Page 144 of Dial F for Finance

“Dominic. You all right?”

“Never better,” I say, already moving, the lie so automatic it should have its own payroll number. “Bid on the Triumph, Thomas. Trust me. Everything old can be rebuilt.”

The Phantom takes nine minutes to reach her building, and I spend all of them rehearsing speeches and deleting every draft.

The driver lets me out, and I hand him a hefty tip, thanking him and telling him not to wait. The rain has ramped up to horizontal. I jog to the entry, collar up, and her doorman waves me through with a smile and a “wet one tonight, Mr. Cruz,” because he doesn’t know I blew it.

My heart lurches in my throat.

Fuck. I blew it.

I take the stairs. Every other night, I’d let the elevator ride be a reprieve—a free fifteen seconds to reorganize my thoughts, smooth the exterior, wedge the chaos into the correct drawer. But my hands are shaking and if I stop moving I’ll lose my nerve.

If Jenna hears me let myself in, she doesn’t acknowledge it. I knock quietly on the open bedroom door, then step inside.

I find her by her bed, the gown over a chair like shed armor, and my wife is in leggings and an old Mercer hoodie with her wet hair twisted up, and there are two suitcases open on the bed, piled high with her things.

“Jen.”

“I’m not running away,” she says, not looking up, not stopping.

“OK.” I say it gently, and immediately regret it, because she flinches, and what she does when she flinches is take every feeling and bury it under six feet of professional-grade granite.

“Don’t,” she says. “Not right now.”

She unzips a side pocket, transfers her toothbrush and retainer case, closes it with so much force it nearly takes the zipper tag off. This is not a woman gathering herself for a dramatic exit. It’s the opposite. She’s cleaning up after a party that ended hours ago, with nobody left to impress but the ghosts. I watch her hands, memorize every quick movement—they shake only once, and she tames it fast.

“I’m leaving, Dominic.”

I don’t do anything for a long second. There is a version of this story where I say something sharp, or grand, or weaponized with hurt. But watching her, I get it. She’s not trying to wound me. She’s just running the script. She’s unspooling every part of her that got knotted to my name by laying it out, perfectly folded so she can leave to protect what’s left of herself.

I don’t ask her to stop. I don’t crowd her or beg. I just sit on the edge of the mattress, elbows on my knees, and trace the grooves in my palm with my thumb, because if I look at her I’ll lose my last grip on composure.

“You can’t even say it?” Her voice is level, so careful it shames me. “You can’t even ask why?”

“I know why,” I say. “And I know exactly how I fucked it up.”

She gives me a look I’ve seen a hundred times. The difference is that every other time I was the one running the room—managing the temperature, keeping the ceiling up—and she was watching me do it. Now there’s no room. Now there’s just her, and there’s me, a giant gap between us, and the weight of an unfinished plan in my breast pocket.

“Dominic,” she says. “This sucks and it’s going to keep sucking, so I’m saying it once and then I’m leaving. You could have knocked the roof off tonight and it still would have happened the same way. We—us—this”—she gestures with the flat of her hand, sweeping the shards between us—“was never going to work for more than a little while.”

My jaw twitches. “That wasn’t how it felt from over here.”

She shakes her head, not even angry, just tired. “Because you run on the high, Dominic. The show. The chase, the charm, the jokes. You’re built to set the tempo for whatever room you’re in, and you’ll die before you let the room set it for you. I can’t keep up. I don’t want to keep up.”

“Tonight isn’t about the jokes,” I say. “I was proud of you.”

She breaks, just for a second. Looks at the floor, then at me. “I know. I know you were. That’s what made it so—” She swallows. “I wish I could be the woman you need. The one who could let that be enough. But I needed it to be different, and I let myself think that maybe if I worked hard enough, if we were careful, we could keep our chemistry and still build something sustainable. But we can’t. You are you. And I am me. That part’s never going to change. We are fundamentally unsustainable, Dominic.”

I want to talk her out of it. I want to make her laugh, because if she’s laughing she can’t be leaving. But she’s not asking for reasons or reassurance, and she’s six steps further down the road than I ever saw coming.

“That’s not true,” I say. “We’re just—we’re different, but that’s the entire reason it worked.”

She gives a ghost of a smile. “It worked until it didn’t. Compatibility and sustainability are not the same thing. Ask Logan—he’ll chart you a regression.”

“Jenna—” I don’t even finish. I want to fix it, but I know even before the words leave my mouth we’re already past the place for repairs.

She grits her teeth, patient but final. “I spent tonight thinking I could finally belong in a room like that. Then you called me a challenge. ‘Impossible.’ Even if you meant it as a compliment, you put me in a box so you could be the person who opened it. You rewrote my story so you could win me. And people laughed and joked about me, and I felt so fucking small.”