Page 48 of Dial F for Finance

“You know,” she says, “my granddaughter looks at ice cream the way that woman just looked at you. Furious about wanting it.”

“Which granddaughter? You have five.”

“Six. Danny’s wife had the baby in March—you sent a blanket.” She waves this off like the math is beneath us both. “The point stands.”

“The point being?”

She takes off her reading glasses and lets them drop to the chain around her neck, which is how I know we’ve moved from commentary to testimony. “I see you, honey. In all the years I’ve sat at this desk, I’ve watched you charm ministers and terrify traders and talk a room full of grown men out of a panic like you were reading them a bedtime story. And every one of them got the performance.” She tips her head toward my office door. “That one gets the boy who eats lunch standing up and answers calls from his brother even when he’s too busy to talk—and then thinks I don’t notice.”

I open my mouth. Close it again. There is no defense, and we both know it. Roz doesn’t deal in allegations she can’t prove.

“It’s nice,” she says, gentler now. “That’s all I’m saying. It’s nice to see you want something for yourself for a change, instead of managing everything for everybody else.” She points one coral fingernail at me, grandmother-stern. “So don’t handle her, Dominic. Whatever you did in there, whatever you’re planning for six o’clock—don’t handle her like she’s a nervous client. Women can tell.”

“Is there anything else,” I say, “or is the performance review over?”

“Wear a tie,” she says, swiveling back to her screen. “And you’ll be taking her flowers. I’ve already ordered them. Peonies. You’re welcome.”

“I love you, Roz.”

“How could you not? Go do your work. And, Dominic?” She doesn’t look up from her keyboard, but her voice does the thing it does at Christmas, when she hugs me at the elevator and tells me to eat something. “Whoever taught that girl to walk like the floor might give out under her—prove them wrong.”

I stand there a second longer than I need to.

Then I go back into my office and close the door, and the warmth goes out of me like a tide.

The folder is still sitting on the blotter where she left it. Squared. Patient. Ticking.

I sit down and open it and read the first page slowly. Then again, slower, the way I read hostile term sheets—looking for the trap door, the out, the clause that means it isn’t what it says it is. It’s clean. Of course it’s clean. She’d have accepted nothing less. Every neat, numbered paragraph is Jenna telling me, in the only language she trusts, that Tokyo can be reversed. Filed under mistake. Made never to have happened.

But she can’t undo the truth.

I press my lips together, square the pages against the blotter the way she squared the folder, and pick up my phone. He answers on the second ring, deposition-tired.

“Dominic. What’s up?”

“David,” I say. “We need to talk.”

CHAPTER 11

Jenna

At five twenty-seven, I begin Operation Avoid Dominic.

The plan is simple, elegant, and built on sound logistics, which is to say it’s the best work I’ve done all day. Bennett left with Layla at five—obviously attempting some kind of work/life balance in the early stages of his marriage. So that means I’m no longer needed in the building and can slip out early as well. Sorry, Dominic.

Not sorry.

This is what you get for ambushing me . . .

The west elevators run express after five fifteen. So if I leave now, I can be in the lobby before five thirty, in a cab by five thirty-five, home by six, door locked, phone off, bath running—an alibi in fluffy socks.

Dominic Cruz can arrive at six o’clock on the dot with all the confidence in the world, and he’ll find an empty desk and a lesson about scheduling dinners by decree.

It would be simpler if I genuinely hated him.

Hate has a protocol. Hate you can file. What I have instead is a ledger that refuses to balance, and I’ve been auditing it all week.

Debit: He ambushed me in his office, kissed me until I forgot what I went in there to accomplish, and patted my ass like we’re a couple in a sitcom.