Page 41 of Dial F for Finance

“With Dominic Cruz,” Audrey says, pushing her glasses up her nose. “The man who has actively been pursuing you as long as I’ve known him. Which is what? Two years now? Three?”

“They’ve known each other a whole decade,” Layla points out.

“Only a matter of time before it detonated.” Nora nods slowly, knowing.

“And you two seemed so close at Layla’s wedding,” Serena adds.

“You laughed,” Audrey says. “A lot.”

“And they danced.” Nora smiles, and if I didn’t like her so much I’d toss something across the table at her.

“That’s your evidence. Time, laughter, and dancing.”

“You laughed with your head back,” Audrey says. “I’d never seen your molars until that moment.”

“I’d had champagne.”

“Don’t blame the champagne,” Serena says, waggling a single finger at me. “You literally switched seats with someone so you could sit with him.”

They saw that? Fuck.

“And then you both vanished from the reception,” Layla adds, delicately, the way you’d set a mousetrap with a ribbon on it. “At the same time. For a while.”

Four faces arrange themselves into expressions of supportive patience. This is worse than hostility. Hostility I can work with. Hostility has exploitable weaknesses. Supportive patience just sits there, refilling its wine glass, prepared to wait me out until the heat death of the universe.

I never had a girl group. In high school, I ate lunch in the library with a paperback propped against my milk carton and watched female friendship happen across the cafeteria like it was happening in a distant country. Borrowed lip gloss. Saved seats. Notes passed hand to hand. I was the tall girl, the too-big girl, the girl by the window who’d learned that if she couldn’t be invisible, outside was the next best thing.

College was polite roommates. Business school was study groups that dissolved after finals. Then I walked into Bennett Mercer’s office at twenty-six and found the workaround: become useful enough, and nobody wonders why you’re there or cares about how big you are.

Competence is a magnificent substitute for intimacy. The woman who fixes everyone’s problems never has to be one herself.

Then these women happened to me.

Layla decided we were friends and treated every refusal as a scheduling conflict. Audrey added me to a group chat without consent and cites my absences like data anomalies. Nora arrived last and is the most emotionally fluent of us all. Serena put me on the happy hour calendar like belonging was administrative.

I’m grateful. At an atomic level, I’m grateful.

I just don’t know what to do with it.

Useful, I can do. Reservations, contracts, a notary at nine p.m. on a Sunday. Friendship, as performed by me, is operations. Affection expressed in logistics.

But this booth is asking for something else. Me.

And I have been Jenna Pemberton—Bennett’s overly capable executive assistant, the woman with the answers, the one who handles everything—for so long that it’s become the only me I have.

Nora is the one who breaks the silence. “You know you can tell us anything, right?” She says it so gently I almost believe her, her eyes crinkling like she’s an empathy bomb about to detonate in my direction. “We’re not going to⁠—”

I clear my throat, ready to weaponize sarcasm, then see the look on her face and abort.

“There’s nothing to tell,” I say, but even I can hear the thinness in my own voice. I will never be able to fake openness; I don’t even speak the language. “But I am concerned that we’re forty minutes into this lunch and nobody has asked the newlywed a single question.”

The table goes quiet.

Layla blinks. “Oh—no. No, we’re talking about you⁠—”

“Two weeks married.” I level my gaze at her. “Honeymoon in Portugal. Far more interesting than my business trip with the over-caffeinated squirrel. Tell us everything. Is that new necklace a gift from Bennett?”

Layla touches the chain resting against her collarbone.