Page 163 of Dial F for Finance

With a sudden, jerky movement, Jenna tosses the folder onto my rolling tool chest. It lands with a heavy, unceremonious slap.

“I didn’t sign them,” she says.

The silence becomes absolute. Even the phantom ringing in my ears from a week of power tools abruptly cuts out.

“Say that again.”

“I didn’t sign the annulment papers,” she repeats, her voice steadying, though the flush on her neck is definitely spreading to her cheeks. “I couldn’t bring myself to file them.”

I stare at her, my sleep-deprived brain struggling to understand. I grip the edge of the workbench to ground myself. “Why?”

“Why did you try to sell your company?”

The betrayal of my inner circle is absolute. I’m going to murder Bennett, and then I’m going to systematically dismantle Caleb’s life. But looking at the fierce, furious woman standing in my garage, I know exactly who deployed the tactical strike to Queens.

“Serena,” I mutter, grabbing the shop rag and rubbing at a spot of grease on my thumb. “Or Audrey. God, I hope it wasn’t Audrey. She probably brought flowcharts to my execution.”

“They all came,” Jenna says, refusing to let me pivot. Her chin tips up, eyes pinned to mine with laser focus. “And they told me you tried to burn down Cruz Financial, hand your entire book to Bennett, and exile yourself from the city. I asked you a question, Dominic. Why?”

I drag a hand through my hair and sigh. “Because I broke your life, Jenna. You loved this city. You loved your job. And you packed it all into two suitcases and fled to Queens because my presence made Chicago uninhabitable for you.” I let out a harsh, jagged breath, the exhaustion settling deep into my bones. “If removing myself from the board was the only way to get you back where you belong, it was the easiest transaction I’ve ever structured.”

She stares at me, her eyes bright and furious. “That is exactly what I mean. You are impossible. You think you can just orchestrate the universe behind my back, manipulate the variables, and hand me a perfectly wrapped solution.”

“I was trying to give you space!”

“That doesn’t mean you erase yourself!” she yells, the echo bouncing off the concrete walls and ringing through the rafters. She takes another step closer, entirely invading my orbit now. She tips her head back to glare up at me, her chest heaving. “I wanted you to stop treating me like a project or a piece on your game board. I wanted to be your partner, Dominic. And then I go home, and I find out you secretly visited my mother? You sat in that kitchen and helped her get sober? And you didn’t even tell me?”

I freeze. My pulse hammers a frantic, bruising rhythm against my ribs. “Your mother has a big mouth.”

“And you have a martyr complex.” A tear spills over her lower lash line, and she doesn’t even bother to wipe it away. “I need you to understand something, and I need it to go all the way in,” she says. “I am not an asset, Dominic. I am not a deal you structure or a room you read or a problem you solve while I’m out of the building. Everyone else in your life lets you do it—Logan lets you rebuild his trusts in the dark, Bennett lets you seed his ventures, David lets you furnish his firm, and they love you for it, and it works for them. It doesn’t work for me.” Her jaw is tight. “You went to my mother behind my back. You sat in her kitchen and took her cruelty and rebuilt my whole childhood’s plumbing without ever once asking me if you could. And I know”—her voice cracks, and she pushes through it the way she pushes through everything—“I know it came from love. She’s thirty days sober, Dominic. What you did might be the single kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. But you still should have asked. Do you understand that both of those things are true?”

“Yes.” It comes out raw.

“The speech. Same thing. You stood up in front of two hundred people and told our story without ever asking me if I wanted it told. It was full of love and it flayed me alive, and you didn’t know it would, because you decided what I needed instead of asking. That’s the pattern. That’s the whole pattern—the gala, my mother, the merger. You keep trying to hand me finished products, Dominic. Paid in full, fixed in the dark, ribbon on top.” She steps closer. The shop light catches her face, and her eyes are wet and absolutely unwavering. “And I don’t want finished products. I want the man. I want to be in the room where things get decided about my own life. I want the drafts, the bad math, the blueprints—I want you to reach for the wrench and then hand it to me so we fix the thing together. That’s the marriage I’ll stay for.”

The silence stretches between us, heavy and absolute, save for the faint hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. I stare at her, my lungs locked, feeling the sheer, terrifying weight of everything she just said settle into the concrete floor.

She’s right. God, she’s completely right. I’ve spent my entire life being the architect. The guy with the answers, the guy who buys the building, structures the deal, and hands over the keys so no one ever has to see him sweat. I thought that was my value. I thought that was the only way I was worth keeping around.

But she doesn’t want the building. She wants the dirt.

I look down at my hands. They’re coated in black grease and engine oil, shaking slightly from adrenaline and exhaustion. I drop the shop rag onto the workbench. I don’t try to wipe them clean again. For the first time in my life, I don’t try to manage the optics.

“I’m sorry,” I say, the words scraping out of my throat, completely stripped of their usual polish. “I thought loving you meant bringing you the answer. I didn’t understand that keeping you out of the work meant keeping you out of the marriage too.” My throat tightens. “I just . . . I don’t have a blueprint for doing it differently. If I’m not solving the problem, I don’t know what my role in the room is.”

She closes the last foot of distance between us. She doesn’t flinch at the grime on my skin or the chaos of the workshop. She stops so close I can feel the heat radiating from her beneath the fleece.

“Your role is to be my husband,” she says softly, her eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that steals the remaining oxygen from my lungs. “Just Dominic. Not the savior. Not the strategist. Just the man who stands next to me while we figure it out together.”

My chest heaves. A dangerous, stinging pressure builds behind my eyes. I want to touch her so badly it feels like a physical injury. But I ball my hands at my sides.

“I love you, Dominic,” she whispers, and it hits so hard the backs of my eyes sting and I have to look away. She doesn’t let me. She places her hand on the side of my face and forces me to look her in the eye. “I’ve loved you since before Tokyo, if I’m being honest with myself. And I should have believed you sooner—I spent our whole marriage waiting for the punchline, and you spent it proving there wasn’t one, and I convicted you anyway on one bad night because being wrong about you was safer than being right. That’s mine. I own it.” Her nails scrape through my overgrown scruff. “But for this to work—for me to stay—you have to treat me like a partner. Not a prize, not a project, not a rescue. A partner. It’s when we’re best, Dominic—every good thing we’ve ever done, we did side by side. So that’s the term sheet. One clause. Partners.”

I lean into her palm. The contrast of her clean, soft skin against my rough, grease-stained jaw is a physical shock. My eyes flutter shut for a fraction of a second, just long enough to memorize the exact pressure of her fingers.

“Partners,” I repeat, the word tasting like oxygen after nearly two weeks underwater. “I don’t know how to do it perfectly, Jenna. I’m gonna fuck it up. I’m going to see a problem and my first instinct will always be to throw myself in front of it before it reaches you.”

“I know,” she says, her thumb stroking my cheekbone. “And my first instinct will be to build a spreadsheet proving why you shouldn’t. We’ll fight about it.”