Page 149 of Dial F for Finance

“Oh, Dominic,” she breathes.

“Don’t,” I warn, dropping my hand from the door. I gesture vaguely to the bags. “Just waiting on the shipping service. Let’s not pretend we didn’t all expect this.”

Audrey sets the greasy bag on the console table and steps right into my space. She doesn’t offer platitudes. She just looks up at me, her warm eyes entirely too perceptive.

“So it’s true,” she says softly. “It’s over? You two are—it’s actually over?”

“She’s flying home today.” I check my watch, then head into my office with Logan and Audrey trailing behind me.

“To Queens?” Logan asks, stopping just inside the doorway.

I bypass my desk and head straight for the bar cart in the corner, pouring myself a second, highly irresponsible measure of Yamazaki. “Queens. She’s moving back in with her mother.”

Logan adjusts his glasses. “I guess that explains why Bennett is currently having a localized meltdown in the group chat. He found her formal resignation in his inbox when he woke up this morning.”

The whiskey suddenly turns to battery acid on my tongue. She didn’t just leave me; she severed her entire Chicago life. She walked away from the empire she helped build because I made the ground too toxic for her to stand on.

“That was likely my fault, too,” I say, my voice hollow. I drop into my leather desk chair, staring at the amber liquid in my glass. “The speech I gave went down like a lead balloon.”

Audrey steps forward, her brow furrowed in distress.

“I realize none of you could understand why someone as brilliant as her would want to marry a joke like me,” I mutter to the quiet room, summarizing the disaster of my own hubris. “And I guess I just gave you all a firsthand account of why you were right.”

“Dominic, no,” Audrey says, rounding the desk to place a warm, steadying hand on my shoulder. “None of us ever thought that. That’s just some shitty coding in your brain telling you a bunch of lies.”

Logan takes the visitor’s chair. “You are categorically not a joke. And logically, one speech doesn’t negate an entire foundational relationship.”

“It does when the speech was a public execution,” I reply.

Audrey sighs, her fingers squeezing my shoulder. “Layla and I have to take some responsibility for last night, too. We’re the ones who campaigned Willa to put her in the spotlight in the first place.”

I look up at her. She looks genuinely stricken, her hands flying up to explain herself.

“When we initially did it, you and Jenna were still just dancing around each other,” she says, the words tumbling out in a rapid-fire rush. “We thought if we could make sure you were in the same room together, and that Jenna was being seen as the absolute force of nature she is, it might help her overcome whatever was stopping her from being with you.”

“We genuinely thought we were helping,” Logan adds gently. “It was obvious to all of us you two would be perfect together.”

“Perfect,” I scoff, downing the glass in one gulp.

“We could tell she was in love with you,” Audrey continues, her eyes shining behind her lenses. “We all could. You bring out the best in each other. But it seems our meddling messed things up, and we just pushed her away.”

“No,” I say, the word coming out dangerously quiet. I set the glass down on the mahogany surface. When I’m vulnerable, the charm shuts off completely, leaving just the raw, ugly truth. “It wasn’t your fault, Audrey. None of it. Willa was already planning on inviting her—your campaigning just confirmed it. She was enjoying the spotlight up until my speech. And that was all on me.”

I pull the desk drawer open and stare at the manila folder still sitting in there.

“I knew she hated being the center of attention,” I tell them, the confession scraping against my throat as I pull the folder out and set it on the desk in front of me. “I’ve known it since day one. But I also knew she craved validation. I got this stupid, arrogant idea in my head that claiming her as my wife in front of everyone would show her how serious I was about her. I thought the grand public gesture would prove I wasn’t playing a game, and that being seen by a roomful of her peers would only lift her up.”

I lean back, closing my eyes against the crushing weight of my own stupidity. “It backfired. I turned her into a punchline. And now we’ve all lost her.”

I flip open the heavy card stock cover of the folder. The annulment papers stare back at me, mocking the absolute wreckage of my life. The signature line at the bottom of the final page is a guillotine waiting to drop.

I reach across the desk for the silver Montblanc pen resting by my keyboard.

Before my fingers can even graze the cold metal, Logan’s hand shoots out. His palm clamps down over my wrist, his grip shockingly tight.

“No, Dominic.” Logan’s voice drops into the precise, unyielding register he usually reserves for a catastrophic system failure. He doesn’t pose it as a question or a suggestion. He states it as an empirical fact. “Those are fucking annulment papers. You are not executing binding legal documents while you’re drunk and hurting.”

I try to yank my arm away, but the kid is built like a linebacker when he actually remembers to use his frame, and he refuses to budge. “Let go, Logan. It’s what she wanted all along—for me to undo it—so I’m giving it to her. It’s the last goddamn thing I have left to give.”