Page 64 of Dial F for Finance

“Of course I did.”

I wrap her in my arms and she makes a sound against me—small, cracked, furious at itself—and grips the back of my coat with both fists. She’s tall enough that her face fits into my neck, which I have thought about more than I’ll ever admit, and she’s trembling in that fine, suppressed way of someone who has been using every bit of their energy keeping themselves together.

“I’ve got you,” I say into her hair. “I’ve got you, sweetheart.”

We stand there while Queens moves around us—a bus, a man shouting into his phone, a delivery bike threading the gap between parked cars—and I hold the most controlled woman in Chicago while she comes quietly apart on a street corner. And I swear to myself that whatever her mother said tonight, I will spend a lifetime saying otherwise.

I press a kiss to the top of her head. “Let’s get you off the street.”

In the car she doesn’t talk. She sits pressed into my side, her hand in mine on my knee, watching the boroughs change out the window. Rodney takes the bridge instead of the tunnel, because the bridge has the skyline and the tunnel has nothing, and I make a note to raise his retainer again.

The apartment is on the eighteenth floor in a limestone building with a doorman who remembers everything and reacts to nothing. It isn’t flashy. No glass walls that make a place look like a terrarium in the sky. Just old wood, brass, thick rugs, tall windows, and the East River sliding black beneath the Queensboro Bridge. I bought it because my New York money men all orbit Midtown and kept it because the place has discretion baked into the plaster. I’ve never brought a woman here. Not once. I have no intention of telling Jenna that and every intention of enjoying the fact for the rest of the night.

She stands in the middle of the living room with her coat still on, city light all over her, and surveys the place with a flicker of the old Jenna. “Of course you have a fancy New York apartment.”

“Technically it’s a crash pad.”

“It has a Steinway, Dominic. Do you even play piano?”

I cock my head slightly. “Have you met me?”

“Of course you do. You’re probably amazing at it too.”

“Amazing might be pushing it.”

That gets me the ghost of a laugh, which is the entire strategic objective. I take her coat, put whiskey in her hand, order from the Italian place downstairs, and then I sit next to her on the couch, close but not crowding, and I do the hardest thing a man like me can do.

Nothing.

I don’t negotiate for information like it’s trapped value. I don’t make a joke about Italian food being a superior coping mechanism, even though there’s one right there and under normal circumstances I’d have put a flag in it. I just sit there with my forearms on my knees, close enough that if she leans an inch she’ll hit me, far enough that she doesn’t have to.

Jenna holds the whiskey with both hands and stares at it like it has offended her personally.

“This glass is very heavy,” she says after a while.

“It’s crystal.”

“Of course it is.”

“You want a mug?”

“No.” She takes a small sip, winces, and then looks faintly annoyed at herself for wincing. “This is excellent whiskey.”

“It should be. I pay a man in Scotland an unreasonable amount of money to feel emotionally superior to other rich men.”

Her mouth twitches.

Then her eyes lift to meet mine. “Thank you for coming to my rescue.”

I nod. “Ends of the earth, Pemberton.”

She sips the whiskey again. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s not really Pemberton anymore. It’s Cruz.”

“Is it?”

Her lips press together and she lets out a slow breath, her eyes back on the amber liquid in the glass. “My mother would accuse me of having daddy issues and marrying my father,” she says after a moment, her voice barely a whisper.

I sit there for a moment, but she doesn’t elaborate. “Why would she think that?”