Page 146 of Dial F for Finance

Three feet away from her. That’s where I am. Three feet, and she just subtracted me from the room without looking up from her suitcase. I know this feeling—I invented it for her, in a ballroom, in front of two hundred witnesses. The difference is she’s doing it quietly, just to me, which is the more honest version of the wound.

“I’ll send someone for my things,” she says, quieter now, folding the last of it. “From Bucktown. There isn’t much. The drawer, the closet—some books. I’ll get a service to⁠—”

“No.” It comes out before I know what it’s carrying. She looks up. “No service. I’ll sort your things myself. Pack them properly. Get them to you—wherever you are.” My voice wobbles at the edges. “It’s the least I can do, Jen.”

She holds my eyes for a long moment, and for one breath something in her face almost gives and then the protocol catches her, the way it caught her at seventeen, the way it caught her at the podium, and she nods once, terms accepted, and turns back to the case.

“Goodbye, Dominic.”

I don’t remember deciding to leave. I remember the hallway. The carpet. The door clicking shut behind me with a sound like a decimal point, final and small, and I stand there in my tuxedo in the empty corridor of my wife’s building trying to remember how the hell I got here.

And then I hear it.

Through the door—muffled, wrecked, coming apart in a way she would never, ever permit while a single soul could see her. Jenna. Sobbing.

It ruins me. Literally. There’s the myth that you can feel your heart break, a cartoon chest clutch. But it’s not like that. It’s all in the gut, pure and undiluted, as if every time I’ve said some dumb thing about “not being able to live without you,” my body was supposed to treat that as a joke, and now the punchline is my large intestine turning itself inside out.

For a second I just stand there, forehead against the door, letting the pressure gather behind my eyes. I can’t be here, and I can’t go anywhere else. If I go back in there, it turns into a second argument neither of us deserves. If I stay, I’ll hear every fraction of her pain, the sound I put there, and it will eat me alive.

I reach into my breast pocket and pull out the box that’s been sitting against my chest all night. Inside are the two rings I wanted to show her when I asked her—properly, soberly—to choose this marriage beyond Thursday.

I tilt them toward the corridor light. Two inscriptions flash along the inside of the bands, suddenly too intimate to look at.

Then I close the box, and put it back over my heart, and press my palm flat to my wife’s door before I force myself to walk away.

“You were never the challenge, sweetheart.”

CHAPTER 41

Jenna

“Here. Extra strong—I told the guy to make it angry,” Hailey says, handing me a coffee the size of a fire extinguisher and dropping into the seat beside me with the enormous soft pretzel she’s already half eaten. “Drink. You look like a hostage video.”

“Thank you. You’re a wellspring of comfort.”

Gate B14 at O’Hare on a Sunday afternoon is all noise and exhaustion. I’m in the same leggings and hoodie I changed into last night, sunglasses on indoors like a widow or a hangover, two checked bags already swallowed by the machine and a boarding pass to LaGuardia in my phone. Somewhere behind me, Chicago is doing its Sunday—brunches, group chats, a man in Bucktown I’m not thinking about in a house I don’t belong in anymore—and I’m facing the jet bridge like it’s a checkout line.

Hailey arrived at my apartment this morning exactly sixty-one minutes before I needed to leave, wearing last night’s clothes and this morning’s smile, and she took one look at my face and my suitcases and hugged me. “I’m so sorry, Nen.”

She didn’t want gory details, just a vague understanding of what made me bail on my whole life in the span of an evening. I didn’t have much besides, “I just can’t anymore.” And she didn’t push—just piloted the aftermath with coffee, Advil, and the task of calling our mother to warn her I was coming home at zero notice and not to make this a “Scene,” capital S.

The gate seating is all hard plastic and armrest conflict. A couple with twin infants is already playing Pass the Screaming Potato, and the man next to me is doing a full portfolio reallocation on his iPad, muttering about quarterlies. Hailey and I move to the farthest bench, our knees bumping like we’re wired for codependent misery.

“So,” she says finally. “You’re sure you want to go through with this?”

“I’m sure.”

“Because it’s a lot, Jen. What you’re giving up. The job. The apartment. The marriage.” She gestures at the gold band still on my finger. “If last night showed me anything, it’s that you’ve built a life here. Even after that speech went wrong, you got up there and took the room back. Those people respect you. You built that yourself.”

“I built a costume.” I twist the band, slow. I don’t know why I haven’t taken it off yet.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Hailey says, tearing off a chunk of dough and pointing it at me like a cross-examiner. “You think it’s a costume because you built it around yourself. But you were giving valedictorian speeches and organizing everybody else’s disasters long before Chicago. The buildings got taller, your accent got smoother, but you didn’t become somebody else.”

I take a gulp of coffee, let the bitter work its way through the scaffolding inside my chest. My arms are covered in a fine, anxious static. “Then why’d I have to work so hard at it?”

Hailey rolls her eyes. “Because careers that earn you stupid amounts of money are fucking hard.” She takes another bite and her phone buzzes with a text from our mother.

“What did she say?”