Chapter 487: A Divorce in the Headlines

Dominic was three signatures into a stack of paperwork nobody would remember by Friday when Foster knocked twice and didn’t wait for an answer.

That alone told him something had already gone wrong.

"It’s out," Foster said, and set a tablet on the desk instead of handing it over, the screen already turned toward him. A business site’s front page, a photo of Diana from an old gala neither of them had enjoyed, and a headline that put her name first and his second, which felt like the smaller injury and turned out not to be.

Dominic read it twice. Filed three weeks ago. Confirmed by sources close to the family. No comment from Blackwood Corp.

"Who leaked it?"

"Unknown. It’s on four sites already. It’ll be on all of them by lunch."

He set the tablet face down, the same motion Gilbert had used on his own phone at a birthday party Dominic hadn’t been invited to and wouldn’t have attended if he had been. "Get legal on the phone. Not to stop it. To make sure the statement goes out before someone writes it for us."

Foster didn’t move yet. "There’s more."

There was always more, lately. "Say it."

"Ashcroft’s office called twice this morning. They want the covenant conversation moved up. Today, if you’ll take it."

Dominic had known this was coming since the fourteen days had turned into fourteen weeks with nothing renegotiated, only postponed, the way a debt postpones itself right up until it doesn’t. A divorce in the headlines gave a nervous lender exactly the excuse he’d been waiting for to stop being patient.

"Tell them two o’clock," Dominic said. "And tell them nothing else. Not one word about the personal matter."

"They’ll ask."

"Then they get a no comment same as everyone else."

Foster left. Dominic sat with the closed laptop and the open window and a house that had, four months ago, still had a seven-year-old’s shoes lined up by the door. Nicholas’s room was down the hall, the door shut, the bed made by a housekeeper who had nothing else to straighten in it anymore. He didn’t go look. He’d stopped doing that after the second week, when looking hadn’t changed anything, only proved to him each time that it wouldn’t.

The phone rang four times before nine. The first was a board member, and Dominic answered that one himself.

"Tell me this doesn’t touch the quarter," the man said, no greeting first.

"It doesn’t touch the quarter."

"Diana’s people are already framing you as the reason it ended."

"Let them." Dominic kept his eyes on the window, not the screen. "The quarter is the only thing on today’s agenda that I answer to you for."

The line went dead without another word, which was its own kind of answer, and Dominic set the phone face down on the desk and didn’t touch it again until the next call actually rang. An investor relations call went to voicemail next. A journalist whose number he didn’t recognize got blocked before the first ring finished. By ten, Blackwood’s stock had dropped another six points, the ticker running under a market segment discussing his marriage like it was a quarterly filing.

He was watching the number fall when a second alert crossed the smaller screen, easy to miss under the noise of his own collapse.

SUMMERS CORP SEEKS BUYER — RAFAEL SUMMERS HAS ALREADY MET WITH THREE INTERESTED PARTIES.

Dominic read it once, and a second read didn’t change anything either.

Rafael had cut the partnership the same week he’d taken the company, a clean blade with his name nowhere near the press release. Dominic had told himself, back then, that it was business, nothing personal in being severed from a company that no longer needed him. He believed that less now, watching Rafael sell the whole thing out from under a board that had crowned him only months ago. A man who moved that fast wasn’t protecting an asset. He was clearing the building before anyone else could smell what was already burning in it.

Rafael knew something he didn’t. The not-knowing settled into his chest next to everything else the week had already handed him, one more number he couldn’t get to add up in his favor.

The man in the hotel suite came back to him anyway, the way he always did on mornings like this. Two years, and Dominic still couldn’t put a face to that voice, only the shape of a man in low light, unhurried, never once raising it. Every plan that man had ever handed him came with a leash Dominic hadn’t felt until it pulled. He’d told himself for a long time that the leash was the price of the return. He was no longer sure there’d ever been a return. Only the leash.

He picked up the phone before Ashcroft’s people could call again. Two o’clock. He’d need the numbers dressed by then, made to look survivable even if they weren’t, and he’d need to do it alone, because there was no one left in the building or the house or the last decade of his life who’d sit across the table and help him hold any of it together.

At noon, the divorce ran on three national broadcasts. At one, Blackwood’s stock closed for lunch trading down eleven points on the day. At two, he sat by himself in a conference room built for twelve, and the call came in on time.

"Mr. Blackwood." Ashcroft’s lawyer, not Ashcroft himself, which told him everything about how this would go. "We’ve reviewed the covenant language again in light of recent events."

"The covenant language hasn’t changed."

"The risk profile has." A pause, practiced enough that Dominic could hear the sentence being read off a page. "We’re calling the loan."

Dominic didn’t answer right away. Across the table, Nicholas’s chair sat pushed in at the far end, where nobody had ever actually made him sit, and Dominic looked at it instead of at the phone while the lawyer kept talking, laying out terms Dominic had already stopped listening to.