CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Second Attempt
Dominic — POV
His therapist was a woman named Dr. Alicia Webb.
She was fifty-three, wore reading glasses on a chain, and had the particular gift of saying the most devastating things in the most conversational tone, as though she were commenting on the weather while dismantling the architecture of a man's self-conception.
"Tell me about the second attempt," she said, at the beginning of their fourth session.
Dominic looked at her. "I haven't made it yet."
"You're planning it."
"I'm thinking about it."
"What's the difference?"
He sat with that for a moment. The space between planning and thinking — whether that gap was strategy or cowardice.
"The first one failed," he said.
"How did it fail?"
He had replayed it enough times to have the architecture of it clear.
The flowers — which Serena had acknowledged, correctly, through Chloe rather than to him directly, which told him exactly where he stood.
The letter that Marcus had eviscerated. The reservation at Carino's that she had not used.
Grand gestures deployed with the precision of business proposals.
"I approached it the way I approach acquisition targets," he said. "I identified the problem. I researched the solution. I executed."
"And love doesn't respond to that."
"No."
"What does it respond to?"
He thought about the bar at the gala. Ninety seconds of conversation. Her voice saying I wanted a husband who came home. The devastation of its accuracy.
"Truth," he said. "Without strategy. Without the filter."
"What would the truth cost you?"
"Everything I've spent thirty years building."
Dr. Webb looked at him over her glasses. "Your defenses."
"Yes."
"The performance of competence."
"Yes."
"The belief that emotion is a liability."
"Yes."
"That's a lot to give up," she said.
"She's worth more than all of it," Dominic said.
He said it without hesitation, and it surprised him — not the content but the immediacy of it. The way it arrived without construction, without the pause he gave most important statements.
"Then the second attempt," Dr. Webb said, "needs to come from there."
He called Serena on a Tuesday.
She answered on the fourth ring, which he counted.
"I'd like to take you to coffee," he said. "Thirty minutes. No negotiation, no agenda. I want to apologize. Not explain. Not ask for anything. Just apologize."
A silence.
"Why coffee specifically?" she said.
"Because it's public, it's time-limited, and it's honest. I'm not trying to romance you into a setting. I'm asking for thirty minutes of your time to say something that matters."
Another silence.
"One hour," she said. "Public place. I'm bringing Jade."
"Yes," he said. "Whatever you need."
He had not anticipated Jade.
He probably should have.
They met at a coffee shop in the West Village — her neighborhood, her choice, her terms. He arrived first and took the table by the window because Jade would want to see the exit routes. He ordered nothing and waited and resisted every impulse to check his phone.
They arrived together. Jade in a coat that seemed to radiate hostility as a design feature. Serena in a gray sweater, hair loose, no particular attempt at armor. Looking entirely like herself.
He stood.
Jade sat down, crossed her arms, and said absolutely nothing.
Serena sat across from him.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," he said.
It was the first time they had sat across from each other without lawyers or event staff or performance in between.
He had prepared nothing.
That was intentional.
"I know about the Singapore file," he said. "I know that Elena Marsh was placed in my office through my mother's lawyer. I know the meetings were canceled before I left. I know I was in Singapore for five days while you—" He stopped. Said it without flinching. "While you lost our baby. Alone."
Serena was very still.
"I also know about the job offer three years ago. What happened to it. Who made it disappear." He held her gaze. "I know about the social campaign. The friends who drifted. The events you stopped attending after year two."
"You did your research," she said quietly.
"Yes. But not to use it. To understand it." He paused. "There's a difference."
Jade uncrossed her arms. Just slightly. He noted it.
"Here's what I need you to know," he said.
"My mother's actions made specific things worse.
Singapore. The job. Those are hers. But she didn't create the foundation of the problem.
I did. I chose the empire, every time there was a choice to make.
Not because I didn't love you. Because I convinced myself that providing for you was the same as being with you. "
He stopped. Started again.
"I never asked you what love actually looked like from where you were standing. I never asked. I assumed. I made an enormous, unfixable assumption and I called it caring for you."
Serena looked at her coffee.
When she looked up, her eyes were bright but her voice was steady.
"I know," she said. "That's the hardest part. I know you loved me. I just was never enough to make you change."
"You were enough," he said. "I wasn't."
The sentence sat in the air between them.
Jade made a small sound he couldn't read.
Serena nodded, once, slowly. Not forgiveness. Not reopening. Just — acknowledgment. The honest accounting of two people who had, between them, failed something real.
They sat for the remainder of the hour. They talked — carefully, without agenda.
He asked about the Foundation job and she told him about it with a warmth in her voice that did something specific to his chest. She asked about the company restructuring and he told her about Marcus's transition to interim CEO with a candor he would not have managed six months ago.
They were, for the first time in a long time, just two people talking.
He had missed this. He had missed her specifically in this way — the intelligence of her, the precision, the laugh that broke out once over something minor and then retreated quickly as though she caught herself.
He did not push that.
He did not reach.
They left separately. He stood on the sidewalk and watched them walk away — Jade talking, Serena listening, their arms linked in the easy way of sisters who had spent a lifetime as each other's infrastructure.
His phone buzzed.
Marcus: How did it go?
He typed back: Better than I deserved.
Marcus: That's a start.
Dominic looked down at his hands. He thought about the letter. The flowers. The reservation. All the wrong approaches to the right feeling. He thought about what Dr. Webb had said about defenses and performances and the enormous costly thing of being simply, irrevocably honest.
He thought about Serena's face when he said you were enough. I wasn't.
He had watched something happen in her expression at that moment. Something he could not name but recognized — the specific shift of a person hearing a true thing they had been waiting for without knowing they were waiting.
He was not reading that as permission.
He was reading it as information.
He walked back to the car.
He did not call his mother. He did not go to the office.
He went to his hotel — the four-star on Park Avenue that had become the closest thing he had to a home, which was clarifying in its own particular way — and he sat by the window and thought about the brownstone in Brooklyn that Serena had loved in year one.
He opened his laptop.
He searched the listing.