.
He thought about what his father had said about showing up like a man who didn't know the outcome.
He thought about Carino's and the flowers and the letter Marcus had rejected.
He thought about what it actually looked like — not as a strategy, not as a step in a sequence, but as a true and unglamorous act of a man in love with a woman who had every right to walk away.
What did it look like?
Not letters. Not restaurants. Not managed expressions of remorse.
Something smaller. Something real.
He arrived at the hotel.
He went upstairs.
He called his therapist and left a message requesting an additional session that week, a third session, which would be the first time in his life he had voluntarily increased the frequency of an activity that made him feel genuinely out of his depth.
He sat in the hotel room.
He thought about the brownstone on Garfield Place.
He had looked it up again that morning. Still not on the market.
He was checking weekly now.
Not as a gambit. Not as a move. As the simple persistence of a man who remembered the look on her face when she'd shown him the listing, and who understood, finally and fully and too late, what it meant that he had looked at that face and chosen the penthouse anyway.
He opened his laptop.
He wrote nothing.
He sat with the blank document for a long time.
Then he typed: What does she need that I haven't thought of yet?
He looked at the question.
He did not have an answer.
But he thought that asking it, honestly and without a ready reply, was probably the first genuinely useful thing he had done in four years.
Outside, Manhattan carried on.
He sat in the light of a blank document and let himself not know.