The Call At One In The Morning

The dresser safe stood open, and the velvet slot inside was empty.

It was Saturday, past one. I sat on the edge of the bed with my mother's jewelry box in my lap, and Dominic's side of the closet was dark because he had not come home. He had, I assumed, gone wherever men go when the woman they took has stopped answering.

My phone rang. His name.

I let it ring twice and picked up.

"You left early," he said. He sounded tired, and a little drunk, which was rare enough to make me sit straighter.

"You had me walked out. Hollis carried my coat to the car."

"I was under pressure."

"You cancelled my badge before I arrived."

Silence. Then, to my astonishment, he didn't argue.

"Your father told me something," Dominic said. "The night before we married. He put a hand on my shoulder and said a man can run a house for years and still be a lodger in it."

"That sounds like him."

"I've been waiting thirteen years for him to be wrong. I turned this company into something and nobody ever said the name Tarrant without saying his in the next breath. The Marchetti money. The Marchetti name in every toast. I built it, Leona, and I still walk into rooms as the man who was rescued."

I could hear the honest part of him. I had married that part.

"Nobody rescued you," I said. "You were very good at running it."

"Running it." He gave a hollow laugh. "That's how you talk about it too."

There it was, the small hard thing under all the swagger. It wasn't that he wanted more money. It was that he wanted to be believed without a footnote.

"Dominic," I said, and my voice came out softer than I meant. "Come home."

He was silent so long I thought the call had dropped.

"I can't," he said at last. "If I walk in there, I have to look at what I've been doing."

He hung up.

I sat there with the empty slot and felt the old reflex rise, the one that says love him harder and he will improve. Then I made myself look at the yellow tab on my phone screen, and it passed.

At 1:40 the phone lit again. Walter Ingram.

"Forgive the hour," he said. His voice was dry as paper. "I've left you three messages."

"I've been avoiding you."

"Yes. I gathered."

"Walter, I need every director in the room on Monday at nine, in person, not on video. Don't tell Dominic what it's about."

"Consider it done." He waited a moment. "Leona, I hold an envelope your father sealed. He asked that it not be opened until a certain day, and he asked me to tell you only this: what it says depends entirely on what Dominic does before that day arrives."

"What day?"

"I'm not permitted to say. It isn't far."

"Is it good news or bad?"

"Your father," Walter said carefully, "hoped it would be a gift."

The line went quiet. I looked at the empty velvet slot, and then I typed a text to Sloane.

Monday, nine a.m. Wear the oak leaf.