Page 133 of Dial F for Finance
Willa lets out a low, musical laugh. “Oh, I like you, Jenna. I knew I would. The foundation board has been talking about the structure you negotiated for the Nakamura acquisition, but I was far more interested in the woman who made it work.” She stops near a towering ice sculpture that seems to be weeping champagne and turns to face me fully. “You don’t hide behind the men in the room. In our circles, that’s a rare and dangerous trait.”
“I find hiding to be highly inefficient,” I reply, my spine straightening instinctively.
“Exactly.” Willa taps one manicured finger against her chin. “Which is why I want you in the conversation about James Tech’s Children’s Health Initiative. Frankly, we need someone who isn’t afraid to use a scalpel.”
My breath catches. This isn’t merely a polite social introduction. She’s treating me like someone whose judgment belongs in the room.
“I brought my scalpel in my clutch,” I tell her, absolutely deadpan.
Willa’s smile turns predatory and brilliant. “Perfect. Let me introduce you to the governor.”
What follows is forty-five minutes I will be reconstructing in the shower for years.
The GC I once audited tells me Xavier Field showed her my redline memo, and it’s now “taught, informally” at her firm. She asks for coffee next month. A man who runs a sovereign fund’s Chicago outpost asks two questions about supply-chain contingencies that tell me he’s actually read the filings, then introduces me to a woman as “the reason NeuraTech is finally rolling out,” and I point out that I simply ensured the pipeline couldn’t stall again, but he wouldn’t hear it. Somebody’s champagne is always at my elbow. Nobody asks me whose assistant I am. Nobody asks me who I’m wearing except a fashion writer who genuinely wants to know, and when I say I honestly can’t pronounce it, she laughs like I’m charming. Me. Charming. Unsupervised.
I catch Dominic across the room exactly twice. Once he’s making Landon James laugh with his whole chest. Once he’s just watching me over the rim of a glass with an expression I can only describe as devoted, and both times something under my sternum goes warm and unsupervised too.
It’s perfect. That’s the thing. It’s all perfect, and I’m in it, unarmored, hair down, drinking the champagne, being seen on purpose in a professional setting for things that I built with my own brain.
Which is when Willa, circling back with two fresh glasses, leans in close and pokes a finger directly through my bubble.
“I’ll confess something, since it’s you.” She hands me a glass, eyes twinkling over the rim of her own. “I nearly sent that invitation in May. I’ve been hearing your name for a while—Thomas Canning quotes your papers like scripture, it’s adorable—but you know how my list is. Forty seats. I dithered.” She squeezes my arm, delighted with herself. “But you have some wonderfully supportive friends, Jenna.”
My smile stays on my face, but a thud falls from my chest to my stomach. “I do?” I mean it as a statement, but it comes out as a question.
“You do. The brains behind NeuraTech herself—Dr. Audrey Greene—wrote to me about you. Two pages, with citations, it read like a grant proposal—and Layla Carmichael called Landon’s office to make sure we had your gown measurements right. I adore being lobbied by people who love someone. It’s the only lobbying that works on me.” She beams at me, warm as an oven, handing me what she believes with her whole generous heart is a gift. “You have remarkable friends, Jenna. They wanted this room to see you so badly they practically stormed it. And I understand why. You are quite magnificent.”
The quartet keeps playing. The glacier light stays blue. My face does what twenty years of training built it to do, which is smile, warmly, correctly, while somewhere below the waterline a hull plate quietly gives.
I didn’t earn it.
They arranged it.
“How incredibly kind of them,” I say. My voice is a perfectly calibrated instrument. It doesn’t shake. It doesn’t betray the sudden, violent vacuum opening up in my chest.
“Isn’t it?” Willa sighs, entirely oblivious to the structural collapse happening three feet away. “I’ll let you mingle, darling. We’ll introduce you to the board chair later.”
She glides away, leaving me standing alone with a glass of champagne that suddenly tastes like battery acid.
They arranged it.
My gaze drifts across the Azure Room, instinctively seeking the architect of my current life. Dominic is leaning against the bar, listening to Landon James. As if feeling the weight of my stare, he turns. He catches my eye, and his smile is soft, intimate, packed with that same devastating pride from the red carpet.
He fucking knew.
CHAPTER 38
Dominic
Landon James is midway through explaining why his new boat is technically a research vessel when I feel my wife look at me from forty feet away, and every instrument on my dashboard goes red at once.
To anyone else she looks perfect. Champagne in hand, spine straight, face doing its flawless corporate expression. But I have nearly a decade of field notes on Jenna Pemberton, and the smile she’s aiming at me right now is the one she gives during crisis meetings when a company Mercer is acquiring pushes back against the contract terms. Something has happened between now and when Willa stole her, and whatever it is, it has my name on it.
“Excuse me, Landon. I think my wife needs me.”
“Of course.”
Fuck, I love calling her that—my wife.
