Page 55 of Dial F for Finance

“Tokyo doesn’t have a waiting period, David.” Suddenly the memory is so crisp, it makes my throat damn near ache. “Thirty-minute cab ride to Shibuya. We hit a twenty-four-hour jewelry place. I bought her a ring. She made me ask her properly, so I did. I got down on one knee, and she said yes, and we did it. I made a few calls—cashed in a favor at the embassy and another at the ward office to speed the paperwork along—and we were legally married before sunrise.”

He blinks at me in total disbelief. “You married Jenna Pemberton in Japan because you⁠—”

“Love each other.” I can hear how pathetic that sounds: a decade’s worth of wanting, collapsed into a single sentence. “Nobody was forced. Nobody was tricked. We stood there stone-cold sober and we meant it, both of us, and everything was fucking perfect. And the very next morning⁠—”

I stop.

“That’s why she came back to Chicago on a different flight,” he says quietly.

“She left a Post-it on the certificate.” I look at the kid’s drawing over his printer because I can’t look at him. “Two words. Undo this.”

The room is quiet for a while. Down the hall, faintly, Michaela is explaining something to Nora with great authority, and Archie’s tail is thumping against a cabinet, and the ordinary Saturday sounds of a home full of people who chose each other drift under the door like heat.

David picks the folder back up. Reads it properly this time, lawyer again, and it steadies us both. “She’s petitioning on lack of capacity,” he says. “Her position is she couldn’t validly consent—that she wasn’t in her right mind when the marriage was solemnized. It’s drafted clean. Her lawyer’s good.” He flips a page. “The window on those grounds is ninety days from when she knew of the condition she says impaired her consent. Her lawyer will count from the morning she woke up married to avoid any argument about timing. That’s why there’s urgency in the cover letter.”

“And if I refuse to sign?”

“She doesn’t need your signature to file. It’s a petition, not a treaty.” He looks up. “What she needs is for the facts to hold. And you’re the other witness to the facts, Dominic. If you corroborate—if you tell the court yes, she was impaired, it wasn’t real consent—it goes through quiet and fast, and legally it will be as if the marriage never existed. If you contest it . . .” He exhales. “Then it’s testimony. Discovery. A public record of the single most private night of her life, picked apart by strangers. And from what you’ve told me, a petition that probably fails—because sober vows at sunrise are the opposite of lack of capacity. And if it fails, or the window lapses⁠—”

“Then the only door left is divorce.”

“Then the only door left is divorce,” he agrees.

“Good,” I say, and I feel my jaw set. “Then she can divorce me like a regular person.”

“Dominic. There’s no prenup⁠—”

“I don’t fucking care!” I plant both hands on his desk, and the thing I’ve kept in a straight line all week finally bends. “Listen to me. A divorce ends a marriage. An annulment says there never was one. She’s not asking to leave me, David. She’s asking me to swear it wasn’t real. To sign my name to the story where she was out of her mind and I was a mistake and the whole thing gets erased like it never happened. And it happened. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done that I genuinely give a fuck about—it’s the realest thing I have.” I straighten up. “Marriage means something to me, David. I won’t corroborate a lie. Not even for her.”

David watches me for a long moment. Then he drags his fingers through his hair and lets out a sigh. When he speaks again it isn’t my lawyer talking. It’s a man who spent seven years raising a daughter alone because the person who was supposed to stay didn’t, who knows exactly what paper can and cannot hold together.

“As your attorney, I’ll tell you your options and draft whatever you decide. But as your friend?” He laces his fingers together in his lap. “If she doesn’t want to be married to you, Dominic, you can’t force it. Not with ninety days, not with nine hundred. Paper doesn’t keep people. I know that better than anyone.”

“I’m not trying to keep her with paper.” I tap a finger against the folder. “I’m refusing to lose her with it. She wants out—the door works fine. It’s the eraser I won’t hand her.”

“And if the door is all she wants?”

“Then I’ll walk her through it myself,” I say. “But she’s going to have to end something real. I’m not signing a piece of paper that says it never was.”

CHAPTER 13

Jenna

The 7 train still screams on the curve past Sixty-First Street, and my body braces two seconds early, the way it has since I was six. Nearly a decade in boardrooms and I never flinch. One elevated train in Queens and I’m all reflex.

By the time I get out at Flushing–Main Street, the gloss of my Chicago life is already sloughing off. In Queens, lipstick is a tactic, exposed skin gets a risk-reward calculation, and you don’t run into the past—you trip over it at the bodega and hope it isn’t drunk by noon.

I cross to the bus line, turning up my collar against the wind, and I’m about to text my sister that I’m here when my phone buzzes with a message.

Layla:

OUTDOOR MOVIE NIGHT AT MILLENNIUM PARK. Tonight, 8pm. Blankets, snacks, contraband thermoses. WHO IS IN?

Serena:

In. I’ll bring the wine and the deniability.

Audrey: