Page 88 of Dial F for Finance

“I like knowing who has access to our calendars and confidential files,” Xavier says, entirely straight-faced.

Thomas and Xavier head for the elevators with handshakes and a dinner promise for when the Nakamura team lands, and then they’re gone, and it’s just me and that impossible woman down the hall, laughing with Roz as if belonging here has always come naturally to her.

I stand there and let myself watch for another minute, the hum of the closing deal fading under the quieter math of how many days I have left to show her we belong together. Then I walk down the corridor through the daily catastrophe of my own operation—past the people who built this place with me and somehow keep it alive—and none of it feels bigger than the sound of Jenna laughing with her new ally.

“Mr. Cruz.” Roz stands, shoulders her bag, and pats Jenna’s hand like a customs stamp. “Your lovely wife agrees Danny’s baby has my nose.” And to Jenna, in the tone she otherwise reserves for board members and priests: “Sunday brunch, whenever you two surface. I’ll text you the address, honey. Not him. You.”

She’s gone before I can appeal.

Jenna stands, unfolding to her full height in the corridor’s hush, and looks up at me with the week all over her face—tired, amused, a little wary underneath, the way she gets when things have gone too well and she’s waiting for the invoice.

“So.” I take her coat lapels in both hands and reel her in an inch. “How’d you cope? First full week of openly being Mrs. Cruz.” Her eyebrow moves and I amend, “Mrs. Pemberton-Cruz.” The eyebrow holds. “Ms.?”

“We can decide what to call me after the sixty days are up,” she says, prim as a filing system, but her hands have found my tie and are straightening it in a way that has nothing to do with the tie.

“Noted. And the week?”

“Surprisingly decent.” She says it like she’s suspicious of the numbers. “The girls have suppressed the gushing. It’s all been dialed back to enormous shit-eating grins across conference tables, which I can live with. Everyone has formally agreed that no parties, showers, or celebrations of any kind will be planned until our decision is made—Layla required a signed addendum, there were tears, we got through it. Bennett has stopped staring at my ring when it catches the light. Roz has apparently adopted me.” She counts it off on her fingers like a quarterly report, and then her voice does the small softening thing that I am collecting, one instance at a time, like rare coins. “And aside from being exhausted because somebody’s appetite keeps me up half of every night, I’m—doing well. Genuinely,” she adds, as if the word got past security without clearance.

She tugs the tie, once, level with my collarbone. “So. I’m told it’s the weekend. I find myself married, in daylight, with no meetings until Monday and no idea what happens next. What do married couples even do on weekends, Dominic?”

I look down at her—my wife, in my office, on a Friday night, fifty-five days left on the clock and none of them promised—and I let the grin off its leash.

“Each other, Jen. They do each other.”

CHAPTER 21

Jenna

Iwake up alone in a bed that isn’t mine and it feels like proof of concept, like a rigorously tested pilot program that’s been left running just to see what happens when no one is watching. The sheets smell like him—a woodsy, overdetermined cologne that doesn’t belong in linen, and the faint, mineral scent of man. The pillow beside mine is dented in a way that says he left recently, or at least not with the kind of finality that would warrant remaking the bed.

For a few seconds I lie still and try not to let my brain spiral into darkness: Dominic Cruz, the apex predator of persistence, finally caught his quarry and then what? Fucked me silly for an extra week and bailed? Not even a note or a glass of water on the nightstand? I stare at the ceiling, at the cracks in the paint, at the way morning sifts through a window statically frosted by the city’s permanent dust, and my brain thorns around the next logical conclusion.

He’s left. He was always going to leave. This isn’t unexpected. The novelty was always going to wear off, because frankly, I’m not that exciting. Especially for a man like Dominic. I’m actually surprised he lasted this long . . .

I shut the thought spiral down. Hard. This is not high school, and I am not the girl who gets dumped before prom. I am in his house, in his bed, and whatever this is, Dominic is not going to disappear out of his own life.

I am not my thoughts.

He is not my thoughts.

I force a breath through my nose.

We agreed to sixty days. He literally negotiated a whole marriage on a deadline. Dominic Cruz—master of the calibrated risk, king of the “tell me what you want and I’ll make it a market”—is not the kind of man to run.

He does not ghost.

He’s not my father, and he’s not any of the men who have pulled clean escape routes from the mess of me.

I twist my fingers in the sheet and force my brain to run the real math. He spent last night—every minute of it—reminding me in elaborate, inventive detail exactly how much he wants me, and when I woke in the small dark hour to get water, his body was still holding mine. I’m catastrophizing, and worse, I’m doing it with the emotional range of a woman who only has two of them—controlled and not-in-control.

Get a grip, Pemberton.

I sit up, stretch, and survey the room. The only things out of place are a pair of his jeans and a T-shirt draped over a chair and my own dress folded with neurotic precision on the bench at the foot of the bed.

The quiet is unnerving though, so I get up, pull on the T-shirt, and poke my head out the door. “Dominic?”

All week we stayed at my apartment—my commute is eleven minutes and his is thirty-one, so I ran the numbers and declared mine the more efficient weekday residence. Which means this is my first morning at his house in Bucktown. Married almost three weeks, and I’ve never been inside my husband’s home until last night.