Make Me Leave

Chapter 30

A week passes, then two, and the silence from Victoria's camp stretches like a held breath that never releases. No calls from her lawyers demanding renegotiation. No threats delivered through intermediaries. No tabloid stories mysteriously appearing about bankrupt CEOs and the women foolish enough to love them.

The quiet feels strange after months of warfare — like the eerie calm when you're not sure if the storm is over or just gathering strength for round two. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. It doesn't.

Saturday morning I come downstairs to find Dominic at the stove with Elliot perched on a chair beside him, both of them studying a pancake with the intensity of surgeons examining a failing organ. His sleeves are pushed to the elbows, flour dusting his forearm, a dish towel slung over one shoulder like he's been doing this for years instead of weeks.

"The bubbles, Dad." Elliot points at the batter with the authority of a six-year-old who has lost all faith in adult competence. "You have to wait for the bubbles."

"I see bubbles."

"Those are baby bubbles. You need grown-up bubbles. Mama's pancakes have grown-up bubbles."

He's home now — really home, not the hollow-eyed ghost who used to stumble through the door at midnight smelling like hairspray and Victoria's ambition. This version of him burns pancakes and argues with a six-year-old about bubble maturity and looks at me when I walk into the kitchen like I'm the best thing he's seen all day. It's disorienting, having him here — disorienting and wonderful and terrifying all at once.

"Coffee's ready," he says, flipping the pancake a beat too late so it lands slightly folded in the pan. Elliot sighs with the bone-deep disappointment only a child can muster at breakfast-related failures.

"That one's yours, Dad."

"Fair enough, Chef. Fair enough."

Elliot drags his pancake plate to the living room and the TV clicks on — Saturday cartoons, the sacred ritual I stopped policing weeks ago. Dominic wipes his hands on the dish towel, drops it on the counter, and disappears down the hall toward the study. I follow him a minute later with two mugs of coffee and find the door open.

His study again — Forbes covers taken down, Vivian's poetry collections returned to shelves that missed them. He's got the laptop open and a legal pad covered in names, half of them crossed out. The pen taps the table in that rhythm I've learned means someone said no.

"Henderson passed." He doesn't look up. "Said the brand is too damaged. Exact quote — 'Nobody wants to shake hands with a headline, Dom.'"

"Henderson's an idiot who wore a turtleneck to his own IPO." I set tea on the desk, away from the laptop. "Who's next on the list?"

"Collins. Boston consulting firm — they want a quarterly advisory role. And there's a VC group sniffing around a strategy retainer." He scrubs a hand over his face. "Nothing glamorous. Nothing guaranteed."

"Glamorous got you into debt and married to a sociopath." I tap the uncrossed names. "These look like a start."

His mouth twitches. He picks up the phone and dials the next number, and I leave him to it — the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding a reputation one conversation at a time, in a room that finally smells like Vivian's books instead of his own performance.

"I spent seven years building a company that looked impressive and meant nothing," he tells me one evening on the porch, the sunset bruising purple at the edges the way it does in autumn. "Collecting magazine covers instead of relationships. Chasing a number on a balance sheet instead of sitting on this porch."

"So what now?" I lean into his shoulder, breathing him in — soap and coffee and the particular exhaustion of honest work.

"Now I figure out who I am without the suit." His hand finds mine, lacing through. "The consulting is real. The people I'm working with now don't care about the Forbes profile — they care about the frameworks. The rest is slower. People don't trust me yet." His jaw sets in that stubborn line I've come to love despite my better judgment. "But I'm not giving up. I can't afford to give up."

"You'll get there," I tell him, and I mean it.

"Maybe. Maybe not." He squeezes my fingers. "Is that enough? The trying, even when it doesn't work out?"

I lean into him and let the weight of the question settle between us, the garden darkening below, Harold's roses closing for the night. "It's enough," I say. "You're enough. You always were."

The back door crashes open and Elliot explodes onto the porch with the particular urgency that only six-year-olds can muster about academic crises. "Dad! Math homework! There's carrying and I don't understand carrying and Mrs. Dunlap says we have a quiz Monday!"

He laughs and lets Elliot drag him inside by the hand, shooting me a look over his shoulder as he goes. I watch them disappear into the house — my son and his father, still learning how to be that to each other, the stegosaurus tucked under Elliot's arm like it has opinions about arithmetic — and something expands behind my ribs that might be joy or terror or both tangled together so tight I can't separate them.

The house is safe. My son is happy. The man I love is finally staying, finally fighting, finally becoming someone worth betting on. I should feel at peace, and mostly I do.

But some nights, when the house goes quiet and Dominic sleeps beside me, Victoria's words creep back like smoke under a door. He's been running since before you met him. That's not damage. That's design. I tell myself it was an empty threat, a wounded woman lashing out because she couldn't stand losing. I almost believe it.

Sunday morning I'm making coffee when the mail slot clicks. I walk to the foyer expecting bills and catalogs, the usual pile of forgettable correspondence, but there's only one envelope on the floor. No return address. My name written in elegant handwriting — perfect loops and deliberate flourishes, the kind of penmanship that belongs to someone who learned calligraphy because it was expected of girls in her social class.

My stomach drops before my brain catches up. I open it anyway.

Inside is a photograph. Dominic and Victoria, years ago, standing in front of a building I don't recognize — white columns, Mediterranean architecture, somewhere warm and expensive. His arm is around her waist. Her head tilts toward his shoulder. They look like they belong together in a way that makes my throat close.

I turn it over. Three words in the same elegant script: Ask him about Monaco.

My hands won't hold the photograph steady. It's just a photo — just Victoria planting seeds because she can't stand that we won. That's all it is.

Behind me, footsteps on the stairs. "Morning. Is that the mail?"

I fold the photo into my pocket and turn with a smile that costs me something structural. He's standing in the kitchen doorway in sweatpants and a t-shirt, hair pointing in six directions, those mismatched eyes — one green, one amber in the morning light — looking at me with the open, trusting expression of a man who thinks the war is over.

"Just junk." My voice holds. Barely. "Nothing important."

He nods and moves past me toward the coffee maker, pressing a kiss to my temple as he goes. "Elliot wants waffles. Think we have batter left?"

"Should be in the fridge."

He disappears into the kitchen, humming something tuneless and happy, completely unaware that my pulse is doing something that would concern a cardiologist. The photograph burns against my hip like Vivian's letter once did — another secret pressed against my body in this house that collects them the way other houses collect dust.

Victoria's voice settles behind my ribs where I keep things I don't look at. That's not damage. That's design.

I stand in the foyer of Hartwell House while the grandfather clock ticks its ancient rhythm. Somewhere in the kitchen my son is explaining to his father that waffles require a level of commitment he has historically failed to demonstrate, and the sound of their voices fills the old rooms the way Vivian's laughter used to.

I press my hand over my pocket. The photograph crinkles against my palm.

This isn't over.