Page 148 of Dial F for Finance

“So you gave him a fake name? And he didn’t give you one at all?”

She nods. “Correct.”

I stare at her, equal parts horrified and impressed. Hailey has always been comfortable with the unknown. She can slip into a fictional identity, have a night of passionate, nameless abandon, and walk away without leaving a single fingerprint. It’s chaos, but it’s a chaos she pilots flawlessly.

Meanwhile, I’m a woman who builds spreadsheets for floral arrangements. I require variables to be solved and risks to be mitigated. And right now, I’m sitting in a departure lounge, hyperventilating over a man whose Social Security number, dietary restrictions, and exact time of day he needs to switch from coffee to tea are permanently burned into my brain. I’m fleeing the most heavily documented relationship of my life, wearing a gold band my own anatomy refuses to relinquish.

“You’re a menace to society,” I tell her, though a tiny, genuine fraction of a smile breaks through my exhaustion.

“I’m an enigma,” Hailey corrects, bumping her shoulder against mine one last time.

The gate agent’s voice cuts through the ambient noise again, sharper this time. “Zone Three, you may now proceed to boarding.”

“That’s us,” Hailey says. She tosses her pretzel into a nearby trash can and hoists her duffel bag onto her shoulder. The playful glint in her eye softens into something fiercely protective, the sister who’ll always have my back. “Come on, Nen. Let’s get you home.”

CHAPTER 42

Dominic

“You’re overpacked,” I inform the weekender. “Somebody should audit you.”

The suitcase declines to laugh. Tough room.

It’s four in the afternoon on the worst Sunday of my life, and I’m sitting on my bedroom floor with a bottle of the Japanese whiskey I keep for celebrations and funerals, folding my wife’s clothes into her weekender like each one is a fragile piece of collateral. I smooth the wrinkles out of a charcoal cashmere sweater—the one she wore that morning in Tokyo when she argued with me over room service. I fold the sleeves inward, aligning the edges with a sickening, methodical precision. It takes me three minutes just to place it in the bag. At this rate, I’ll be finished sometime in the next fiscal year.

I take a pull straight from the bottle of Yamazaki. It burns beautifully, searing a path down my throat and settling like a hot stone in my gut.

My phone has been buzzing on the nightstand every twelve minutes for the last six hours. I don’t have to look to know it’s the group chat panicking. Bennett demanding a status report. Logan calculating the exact probability of my emotional collapse. Caleb threatening me with psychiatric intervention. I’m ignoring all of them. The perimeter is breached. The fortress is empty, and there isn’t a damn thing any of them can do to fix it.

I pick up a pair of her yoga pants. They still smell like her—that faint, clean scent of expensive bergamot and relentless ambition. A sharp, physical ache punches me right behind the ribs, stealing my breath. I drop the fabric and drag a heavy hand down my face, feeling the rough scrape of a beard since I missed my morning shave.

I squeeze my eyes shut, but the darkness just projects high-definition replays of last night.

“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 grab another shirt—the soft white button-down she wore the morning we negotiated our terms—and fold it. The courier is scheduled for five to take these bags to Queens. I’m boxing up my wife’s life into neat, shippable squares because I couldn’t figure out how to just be a man standing next to her. I had to be the guy who won her. I hate myself with a sudden, violent clarity that cuts right through the eighty-proof haze.

I am the architect of my own goddamn ruin.

Carefully adding the last of the things in her drawer—as well as the hoodie of mine she claimed the first week she spent here—I zip the weekender. One sharp, definitive pull, sealing away the last trace of her in my space.

The doorbell echoes through the house, sharp and demanding.

Four forty-two. The courier is early. Probably wants to beat the Sunday evening traffic.

I push myself off the floor, my knees popping in protest, and grab the handles of the two bags. I carry them down the stairs, my jaw set, mentally rehearsing the frictionless, dead-eyed transaction. Sign here, thank you, keep the bags upright.

I yank the front door open. “You’re early, I just need to grab the⁠—”

I freeze.

It isn’t a courier in a branded polo. It’s Logan, looking exceptionally disheveled in a faded MIT T-shirt, rolling his shoulders in that jerky, twice-over nervous tic he does when he’s stepping outside his comfort zone. Beside him stands Audrey, her frizzy curls practically vibrating with concern, holding a brown paper takeout bag that smells aggressively like grease and sodium.

“We were concerned you were at risk of alcohol poisoning—based on your radio silence,” Logan says, stepping smoothly past me into the foyer as if he holds the deed to the place. “We brought fries.”

“I didn’t order fries,” I say, my voice raspy, still holding the door handle like an idiot. “And I don’t need a welfare check.”

Audrey slips past me next, her eyes darting instantly to the two packed weekenders sitting at my feet. I see the exact moment her brilliant, statistically obsessed brain puts the data together. Her face softens, a devastating influx of pure empathy that I absolutely cannot handle right now.