Page 129 of Dial F for Finance

“Next week,” I repeat.

“Yeah,” he says. “But you’re good, right? Audrey said Jenna is the happiest she’s ever been, and you’re preparing the greatest date night in the history of date nights to celebrate her at the gala. The deadline isn’t going to change anything, right?”

I keep my face perfectly blank. It’s a skill that has saved me millions in negotiations, but right now, it’s taking every ounce of my willpower to maintain. Thursday. We have less than a week left.

“Right,” I say, my voice smooth, entirely frictionless. “The gala. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Logan echoes, satisfied. He leans over the table to inspect the remaining solids. “Audrey said she’d bet a month of her salary you’re planning on making things permanent with Jenna at the gala. I doubled her wager and said you’d use the gala as the staging room and keep the ask private.”

I force myself to chew and swallow. I’ve been so deeply entrenched in the daily reality of Jenna—waking up next to her, sparring with her over coffee, watching beautiful hairline cracks form in her bulletproof façade—that I stopped thinking we were operating inside a timeline. I’ve been treating a probationary lease like a permanent holding.

How did I overlook this?

I turn my beer bottle slowly within the ring of condensation it left on the table.

The gala is tomorrow night. The car, the tuxedo, the flower—every detail is already arranged. I built it to celebrate Jenna. To give her the prom she never had and put her at the center of a room she earned.

Now it has to do something else too.

If I can make her feel certain enough—seen enough, loved enough—then Thursday won’t be a deadline. It’ll be another morning with my wife.

“Dominic?”

I blink. “Huh?”

“About what I wanted to ask you.”

The deadline is still ringing in my skull, but Logan is looking at me with the careful, rehearsed expression of a man about to hand me something breakable.

So I drain the last of my beer, put Jenna, the gala, and next week in a box and shove the lid down.

“What’s on your mind?”

He takes a breath. “Audrey and I set a date. October. Small—forty people, the lake house, Audrey wants the vows before sunset because of the light, and I’ve run exactly one probability that matters, which is that there is a one hundred percent chance I get this next part wrong if I improvise, so I wrote it down.” He doesn’t take anything out of his pocket. He recites it, eyes steady on mine, like it’s the one block of code he’s ever memorized. “You taught me how to human, Dominic. Before Audrey, before any of it—you found me, friendless, and decided I was worth the trouble, and every good thing in my life routes through that decision. So. Will you stand next to me while I marry her? Be my best man?”

The ’90s pop music still plays. The MALL sign buzzes. And I stand there in a dive bar with a pool cue in my hand and my chest doing something enormous, thinking about a skinny kid at Harvard who wouldn’t make eye contact, who’s now looking at me dead-steady, asking me to stand up for him outside his lake house in October.

“Kid,” I manage. “Try and stop me.”

Logan nods once, satisfied, and then ruins me completely by adding, “Good. You were the only name on the list. It wasn’t even a list, Dominic. It was just you.”

CHAPTER 36

Jenna

The presidential suite at the Peninsula currently contains seven women, four robes, two hair teams, a makeup artist named Sasha who works exclusively in silence, and a volume of champagne that Audrey has begun tracking on the notepad by the phone “for science.”

It was Layla’s idea—of course it was—one suite, everyone together, get ready the way you’re supposed to before a night like this. I budgeted an hour for it and planned to arrive composed and finished. Instead, I’ve been here since two o’clock in a robe with my hair in rollers, eating room-service fries off Serena’s plate, and I can’t remember the last time I laughed this much.

Possibly never. The committee has stopped keeping minutes.

“Hold still,” Hailey says. She’s cross-legged on the ottoman in front of me, doing my nails herself because she didn’t trust “a stranger with this moment.” Her own hair is already done—old-Hollywood waves that took the hair team forty minutes and made Miranda gasp like a period drama. “You keep flexing your fingers. It’s like you’re trying to type emails in your head.”

“I am not.” I laugh.

“It’s like you’re so unaccustomed to having fun that your body is staging a revolt,” she teases. “To whom it may concern. Henceforth!”

“I do not sound like that,” I say, pinching a fry and not acknowledging that I absolutely do sound like that.