Past Midnight

by Jasmine Haynes

  “Thank you,” Dominic said with tight politeness.

  Erin smiled her thanks at the woman. The floor of the lobby was expensive marble shiny enough to see her reflection in, the leather furniture top quality, the feel of the place posh and worldclass. And overextending the cash flow? WEU management obviously subscribed to the policy that in a cash crunch, you didn’t stop spending, you just stretched out your payment terms. Or maybe accounts payable was so busy paying off the lobby remodel that they couldn’t pay hardworking, small-fry vendors like Leon. The coffee service had everything imaginable, even an automatic espresso machine on a granite countertop, all of it top of the line.

  She pressed the button for plain coffee to soothe Dominic’s savage beast. She was actually surprised at his muttered thank you when he took the cup.

  After settling in the chair next to him, she said, “We need to talk before Brooks gets here.”

  Dominic turned his head slowly, his gaze sliding to her. “You want to get rid of DKG, we’ll get rid of it.” He leveled her with a dark, hooded look.

  She eyed the receptionist and dropped her voice. “That isn’t why I showed you their letter. I wanted you to see how they were trying to make a move on us.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me about it when you got it?”

  Okay, so he’d seen the date was from last year. “For the same reason you didn’t tell me about the patent infringement when you first got that letter. We were supposed to be going away. I didn’t want to spoil the fun.”

  His eyes were sharp, narrowed. “I didn’t tell you about the trip I’d planned until the evening. After you must have gotten the letter.”

  Shit. Yes, she’d wanted to keep it to herself, think about it, hold it close as if it were a way out of her guilt and turmoil. Then, with everything they’d done, the hellish weekend, she’d forgotten about it until the moment Al showed them how their numbers were being stolen. It wasn’t just Jay she’d stopped talking about; it was the business, their lives, everything.

  Dominic gave her a small smile that never reached his eyes. He wasn’t fooled. She’d told him so many lies, shut him out so many times, he no longer had faith in her. Why should he? She hadn’t given him anything to have faith in. Not for a long time.

  They sat in silence, except for the brunette’s soft, polite tones as she took calls and the beat of shoes along the hallway off to the left.

  “Hey, Denise, can you give this to the FedEx guy when he gets here?” A man’s voice echoed across the lobby. A very familiar voice.

  Erin knew it in a heartbeat. So did Dominic.

  At the same moment, Reggie recognized them. Reggie, their ex-software engineer, the man who’d worked on the through-coat gauge, the one who’d helped Dominic research the patent.

  What the hell was he doing at WEU?

  36

  “HEY, YOU GUYS, HOW ARE YOU?” REGGIE’S VOICE WAS TOO LOUD, falsely genial, and nervous. “It’s been ages. How ya been? How’s everyone at DKG? Wow, I really miss the old gang. You can’t imagine how impersonal it is working at a big place like this.” He flapped a hand in the general direction of the building’s back end.

  Oh yeah, real nervous. Dominic had known Reggie almost since they’d moved to California, fifteen years, and Reggie telegraphed jitters with his fast-talk, wide eyes, and the way he shifted foot to foot like a kid who had to go to the bathroom. Tall, gangly, with a thin nose, and a pocket protector, he was the archetypal nerdy engineer.

  “I’m sure you know exactly how we’ve been, Reggie.”

  Reggie nodded, his head bobbing on his neck like one of those bobblehead dogs. “Man, it’s been so busy around this place”—he waved his arm to demonstrate—“I haven’t had time to poke my head out.” He laughed tensely. “Like a t-turtle.”

  The brief stutter was a dead giveaway. Dominic smiled with the acrimony burning inside him. “Then let me tell you we’ve been doing great. Sales of our through-coat gauge have gone through the roof.”

  “Cool.” Reggie’s eye started to tick.

  Dominic had been consumed with Erin, that she wanted to sell, she wanted out of DKG, out of their marriage. He hadn’t stopped to consider the implications of the letter itself. Escalating everything at year-end, then a sweet little note saying, oh, hey, we’ll take your company in settlement, help you get out of the mess you got yourself into. It was so convenient. His visit to Garland Brooks had played right into the scheme, making them think he was nervous. Brooks was still playing them, as evidenced by the wait in the lobby rather than inviting them to the inner sanctum. Mind games.

  He’d let himself be played, and that made him all the more pissed at Reggie. “But you already knew how well the gauge has been doing.” Dominic crossed his arms over his chest, smiled maliciously, like a predator ready to pounce. Beside him, Erin smiled, too, as if they were suddenly a team again. “Trying to get your profit sharing out of us any way you can, Reggie?”

  Reggie’s gaze flashed between them like a Ping-Pong ball. “What are you talking about, Dominic?”

  Reggie had managed their software system, worked with the techs, added the user IDs. He knew how each module worked. He would know how to obtain the pertinent data. He probably knew that Yvonne circumvented the password change. Dominic didn’t need to test the theory, he felt the rightness in his gut. “Are they paying you a bonus for our financial data, Reggie?”

  “Dominic, I—”

  Then Dominic laughed. “Holy shit. The royalty scam on the patent was your idea.” He didn’t even make it a question.

  Reggie gaped, but couldn’t get a word out.

  “I’m sure he knows about Leon and the transducers, too,” Erin added, staring Reggie down. Yeah, Reggie would have assumed their costs would go up, putting them in a deeper bind, but Erin had it under control. She’d implemented a plan.

  Dominic suddenly felt a burst of pride completely at odds with the crap they’d been going through personally. He wanted to touch her, hold her hand in solidarity. They’d lost so much, but they still had DKG. He would not let her throw it away.

  Reggie was saved from sputtering and stammering by a strutting Garland Brooks making a grand entrance in his slick suit. “Well, the DeKnights. How wonderful to see you.” He didn’t extend a hand.

  In her high-heeled shoes, Erin was slightly taller. “Nice to meet you,” she said politely, though she knew of the man’s ethics, or lack thereof.

  Brooks pushed his wire rims up the bridge of his nose as if that would help him see better. “I had no idea you were talking to Reggie here about our offer”—yeah, right—“but why don’t we go to my office to discuss the particulars?”

  “We’re not here to discuss particulars.” Dominic didn’t give the man the benefit of a smile. “We’re here to tell you that DKG isn’t for sale, and you can sue us over the patent but you’ll lose.” He turned on Reggie. “Isn’t that right, Reggie? You understand since you helped me do the research on it.”

  Reggie spluttered. If he was getting any sort of bonus out of backing DKG into a corner, he’d lose it now.

  “It’s going to cost you a lot to fight us.” Brooks punctuated the threat with a scowl.

  “It will cost you more.” Seeing Reggie in the enemy territory put everything in perspective. WEU knew they couldn’t win, which is why the original patent infringement letter hadn’t come from an attorney. Garland Brooks was blowing smoke. “I wonder what would happen if the other manufacturers paying you a royalty were to learn your patent’s validity is questionable?”

  “Well . . . well—” Brooks blustered ineffectually. He was losing confidence.

  “Don’t worry.” Dominic waved a hand and gave them a conspiratorial wink. “It won’t come from me.” It wouldn’t have to. Like magic, the industry grapevine would transmit the news. Dominic clapped Reggie on the back. “But hey, Reggie, hacking into a competitor’s system is illegal. You should cover your tracks better.” Al hadn’t pinpointed the culprit, but Dominic
didn’t have to be a betting man to know it was Reggie.

  Reggie cringed, stammered, nothing came out. Garland Brooks glared, but even backed up by his thousand-dollar suit, the look didn’t carry the punch he wanted.

  “Thanks for the coffee.” Dominic drained the last of the brew, crumpled the cup, and tossed it in the trash. Then he drew WEU’s letter from his back pocket. “Guess we can throw this in the old round file as well.” He tore it and let the pieces fall into the trash can, too.

  Dominic had won not just the battle, but the war.

  “My dear?” He held out his hand as he turned.

  Erin put hers in it.

  ERIN DIDN’T KNOW IF THE CLASPED HANDS WERE FOR SHOW, BUT she held on tight. She’d never admired him more. Dominic hadn’t gotten angry. He hadn’t yelled. He stated the situation in good-old-boys terminology, a simple “Don’t mess with me or mine.”

  “Do you really think they’ll back off?” She wasn’t sure how stubborn Garland Brooks could get.

  “They will. I’m right about the patent. This is over.”

  His hand around hers was warm, solid. She’d forgotten how solid he was, how she could count on him. He hadn’t given up on DKG. He wasn’t the type to give in without a fight.

  And he’d fought for her for a long time now. She’d shut him out, punished him with her silence and her distance, yet he’d bared his soul to her. She’d been too afraid to give him the same in return. She was still afraid. If only . . . there were so many if onlys.

  If only they hadn’t let Jay go that day. If she’d gotten him to the doctor sooner. If she hadn’t screamed at him. And even later, after they’d ruined their lives, if she’d let Dominic talk, if she’d talked to him. Maybe she could have at least stopped hurting them both. For a year, she hadn’t thought about losing him. Now, she was actually afraid of it, about what that meant, how it would feel.

  If only. Maybe she had some control over that. If only she could talk to him? It was just a matter of opening her mouth and doing it. Giving him what he needed instead of considering only her own stuff, her own feelings, her own fears.

  She tugged on his hand as he headed to the car. “Walk with me for a minute. I’m not ready to go back yet.”

  WEU was at the end of a cul-de-sac, the street tree-lined, the sidewalks edged with flowerbeds now dormant in winter. He followed her, but his fingers tensed in her grip.

  She was afraid to talk, but afraid to lose him if she didn’t. She opened her mouth, closed it, started again. “I did blame you,” she said, and the words actually carried a physical ache with them.

  “I know.” He didn’t have to ask if she was referring to Jay; she heard the softness of heartbreak in his voice.

  “Not for the reason you think.”

  “Why then?”

  The words stalled on her lips. She’d spent so long trying not to say it, hiding it, hiding from it. But Dominic had been right, she’d robbed them both. When that was all they had left, denying Jay’s memory was like losing their son all over again. She needed those memories back. There was only one way to get them. “I blamed you because if you hadn’t let him go, then I never would have said those things to him the day we took him to the hospital.”

  A squirrel chattered as it scurried along a wire, and birds twittered in the trees, high tweets, musical chirps, the caw of a crow. And there was Dominic’s hand tight on hers, then his deep, torn voice. “What did you say to him?”

  “He was being a pill.” Even now, she could see Jay’s cheeks bright with splotches of anger. “He threw his oatmeal, broke the bowl. Then he started shouting at me. I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I yelled right back. I called him a stupid little asshole.” Later, so much later, when it was too late, she’d learned that the combativeness was a symptom. The knowledge hadn’t made her feel better.

  “He could be a pill when he wanted,” Dominic said gently, almost as if the memory were fond.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “But it was worse. I was so angry. I punished him by not speaking to him the rest of the morning, while I drove him to school.” Just as she’d punished Dominic by not talking.

  Their footsteps had grown to near nonexistent. She no longer heard the birds. She could hear only her thumping heartbeat. She could feel only the tightness in her chest, the prick at the backs of her eyes. “He kept whining that his neck ached, and I still didn’t talk to him because I thought he was playing the sympathy card so I’d forgive him without making him apologize for his behavior.” Later, the school called to say he was sick. “Every mother knows,” she whispered, “that when a child has a neck ache, you take them to the doctor.” She didn’t realize she was crying until she tasted a tear on her lips.

  Dominic put his hand to her cheek, brushing away a teardrop with his thumb. “It was already too late.”

  She’d hated herself every moment since, every time she woke to the sound of her own words in her ears. She hadn’t kissed Jay good-bye that day. And she would hear the things she’d shouted at him until the day she died.

  Maybe, with Dominic’s help, she could also remember the sweetness of her son’s smile, or how much he’d loved to be read to at night, even when he was old enough to read for himself.

  This was what she denied both herself and Dominic for that last year, all the sweet things. She wanted them back, even if they were only memories.

  EVERY BREATH FLAYED DOMINIC’S THROAT, EVERY WORD ERIN spoke stripped his flesh from his bones. She had punished Jay with silence, and she had punished him. But for herself, she’d reserved pure torture.

  As much as he’d loved and hated her in the last year, he understood why she’d shut him out. “Hating yourself won’t bring him back, and it won’t make the pain go away.” Nothing could.

  She raised her gaze from the open throat of his shirt to his eyes. “That’s why I need to start remembering all the good things. I need you to help me do that.”

  She had never asked him for anything. Until now.

  “We can help each other.” That was all he’d wanted. For them to comfort each other. It wouldn’t end the pain. It wouldn’t even stop the guilt. But it was better than dying inside all alone.

  Beneath a bare dogwood tree that wouldn’t bloom for another three months, he pulled her against him. She slipped her arms beneath his jacket, and her tears seeped through his shirt.

  “Do you hate me for what I said to him?” she murmured in a child’s voice.

  She’d feared all along that he would. But no, not for that. “That’s only a reflection of your own feelings.” He’d hated her for other things, but then you couldn’t love someone if you didn’t sometimes hate them, too.

  “I forgive you for letting him go by himself and not telling me.” She waited a beat. “I would have done the same.”

  “I would have let him do a cannonball in the hot springs.”

  She sighed, sniffed, and finally smiled just a little. “You would have been the first to do it.”

  “Yeah.” He wouldn’t ask now, but he knew when he did, she would finally agree to talk to someone with him, a professional. “I forgive you.” He breathed in her sweet, cleansing scent. “And I love you.”

  He led her back to the car, but when he drove her away, he didn’t return to work. He took her home. Once there, he carried a box in from his lab, where he’d hidden it away since February. Setting it on the floor of her office, he opened the flaps.

  She came down on her knees beside him. “You kept some of his things.”

  “I knew someday you’d wish you still had them.”

  She pulled out the much-loved stuffed green dinosaur Jay had slept with for so many years until somehow it made its way to the back of his closet. Rubbing the grubby material against her cheek, Erin fingered the tail. Her eyes misted. Then she rummaged through the other favorites, touching each one for a long moment as if she could see Jay in her mind’s eye. She gave the baseball glove to Dominic, dug deeper.

  “Noah’s ark.” S
he traced a giraffe, an elephant, Leon’s painstaking detail. “He was carving the camels.”

  For a moment, Dominic couldn’t speak, then he swallowed past it. “Maybe he’d let us have them to put with these.”

  “I’m sure he would.” She pulled something else from the box. “My mug.” She wrapped her palm around the ceramic “World’s Best Mom” mug Jay had given her that last Mother’s Day. He had the matching Father’s Day mug in his lab. There wasn’t a day he didn’t drink from it without equal parts pain, guilt, and love. He could still taste the burned toast and the overdone bacon his son had made him for breakfast on Father’s Day. He would take the hard memories because with them came the good ones, too.

  “He didn’t burn your bacon the way he burned mine.” His throat ached; his cheeks were wet.

  “That’s because I was the world’s best mom.” She laughed, choked it off. “And you were just his dad,” she whispered.

  He lifted her hand, kissed her knuckles.

  She drew in a breath, held it. “There’s something else.”

  His heart pounded. There would always be something else, a memory that would slice him like shards of glass. “What?”

  She rose, let him follow. Her computer had finished booting while they’d gone through the box. She opened a photo gallery.

  Jay’s face bloomed on the screen in picture after picture. Dominic’s heart stopped beating. He’d thought she’d purged these.

  “I believed that if I looked at him enough,” she murmured, gaze fixed on a photo of Jay in his baseball uniform, “that he’d forgive me.”

  For a moment, he wanted to hate her all over again for hiding those precious moments of Jay from him, for keeping them to herself for a year. His vision blurred, yet in the next breath, he knew they’d hated and punished each other more than a lifetime’s worth. He needed it to end. “This is what you did every night?”