Page 151 of Dial F for Finance

Slowly, I get up and find the velvet box containing the custom rings I was supposed to give her last night. I stare at it for a second before dropping it directly on top of the folder. Then, my fingers go to my left hand. I twist the gold band off my own finger—it feels like peeling off a layer of skin—and drop it into the bag alongside the box.

I zip the compartment shut just as the doorbell rings again.

I swing the door open. A courier in a dark blue polo stands on the porch, tablet in hand.

“Pick up for Cruz?”

“Yeah,” I say, my voice dead. “These two bags. They’re going to the address in Queens.”

He scans the pre-printed tags I attached earlier, has me scribble a digital signature on his screen, and hoists the bags over his shoulder. I stand in the doorway, the wind biting through my shirt, and I watch him load the last pieces of my wife’s life in this house into the back of a cargo van. The doors slam shut. The engine turns over. He drives away, taking the best thing that ever happened to me with him.

I close the front door and lean my forehead against the heavy wood.

“The fries are getting cold,” Logan says gently from the hallway.

CHAPTER 43

Jenna

“—and I said to her, Donna, if your Michael wants to park that boat trailer in front of my house all summer, then your Michael can shovel my sidewalk all winter, that’s the exchange rate,” Ma says, refilling my coffee I didn’t ask for and haven’t finished. “He moved it this morning. So. That’s the Donna situation.”

“Riveting, Ma.”

“You used to like the Donna updates.”

“I still like the Donna updates.” I wrap both hands around the mug and make myself mean it, because she’s trying. That’s the thing I keep bumping into, day three of this: my mother, sober, trying—narrating the neighborhood like Scheherazade, cooking enough to feed six, hovering at the edge of my silence with a dish towel and no idea what to do with a daughter who came home broken and won’t say how.

Three days. The house smells like coffee and cleaning products instead of wine, and there’s a serenity prayer on the windowsill above the sink where other mothers keep saints and a list of steps stuck to the fridge. She hasn’t mentioned them. Neither have I. We are a family of unexploded conversations, and we set our plates around them.

The doorbell rings at ten past eleven.

“Are you expecting a delivery?” Ma asks, already moving.

“No,” I say, pushing my chair back. The scrape of the wooden legs against the linoleum sounds entirely too loud. “But I have a feeling I know what it is.”

Ma opens the front door, wiping her hands on her dish towel. A man in a dark blue polo stands on the stoop, holding a digital tablet in one hand and wrestling two familiar leather weekenders with the other.

“Delivery for Jenna Pemberton?” the courier asks, looking aggressively bored.

My lungs seize as I stand up. “That’s me.”

My things.

I cross the living room, sign his screen with a finger that only slightly trembles.

“Have a good one,” the guy mutters. He leaves the bags on the mat and heads back to his van.

I stand there staring at the luggage. They look absurdly out of place on the cracked concrete of a Queens porch. Too sleek, too expensive. Too Chicago.

“Do you want me to help you carry them up?” Ma asks softly. She isn’t looking at the bags. She’s looking at my face. She knows a casualty when she sees one.

“I’ve got it,” I say. My voice is perfectly level. The professional armor locks into place, a reflex triggered by the immediate threat of total collapse.

I drag them inside, hefting them onto the couch in the living room. Then I just stare at them.

“We should probably unpack those,” Ma says softly, breaking the quiet. She steps closer, her fingers nervously twisting the edge of her dish towel. “You know how men are with packing. He probably just threw all your lovely clothes in there without folding a single thing. If we leave them zipped up too long, everything will get ruined.”

I swallow the sharp, hysterical laugh bubbling at the back of my throat. Men, generally, might be terrible at packing. Dominic Cruz is not a general man. Dominic approaches a suitcase the way he approaches a corporate restructuring: with ruthless efficiency and absolute, devastating precision. I guarantee he didn’t just throw my clothes in. He probably folded my cashmere with a ruler and lined it with tissue paper.