Page 145 of Dial F for Finance

“You’re not small.” The force of it flattens my voice.

She looks at me like she wishes I were even one percent less convincing. “You say that, but you also need me to be. Because if I’m not a challenge, if I’m not the ice queen, then who are you? You exist to solve problems, to break the room open, to win. You don’t know how to let it go. And I’m not—I’m not something to be won. I’m not the next impossible thing.”

“I know that.” I do. Jesus, I do. “You’re not a problem, Jenna. You’re the answer.”

Her bag slides off the bed, lands against my foot. I don’t move. I just watch her, every muscle in my body fighting to stay out of her way and simultaneously screaming at me to drag her back and make her understand.

“You got it backward,” she says, soft. “You say I’m the answer, but what you actually need is the question.” She stands in the narrow space between the suitcases and the dresser. “If I were easy to charm—if I wasn’t the ice queen or the challenge—would you even have been interested in me?”

Her mouth is set, but her eyes shine with the dare of it—she’s inviting me to knock the premise off its axis, to fix it right now or else let her go for good. I try. God, I try. I run the simulation: what if she was easy, what if she didn’t make me sweat, what if I never felt my pulse hammer sideways when she cracked a smile? Would I have wanted her? Would it have worked, or would I have gotten bored and pulled the plug before the first month?

I don’t know the answer to that. The woman I saw in Bennett’s office that very first day was tough and brave and entirely unimpressed by me. For her to be anything else is to erase a massive part of her, invent someone else. And I never wanted someone else. Only her. Exactly as she is.

It’s true that I’ve never been bored a day in my life with Jenna. I’ve also never loved anyone more completely, and never more chaotically.

But I don’t say any of that, because if I do, I’m just confirming the very thing she’s trying to name: the dynamic, the impossible, the fucking “challenge.” My language is wars and wins and she’s done being a prize. I want to promise her I can shift, that I’ll build a whole new lexicon if that’s what it takes, but in this moment, all I can do is show up, unarmed, and hope she’ll see that’s enough.

“You had me at the first meeting, Pemberton,” I say, and it comes out broken, like I’m learning to talk again. “Who you were in that room—how you didn’t give a shit who I was, how you made me work for every inch—yeah, I loved it. But I stayed because you were the only person in any of those rooms who ever looked at me and saw past the game.”

“That isn’t what I asked,” she whispers, tears at the edges of her eyes.

I want to tell her I know. That she isn’t an equation, or a deal, or the best kind of opponent in a room rigged for men. That she’s the breath in my fucking lungs, and for all the jokes I’ve told, all the angles I’ve played, the only time I recognized the real thing was when she hosed me down with contempt from across a conference table.

But I don’t. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? She doesn’t want another speech. She wants the respect I never learned to give in silence.

“Say something,” she says, so quiet it’s like she’s reading my mind. “Anything that isn’t—I don’t know—damage control.”

I look up. My voice is foreign to me. “I have made a life out of reading people. Of seeing what they want before they know it, and giving it to them so I always get the upper hand. But you—” I shake my head, because there is no spin, not for this. “I knew what you needed from the first time we spoke, Jenna. You wanted someone who could see you. Who didn’t just use your brain as a power tool or your ambition as a mirror. You wanted—” I stop, because now her hands are shaking and I can’t touch her, can’t even move.

She’s looking at the floor, but she’s listening.

“I have fucked up a lot of things in my life. Contracts. Friendships. My own family, more than once. I was going to come here tonight and win you over one last time. Some pitch-perfect, grand gesture, a thing that would eclipse your doubts so completely you’d forget to have them. But I can’t. Not this time. I have to just⁠—”

I swallow it. My mouth feels raw.

“I’m in love with you,” I tell her. “The woman who takes over a negotiation because everyone else is wasting time. The woman who learned to sign because Dustin loves Hannah. The woman who leaves her makeup beside my sink and makes room for my razors beside hers. I know how hard it was for you to even try this with me, and I know I made it worse tonight.”

She sits on the window ledge, hands knotted, legs drawn up. Her wet hair begins slipping from its knot. She is the most beautiful thing in Chicago.

“But none of that matters now. You don’t need my pride, or my devotion, or even my fucking apology. You need someone who can sit here and let you walk away, and not try to win. Even if it kills them.”

Her face is streaked, mascara mixing with fresh tears. She tips her head back, lets it rest against the window, and for a long time the only sound in the room is the rush of rain on glass.

“I know you don’t want to sign the annulment papers,” she says. Not an accusation, just a stated fact, sized to fit the space between us. “I know you were probably planning some kind of countermove. A loophole, a delay, a speech that would turn it into a . . . a stunt with a happy ending, or at least a second act.” She wipes at her face with her sleeve. “But you don’t need to do that.”

She looks at me, eyes rimmed red but blindingly clear. “You can set whatever terms you want in the divorce. I won’t fight you on it and I don’t want anything from you either.” Her voice shakes but the words don’t. “Just a clean break, on the record the way you want it, Dominic. No erasure of what we did in Tokyo—you win that much. You just don’t win in the way you hoped.”

She goes back to packing, efficient and relentless and so heartbreakingly herself. I sit there, hands useless in my lap, wishing for a single grenade of wit or bravado that could un-cord this knot. I want to scream that I don’t care about any of it, that I would set every dollar in my name on fire if it meant she’d stay, but she wouldn’t believe it and that’s the real crucible—she knows me, so well, that she can call every bluff without even looking at the table.

“Where will you go?” I ask, when I can.

“Home.”

“To your mother’s.” It comes out flat with disbelief. Queens. The kitchen with the cake in the trash. The woman with the dagger tongue. My wife, who built thirty floors of glass between herself and that house, is packing two suitcases to move back into it.

“Yes.” Her chin comes up, daring me to make it strange. “Hailey’s references are being checked. She’ll be in San Francisco soon. Eleven years she’s held that house together so I could build a life here.” She exhales. “Now it’s my turn. Ma’s started going to meetings. She needs support. Help with the house. Whatever comes next. Somebody has to be there, and for once it’s going to be me.” She zips the second case, one clean pull. “I need time to figure out what I want to do with my life, Dominic. And there’s nothing here for me anymore.”

Nothing here.