"Max."
"I'm asking because I'm your best man and it's literally my job, and because you've been checking your phone every thirty seconds since we got here and you haven't once asked if anyone's heard from your bride."
Dominic's jaw tightened. He picked up his phone from the side table. One new message from Charlotte:I can't wait to marry you. He typed back a thumbs-up. He set the phone down before he could think about how insufficient that was. She deserved more. A paragraph, a love letter, something with weight to match what she'd written. He'd do it later. After.
There was also a text from his mother:The Harringtons are seated. Roland says the officiant needs the final version of the program. Handle it.And below that, from his father directly:Don't be late.
No "good luck." No "proud of you." Justdon't be late,as if the wedding were a board meeting and Dominic were an employee with an attendance problem.
He handled the program issue with two texts to the wedding coordinator. Checked his cufflinks. Checked the mirror. The tie was fine. Everything was fine.
"I got her something," he said, turning back to Maxwell. "Had it sent up this morning. Diamond earrings."
"Nice."
"Two carats each. The jeweler said they were?—"
"Dom." Maxwell set his glass down. "Did you write a note with them?"
Dominic paused. "She knows who they're from."
Maxwell stared at him for a long moment. Then he picked his glass back up and leaned back in the chair and said nothing, which was Maxwell's version of saying a great deal.
The groomsmen's suite was on the twelfth floor. Two floors below Charlotte's, close enough that Dominic could have walked upstairs and knocked on her door and seen her in whatever state she was in, nervous and flushed. Probably laughing with Kate, all those brown curls falling everywhere. He could picture it. He chose not to.
He'd chosen Charlotte Elizabeth Hoffman the way he chose most things: with research, clear criteria, and a decisive timeline.
Months ago, his father had laid it out plainly over dinner at the club. The Weston Group was pursuing a major municipal contract — a redevelopment project that would define the company's next decade — and the selection committee cared about stability. Family values. Community ties. "They want to know who they're doing business with," Roland had said, cutting his steak. "They want to see a man with roots. A foundation. Not a thirty-two-year-old bachelor who shows up in the tabloids with a different woman at every charity gala."
"I don't show up in the tabloids."
"You will if you keep this up. Find someone, Dominic. Someone appropriate. Someone who signals the right things." Roland had looked at him over his glasses. "You've had your fun. It's time to build something."
The wordfunhad landed wrong. His father meant the women. The dates, the events, the carefully managed relationships that served a social function and ended cleanly. But what Dominic heard wasJacqueline.
Jacqueline March. The name still made his chest tighten, an old ache that flared at unpredictable moments. In line for coffee. Driving past the Village. He'd trained himself to push through it, like learning to walk on a knee that never fully healed. You compensated. You adjusted. You stopped limping, but you never forgot the injury.
They'd been together for two years. He’d loved her. He was certain of that. A love that made him reckless, that loosened his grip on the careful design of his life.
His mother had called Jacqueline "unsuitable”: a word that did a lot of work in her vocabulary. The Marches were old money, well-connected, a family the Westons should have been thrilled to merge with, until Jacqueline's father was indicted for insider trading. It had been all over the financial press for months. Peter March, the patriarch, led out of his office in handcuffs. The trial. The conviction. The family name dragged through every headline and cable news chyron in the country. The name became radioactive, and the Westons were not a family who touched radioactive things. His mother had delivered her verdict:She's lovely, I'm sure. But the March name is poison, and with our business dealings, we can't afford the association.
So Dominic had ended it.
He'd sat across from Jacqueline in her apartment and explained that it wasn't going to work. She'd looked at him withthose dark eyes and said,Because your mother told you so?He'd said,Because I have responsibilities,and she'd said,You have a leash, Dominic. You just haven't noticed it yet.
He'd told himself it was the hardest thing he'd ever done. He'd told himself that for years. Through the months of silence afterward, through the news that she'd started seeing someone, through the wedding announcement he'd found online one night at two a.m. and stared at until the screen blurred.Jacqueline March and David Reeves.She'd looked happy in the photo. He'd closed the laptop, poured a drink, sat in the dark and told himself the ache in his chest was proof that he'd sacrificed something real for duty. That he was capable of that kind of love, even if he'd chosen to walk away from it.
He kept that ache like a man keeps a scar. Evidence of depth. Proof that underneath the boardrooms, the tailored suits, and his father's voice, there was someone who’d loved completely and lost.
And then Charlotte.
He'd been at a fundraiser. Some education nonprofit his mother sat on the board of. Charlotte was there because one of her colleagues had won a grant, and she'd come to support her. She was standing near the bar in a dress that didn't fit quite right, holding a glass of wine she clearly wanted to abandon. She'd bumped into him — literally, physically backed into him while trying to escape a conversation with a donor's wife. Her wine had sloshed onto his shirt, and she'd turned around with her face already burning. "Oh god, I'm so sorry, I'm — you're — that's — I'll pay for the dry cleaning."
"It's fine," he'd said.
"It's not fine, please let me?—.”
"It's still fine."
