Updated Feb 23, 2026 • ~14 min read
POV: Dominic
Jules won’t stop crying.
Not the quiet, sealed-off crying he did in the months after Cecile died, when he went silent and turned himself inward like a house shuttering its windows. This is different. This is loud and desperate and full of language — Jules has words now, and he uses them, and every word is a variation of the same question, asked with the relentless, focused persistence of a child who believes that if he just asks it the right number of times, the answer will change.
“When is Val coming back?”
“Soon, buddy. She just needs some time.”
“But why? Why did she leave? Did I do something?”
“No. You didn’t do anything. None of this is your fault.”
“Then why?”
How do you explain it? How do you translate “press scandal” and “class warfare” and “reputation destruction” and “my mother’s cruelty” into something a six-year-old can hold? Dominic has tried several versions of the truth over the past three days, and none of them are satisfying, because none of them are simple, and Jules deserves a simple answer and there isn’t one.
“Some people said mean things about Val,” Dominic tries. “Said things that weren’t true and weren’t fair, and it hurt her. She needed space to feel better.”
“We could make her feel better. Why can’t she feel better here?”
Dominic pulls his son against his chest and doesn’t answer that, because the answer is complicated and also because he’s afraid that if he tries to explain it he’ll lose control of his voice. He holds Jules instead and lets Jules cry, his small body heaving with it, his hands fisting in Dominic’s shirt.
He doesn’t have a good answer.
He doesn’t have any answers.
The worst part — and there are many candidates for worst part, this is a list with genuine competition — is that Jules has stopped talking again. Not the way he was before Valencia. He still speaks, still asks his endless questions, still narrates things in his low, absorbed murmur when he thinks no one is listening. But the brightness is gone. The chattering enthusiasm, the way he’d announce his dinosaur facts with the urgency of breaking news, the way he’d reach for Dominic’s hand and swing it as they walked because he’d discovered that walking next to someone was something you could take pleasure in — all of that has contracted. He answers in short sentences. He doesn’t volunteer information. He sits in front of the television for hours without saying anything, and when Dominic looks over, Jules’s eyes are somewhere far away.
Regressed. That’s the clinical word. He’s regressed.
Because Valencia left.
Dominic calls Dr. Huang on the fourth morning, standing in the kitchen before Jules wakes up, speaking quietly even though he’s alone.
“He’s regressing. Short sentences, withdrawal, he’s barely eating. I don’t know what to do.”
“What changed?” she asks, and her voice carries that careful neutrality she uses when she already has a theory and wants him to arrive at it himself.
“His nanny — the woman who got him talking — she left. Suddenly. It’s been four days.”
“Can she come back?”
Dominic looks out the window. The press vans are still there, three of them, parked along the curb like a long-term encampment. “I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
“Mr. St. Clair.” Dr. Huang’s tone shifts slightly — still professional, but with a directness that doesn’t leave room for avoidance. “Jules formed a secure attachment to her. A primary attachment, in terms of day-to-day care. Her sudden departure is re-traumatizing him. Not because she left, necessarily, but because of how it mirrors the loss of his mother — sudden, without warning, the person simply not there anymore. If there is any way to bring her back—”
“I’m trying.”
But Valencia won’t answer his calls. The phone rings and rings and goes to voicemail, and he doesn’t leave messages after the second day because he ran out of things to say that felt adequate, and inadequate messages seem worse than silence. She won’t respond to texts. He sends them anyway — short, careful, not wanting to crowd her, wanting her to know he’s still here, he hasn’t stopped.
She’s gone, and the penthouse is quieter than it’s been since before she arrived, and that particular quality of quiet — different from the professional silence of a well-run household, carrying in it the absence of a specific person — presses on him constantly.
He manages the press situation because he has to, because it’s there and it requires managing. More statements, carefully worded. His lawyers threaten three tabloids with defamation suits and two of them pull the most egregious articles, which feels like a small, expensive victory. He does the damage control because he knows how to do it, because crisis management is a skill he’s developed over fifteen years of building and running a company that people want to see stumble. He does it well, efficiently, and it helps almost nothing.
The scandal has its own life now. That’s the nature of these things. Once the narrative has taken hold — nanny, billionaire, fake romance, gold-digger — it becomes self-sustaining, feeding on its own momentum. Society has always loved watching people fall, loves it especially when those people had the audacity to reach for something above their assigned station. The press doesn’t need Genevieve’s emails anymore. The story tells itself.
And his mother.
Genevieve has not called since the morning the story broke, when she’d said, with a composure that he now understands was satisfaction badly disguised, that this was “inevitable” and she was “sorry he’d had to find out this way.” She hasn’t called since. Hasn’t visited. She created the wreckage and then withdrew to somewhere comfortable and waited for the dust to settle.
He calls her on the fifth day. He waits that long because he needs to be certain he can speak without the conversation dissolving into something irreparable.
“Are you happy?” He keeps his voice even. This is a trick he learned from his father — the quieter you are when you’re most angry, the more the other person has to sit with it. “You destroyed her. Destroyed my relationship. My son has regressed. He’s not eating. Was it worth it?”
“I was protecting you. I was protecting this family—”
“From love? From happiness? From the best thing that has happened to this household in two years?”
“From someone inappropriate. Someone who was never going to fit into your life, into our world—”
“She was perfect.” The evenness slips, just at the edges. “Perfect for me. Perfect for Jules. She healed us both. Made this house feel like a home again. And you couldn’t see past a paygrade and an idea about what sort of woman belongs in a penthouse on the fortieth floor.”
“Dominic—”
“I’m done.” He says it the same way he’d close a board meeting — not with anger, just finality. “Completely done. Don’t call. Don’t visit. I want nothing from you right now.”
He hangs up.
He stands in his office for a moment afterward, looking at his phone, and then he sets it on the desk and goes to find Jules.
Ethan shows up on day five with takeout containers and the look of a man who has been rehearsing his approach in the elevator.
He finds them in the living room — Jules on the couch watching a nature documentary about pterodactyls with the volume low, Dominic beside him staring at the middle distance, both of them with the particular stillness of people who have run out of things to do to make themselves feel better.
Ethan sets the takeout on the coffee table, looks at them both, and says, with the bluntness of a man who’s known Dominic since they were twenty-two and has never felt the need to soften things: “You look terrible.”
“I feel terrible.”
Ethan settles into the armchair across from them. Jules glances at him, registers that it’s a familiar safe person, and returns to the pterodactyls. “Have you tried actually talking to her?”
“She won’t answer.”
“So go see her. Show up.”
“She doesn’t want to see me.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because she left, Ethan.” The exhaustion in his voice is audible even to himself. “She packed her bags and walked out and didn’t look back. That’s not ambiguous.”
“Or she’s in pain and scared and convinced herself she doesn’t have a choice. There’s a difference.” Ethan leans forward, elbows on knees. “Did you fight for her? When she was leaving — actually leaving — did you fight?”
“I asked her to stay—”
“Asking her to stay is not fighting. I mean fight. Did you tell her explicitly that you choose her over your mother, over society, over your own reputation? Did you make it completely, undeniably clear that you’ll dismantle everything if that’s what it takes?”
Dominic is quiet.
The pterodactyl documentary plays on. Jules reaches over without looking and takes a piece of chicken from one of the containers, which is the most he’s eaten in two days, and Dominic notices this and says nothing because Jules will stop if he notices being noticed.
No. He hadn’t said any of that. He’d asked her not to go and he’d said they could figure it out together and he’d watched her zip her suitcases and he’d watched her walk out and he’d held his son on the floor of the hallway afterward with Jules screaming her name toward the closed elevator doors, and at no point had he made her understand what she was to him. Not in the way she needed to hear it.
“What do I do?” Dominic asks.
“You win her back. You make a gesture that actually matches what she’s worth. Something public, something that costs you — reputation, pride, whatever — because she needs to see that you understand what she risked by being with you. That you’re willing to risk something equivalent.”
“She thinks she doesn’t fit in my world—”
“Then change your world. Actually change it, not just promise to. Make it one where class doesn’t determine who belongs and who doesn’t.”
“And how exactly do I—”
“I don’t know.” Ethan sits back. “That’s your job to figure out. I can help you execute it. But the idea has to come from you. Just don’t sit here anymore. Sitting here isn’t doing anything except making Jules sad and making you look terrible.”
After Ethan leaves, Dominic sits with Jules through the rest of the documentary and through dinner and through bath and bedtime, all the ordinary rituals of an ordinary evening, and he thinks.
Valencia left because of the press scandal — that she couldn’t carry the weight of the narrative they’d built around her. Because of Genevieve’s interference, which was specific and deliberate and exactly as damaging as it was intended to be. Because of the class gap, which was real and wasn’t going away, and which she’d felt every day in ways she’d mostly kept to herself. Because of her family’s shame, her mother’s voice asking her to come home, the community she’d grown up in passing judgment on the girl who got ideas. And because somewhere underneath all of it, she’d believed — had been given reason to believe — that she was secondary. That when something more important came along, she’d be pushed aside.
He can’t undo the scandal.
He can’t change his mother, and he’s beginning to accept that he was never going to be able to.
He can’t erase a class difference that is structural and historical and larger than both of them.
But he can show her she belongs anyway. He can show her publicly, in a way that costs him something real, that she is not secondary. That she is the point. That everything else is negotiable and she isn’t.
He starts planning.
Not damage control — he’d been doing damage control for five days and damage control is reactive, is about minimizing, is about protecting what already exists. What he needs is something different. Something that doesn’t protect anything. Something that takes his most carefully guarded asset — his privacy, his control over his own narrative — and surrenders it completely.
He calls Ethan. “I need your help planning something.”
“Finally.” Ethan doesn’t even ask what. “What are we doing?”
“Winning her back. Publicly. No script, no PR polish, no carefully worded statement. I’m telling the truth. All of it. In front of cameras.”
A pause. Then, with evident satisfaction: “I’m listening.”
They plan for three days. The logistics come together steadily — the venue, the media invitations, the setup. Dominic’s PR team thinks it’s a business announcement, which is technically not inaccurate, because Dominic has decided that proving he’s changed isn’t just about words, it’s about structure. He hires a COO to handle daily operations — someone capable and experienced whom he’s been putting off hiring for two years because relinquishing control has always felt equivalent to losing. He implements hard boundaries around his hours. He starts therapy with a specialist in workaholism and control, twice a week, the kind of work that takes time and is genuinely uncomfortable and cannot be faked.
He does these things before the press conference. He does them because they needed doing, and because he needs Valencia to understand that the gesture is not the change — the change is already happening.
“This could tank your reputation,” Ethan says, reviewing the plan on Wednesday evening over cold coffee and too many printed notes. “Standing up in front of cameras and publicly admitting you messed up, publicly begging your girlfriend to come back — people will say you’ve lost it.”
“Let them.”
“Your mother will have a complete breakdown.”
“Already cut her off. Her breakdown is her own business.”
“Business associates might question your judgment. You know how this world works — perceived emotional volatility is a liability.”
“Then they can take their business elsewhere. Valencia is not a liability to be managed. She’s the person I love. There’s a difference.”
Ethan’s expression shifts — something between exasperation and genuine admiration. “There’s the friend I actually know. The one who can tell the difference between what matters and what doesn’t.”
The press conference is scheduled for Friday afternoon. Dominic doesn’t write a speech. He tries twice and both attempts come out sounding like prepared remarks, like something shaped by the advice of publicists and lawyers, and he doesn’t want that. He wants the truth, which doesn’t benefit from drafting.
Meanwhile, Jules asks every morning: “Is Val coming back?”
“I’m working on it, buddy.”
“Can I do anything to help?”
“Yeah.” Dominic looks at his son — at the small, watchful face that has his wife’s cheekbones and his mother’s eyes and its own particular quality of hopefulness that Jules has never quite lost, even in the worst of it. “Just be ready to hug her when she does.”
Jules considers this seriously. “I’ll hug her so hard. The biggest hug. She won’t be able to breathe.”
“That’s the goal.”
He hopes he gets that chance. He hopes this works. He hopes Valencia is somewhere in Brooklyn watching the news on a Friday afternoon, and that she believes him, and that she comes home. He hopes it because hope is the only available option when you’ve done everything you can think of and the rest is out of your hands.
He loves her. That’s the thing he keeps coming back to, the thing at the center of all the planning and all the logistics and all the structural changes — he loves her completely and desperately and in the permanent way you love someone when they’ve become part of the architecture of your life. She walked into the penthouse fourteen months ago with sensible shoes and a teaching degree and sat on the floor with his silent son and built a block tower, and Dominic hadn’t known it then, had been too guarded and too careful to let himself know it, but everything that matters started in that room.
He’s done hiding it.
Done letting his mother’s disapproval or society’s ideas about who belongs where or his own carefully maintained privacy determine what he does with the most important thing in his life.
Friday is coming.
And Dominic is going to tell the truth.
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