Page 143 of Dial F for Finance

He reaches for my arm—gentle, not a grab, just a hover. “Sweetheart, talk to me. Did I fuck up? Tell me what I did.”

I shake him off, not because I want to hurt him, but because right now the last thing I can do is let him see my eyes.

“I can’t—I just need a minute,” I manage, and it is less a voice than a gasp.

He tries again, softer. “Hey. Jenna. Look at me.”

I turn on him, every word sharp enough to bleed. “Do you know how many times in my life I’ve been called a ‘challenge’? Do you know what it’s like being measured in every single room, every fucking time, and then having you stand up there and use the exact words every man who ever made a joke out of me used?” The words choke off, replaced by a shudder. “You turned me into a challenge for the whole room to laugh at, called yourself victorious, then finished by replacing my fucking name with yours. For what?” My hand curls into the fabric at my waist, because that is all that’s holding me upright. “Was that supposed to make me feel proud of myself—or remind everyone that you were the one who finally cracked the code and won?”

His face falls.

“Jenna—no. No, sweetheart. I was proud. I wanted them to see you the way I do. I wasn’t—fuck, I wasn’t thinking⁠—”

“That’s right,” I spit, shocked at the force in my own voice. “You weren’t. For once you didn’t do it on purpose. You just—said it. Like them. Like him.” I taste the copper at the back of my throat, that old familiar taste of remembering exactly how far you haven’t come. “It’s fucking prom all over again.”

His head pulls back. “What do you mean?”

“Do you know why I didn’t go to prom, Dominic? It’s not because I wasn’t asked. I was. The captain of the football team. The beautiful boy everyone loved. He worked for weeks to make me believe him, and when I finally did, he drove past me in a limo with his friends and shot me with paintballs while they filmed it to show everyone inside.”

My voice breaks. I hate that it breaks.

“So when you stood up there and called me a challenge, when everyone laughed, when you lifted your glass and called yourself victorious—” I swallow hard. “I was seventeen again. And you were the boy in the car. And everyone—everyone—was fucking laughing at me.”

The memory is so raw that it doesn’t even sting; it just rips, clean as a tendon.

“For years, I told myself I wasn’t going to be that girl again. I was never going to be the joke. If I couldn’t win at being wanted, I would win at being needed. Or at least at being unbreakable. And then tonight—” I clamp my mouth shut so hard I taste blood.

“Jenna, I’m sorry⁠—”

I wipe at my face, furious with myself. “Don’t. Just don’t. I don’t want this. I don’t want to feel this.”

The doorman catches my eye, and I wave him over, desperate for a lifeline. He reads the room and flags a cab, the yellow light winking at the curb, ironic as hell. I step into the rain, painting streaks down my arms, and open the car door before Dominic can finish the two strides between us. He doesn’t try to block me, just stands there in the thickening storm, hands helpless at his sides.

“Where to, ma’am?” The cabbie’s accent is pure old Chicago. He watches me in the rearview with the half-worry, half-curiosity that says he’s driven a hundred women away from a hundred black-tie train wrecks.

“Home,” I say, swiping angrily at my tears. “I just want to go home.”

CHAPTER 40

Dominic

“Cruz! I thought that was you. Leaving already?”

Thomas Canning is coming up the hotel steps through the rain with an umbrella and no hurry, dinner-jacketed, composed, arriving at his own pace to a party that started three hours ago. And here is the sick magic trick of being me: my wife’s cab is still visible at the light on Michigan Avenue, my chest is a building coming down in sections, and my face—entirely without authorization—assembles the smile. Boots the machine. Showtime.

“Thomas.” My hand comes out. My voice arrives warm and even. I could kill it for that. “Late entrance. Very fashionable.”

“Strategic.” He shakes my hand, rueful. “I’ll be honest with you—I nearly didn’t come at all. First one of these since the divorce went through. I kept picturing it: two hundred people, half of them doing the math on my settlement, the other half lining up sympathetic widows and hungry socialites.” He tips the umbrella back and gives me a dry, tired smile. “The vultures can smell newly divorced at a thousand yards, Dominic. I wanted one more year before I became the buffet.”

Newly divorced.

The words go through me like a shard of glass. Because that’s me. That’s Thursday. That’s the word that attaches to me the moment my wife stops being my wife—Dominic Cruz, newly single, back on the market, the vultures circling, everyone doing the math, and none of it, none of it, mattering, because the only person whose math I care about is in a cab heading north with my whole life inside her.

“—anyway, Willa promised me the auction has a Triumph in it this year, so.” Thomas is still talking. Kind, wry, decent Thomas, who stood up for David when it counted, whose only crime tonight is arriving with the truth in his mouth. “Are you heading back in? I hear your wife was one of Willa’s chosen few. Sorry I missed the speeches honoring her.”

“I have to go.”

It comes out with no charm on it at all. Naked. Wrong-shaped. Thomas blinks, and something old and perceptive moves behind his eyes—a man who has watched another man’s face do exactly this before, probably in his own mirror.