Page 81 of Dial F for Finance

“That sounds awful. I like rules.”

“I know you do, sweetheart.”

He leans forward again, and the whole cabin seems to shrink around us.

“Give us sixty days. If day sixty comes and you still want out, I’ll give you out.”

My chest hurts.

“What does that mean?”

“No fight. No punishment. No making you prove you’re scared enough to leave me. I’ll sign whatever ends the marriage without asking me to lie.”

“A divorce?”

His jaw tightens. But he nods.

“Not an annulment?”

“I won’t erase us, Jenna. But I will let you go.”

I’m standing on the edge of something enormous, and Dominic Cruz is offering me sixty days to decide whether to step back or jump.

“What if I say no?”

“Then I still won’t sign the annulment, and you’ll need to fight me in court over it.”

“Dominic.”

“But I’ll still give you a divorce if that’s what you want.”

“You’re very calm for a man trying to negotiate his own marriage.”

“I’m screaming internally.”

I squeeze my hands together in my lap. “So sixty days,” I say.

“Sixty.”

“And if I want out?”

“You get out.”

“And if I don’t?”

Dominic pulls out his wallet and opens it. “Then you stay married to me,” he says, setting two gold bands on the table between us.

My breath catches. “You want us to wear those?”

He picks his up and slides it onto his left ring finger. “Abso-fucking-lutely, I do.”

I’m so stunned I forget to breathe for a second.

He’s not joking. Gone is the smirk, the practiced debater. He’s looking at me like a man who means the next sixty years, not sixty days.

I stare at my ring, gold and shining.

“You understand that if I wear this, everyone will know?”