"Mr. Weston, there's a Jacqueline Reeves here to see you. She doesn't have an appointment."
He sat very still. His hand was on the proposal, his pen uncapped, a note half-written in the margin.
"Send her in," he said.
The door opened. Jacqueline walked in, and Dominic's chest braced for the ache — the old, familiar ache he'd carried for years, the one he'd kept like a scar, proof of depth — and foundnothing. It was gone. Charlotte lived in every place of his heart now.
Objectively, he noticed that she looked good. Different from the wedding — thinner, maybe, or just drawn in a way that thinness couldn't account for. Her dark hair was longer, pulled back loosely, and she wore a simple navy dress, no jewelry except a thin gold chain at her throat. No wedding ring. The left hand, bare.
"Dominic." She stood just inside the door, one hand on her bag strap, the other at her side. "I should've called."
"It's fine. Sit down."
She sat in the chair across from his desk. She was nervous. Jacqueline, who'd never been nervous about anything, who'd walked through her father's trial with her chin up and her composure intact.
"I wasn't sure you'd see me," she said.
"Why wouldn't I?"
A beat. "Because the last time we were in the same room, you said my name at your wedding, I left without saying goodbye and neither of us has acknowledged it."
"That's fair."
"I should've reached out sooner. After the — after what happened. I wanted to, but David was..." She trailed off. Picked at the edge of her bag. "David was very angry. At you, at me, at the situation. He felt like the whole thing was a spectacle and we were caught in it."
"He was right. It was a spectacle. I'm sorry."
"You don't need to apologize to me."
"I do. I said your name, Jacqueline. At my own wedding, in front of everyone. That wasn't fair to Charlotte."
She looked at him. Her dark eyes were searching his face. He let her look. He had nothing to hide, which was a new sensation, or maybe an old one he'd lost access to.
"That's actually why I'm here," she said.
He watched her struggle with something, and the struggle was so unlike the Jacqueline he remembered — composed, direct, a woman who said what she meant without rehearsal — that he understood, before she spoke, that whatever she was about to say had been building for a long time.
"David and I are separated," she said. "He moved out. We're — it's been coming for a while. Before the wedding, even. We'd been going through the motions for over a year, and when he saw me react to you at the ceremony — when he saw my face — he said it confirmed what he'd already suspected. That I'd never fully let you go."
Dominic didn't speak.
"He was right." Her voice was controlled, but underneath it he could hear the shakiness. "I married David because he was good and he loved me. I wanted to love him back the way he deserved. And I did love him. But there was always this — this part of me that was still in your apartment on the day you ended it. Still sitting on your couch listening to you sayI have responsibilitieswhile I waited for you to fight for us."
"Jacqueline—"
"Let me finish." She took a breath. "I've been thinking about this since the wedding. Since you said my name. I couldn't stop thinking about it. You were standing at the altar marrying someone else and my name was the one in your mouth. I hated myself for what I felt when I heard it. Because I felt — I felt like you'd finally told the truth."
Dominic looked at the woman he'd spent years believing was the love of his life, and felt the last piece of that myth dissolve.
"I came here to ask you something," Jacqueline said. "And I need you to be honest with me, because if I'm wrong I need to know." She met his eyes. "Do you still love me?"
The question hung between them. Simple, direct, devastating in its simplicity. There was a time, long before Charlotte, where he would've said yes. Now, sitting in his office with Charlotte's kiss still living in his nervous system, the answer was so clear it felt like the most obvious thing he'd ever known.
"No," he said.
The word was gentle. He made it as gentle as he could, because Jacqueline deserved gentleness, she deserved honesty, and the two things had to exist in the same breath.
She didn't flinch. But something behind her eyes shifted. A door closing, quietly, on a room she'd been keeping lit.
