Page 63 of Dial F for Finance

Fuck.

I press my free hand over my mouth.

Dominic’s voice goes quiet. “Do you need me, sweetheart?”

The tears arrive so suddenly I hate them on principle.

They fill my eyes, hot and humiliating, blurring the laundromat mural until the cartoon skyline turns into bright, meaningless color. I nod once, as if he can see me, because language has become a luxury item I cannot afford.

“Jen?”

“Yes,” I whisper. “I need you.”

There’s one second of silence, and in that second something in him changes. I can hear it. The line goes still in a different way, focused and lethal.

“Tell me where you are.”

CHAPTER 15

Dominic

Northern Boulevard slides past the window in strips of neon and shutter-gate steel, and I’m looking for a tall woman in a cashmere coat the way other men look for exits.

“She said near a laundromat with a mural,” I tell Rodney, who has been driving me around New York for eleven years and has never once asked a follow-up question, which is why I pay him a handsome retainer. “Cartoon skyline.”

“That’s half of Queens, Mr. Cruz.”

“Then drive past half of Queens.”

I have never wished teleportation existed more than I did in the moment I heard Jenna’s sob break over the phone.

When she texted Mom’s birthday this morning, I was still at David’s, standing in his kitchen drinking my spiked coffee while Michaela went over her dog-walking operation with me. My first thought was Tokyo, two a.m., her voice gone soft at the edge of sleep, telling me about her relationship with her mother. She never said anything as unguarded as my mother hurts me. She said things like visits can be strained and I do my best to keep the conversation light, and then she sighed and said that nothing is light if her mother is drinking and then abruptly changed the subject.

Most adults drink on their birthdays.

I called my pilot the moment she said she was “fine.”

I don’t even bother pretending that was rational.

Rational is for quarterly reports and board votes and deciding whether a five-percent concession opens you up to a predator clause. Rational is not for the woman you accidentally-on-purpose married in Tokyo, who has spent ten days trying to legally erase you and then whispers I need you like her whole world is collapsing inward.

If she hadn’t called, I’d have flown home tomorrow morning and she would never have known I was here. That was the deal I made with myself at the gate. This wasn’t a play. There was no next move. It was just—if the day went the way her sigh said it might go, I wanted the distance between us to be twenty minutes instead of a two-hour flight.

She called.

My only regret is that I chose to wait in the apartment I keep on Sutton Place for when I’m in town doing business. I’d fought against my instinct to sit in a car across from her mother’s place like a stalker. And now I wish I’d given in. I’d have gotten to her a hell of a lot faster.

“There.”

Rodney is already pulling over. She’s exactly where she said she’d be, across from the laundromat mural, overnight bag at her feet, arms crossed like she’s holding a version of herself together with upper-body strength. Streetlights catching her cheekbones. Chin up, of course. Even now, even shaking, the chin is up.

I’m out of the car before it fully stops.

“Jen.”

She turns. And I watch it happen—the thing I will think about for the rest of my life. The chin holds for one more second, professional to the last, and then her face just . . . falls. All of it. The composure, the armor, the thirty-odd years of practice, sliding off her like a coat with all the stitching cut, and underneath is a woman on a sidewalk of her childhood neighborhood, looking at me like she can’t decide whether I’m real.

“You came.”