Page 46 of Dial F for Finance

Layla:

Should we stage an intervention? Or is that too much?

Serena:

I vote wait and see. If they sit on this tension for another week, one of them is going to do something stupid at a work function and we should all get front-row seats.

Layla:

The James Foundation Gala is soon . . .

Audrey:

OMG! Yessssssssss. Jenna’s work on the Nakamura deal is the reason NeuraTech will make it to market. I’m texting Willa. She should be one of this year’s special guests.

CHAPTER 10

Dominic

The week tries its best to kill me.

One of Cruz Financial’s oldest clients—a fund manager with more money than impulse control—decides Tuesday is the day to blow up his own acquisition, and I spend three straight days talking eleven very rich, very frightened men off eleven separate ledges. Fourteen-hour days. Conference calls at dawn. A flight to New York and back that I mostly don’t remember. I run rooms, I run numbers, I run interference, because that’s what I do. I handle things.

But every night, no matter what time I crawl out from under the wreckage, I call Jenna.

And every night—this is the part I keep turning over like a coin—she answers.

Not quickly. Never before the fourth ring, because God forbid I get the impression she was holding the phone. But she answers, and we talk. About nothing. The client. Her day. A podcast she pretends she doesn’t listen to. Whether wasabi peas constitute a food group. Around midnight her voice loses its corners, and by half past she’s saying things she’d never let out around witnesses—that she misses the ramen place near the hotel, that the city feels loud since Tokyo, that she sleeps better when I’m talking. Wednesday she fell asleep on the line mid-sentence, and I stayed on for ten minutes, listening to her breathe, feeling like the richest man on the planet.

Progress. Careful, fragile, four-rings-of-plausible-deniability progress. I gave her space this week because the client crisis forced me to, and some idiotic part of me decided the universe was helping. Let her come to me at her own speed. Let her learn nobody’s laughing, and I’m not going anywhere.

Then, on Friday afternoon, she comes to me.

My assistant’s voice comes through the intercom half a syllable ahead of the door. “Mr. Cruz, Ms. Pemberton from Mercer⁠—”

Jenna walks into my office like she’s repossessing it. Charcoal dress, hair scraped back into the sleek knot that means armor, chin jutted out. Beautiful. Terrifying. Mine—though we’re not saying that word yet.

She stops on the far side of my desk and sets a folder down on the leather blotter.

“I had my lawyer draw this up,” she says. “It’s all there. Everything’s in order. You just need to sign.”

I look at the folder. Plain manila. Unmarked. And what was absolute joy a few seconds ago is a shriveled-up pit in my stomach.

“No,” I say.

“You haven’t even looked at it.”

“I don’t need to.” I already know what’s inside, and if I open it in front of her, my face will do something I can’t afford. “Your answer is no.”

Her eyes narrow. “No?”

“No.” I lean back in my chair. “Need I remind you, this was your idea.”

“And need I remind you,” she says, with the icy precision she uses on men twice my ego, “that I told you to undo it. In writing.”

“You left a Post-it, Jen. Two words on a Post-it is not instruction. It’s barely a mood.”

“It was perfectly clear⁠—”