Nothing else there 15

The apartment is warm when I get back and Nick is on the couch with his paperback, feet up, a mug of something on the floor beside him.

He looks up when I close the door and I can see him reading my face the way he reads everything — fast, quiet, looking for the thing I’m not saying. “How’d it go?”

I drop my keys on the shelf and hang up my coat. “She loved it. Asked about Sydney again in the car — I think she’s planning to move there.”

“She’s welcome.” He turns the book over on his chest. “I’ll set up the spare pelican.”

I sit down on the other end of the couch and pull my legs up. The fact that I do this without thinking — sit on his couch, pull my knees up, let myself take up space — is something I notice and file away to think about later.

“The drop-off?” he says.

“Camille opened the door.” I pick at the seam of the cushion. “In loungewear and full makeup at six in the evening, like she was expecting a photographer. She told me to save the date — her and Dominic are having the ceremony tomorrow.”

I do Camille’s voice without meaning to, the tilt, the sweetness. “Small thing. Very intimate. She said she’d invite me but it would be a bit awkward, you know. The ex-wife at the wedding.”

Nick’s jaw tightens. “She said that to your face?”

“She said that to my face and then she closed the door.”

He’s quiet for a second, his thumb pressing into the spine of his book. Then he shakes his head. “Tomorrow, huh? That’s fast.”

“That’s Dominic.” I wrap my arms around my knees. “When he decides something, it happens on his timeline. The rest of us just get the memo.”

“Sounds like someone else I know,” he says, and when I look at him he’s grinning.

Not the careful grin, the real one. The one that makes the skin around his blue eyes crease, and I realize he’s teasing me. But his teasing feels like warmth and that warmth feels like something I haven’t had in so long I’d forgotten it existed.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” He holds his hands up. “Just an observation.”

I grab the pillow behind me and throw it at him. He catches it one-handed without flinching and tucks it behind his head like that was the plan all along. “I am nothing like your brother!”

“I didn’t say that.” He settles deeper into the couch with the stolen pillow, looking pleased with himself. “I said you’re decisive. It’s a compliment.”

“It didn’t sound like a compliment.”

“Everything I say to you is a compliment. You just have to listen harder.”

I’m smiling. I can feel it on my face and I can’t remember deciding to do it. The sound in the apartment is different now — lighter, the air between us carrying something that has nothing to do with custody filings or court dates.

He’s looking at me from the other end of the couch with his feet almost touching mine and I realize I’m comfortable. Not careful. Not measured. Just sitting on a couch talking to someone and not thinking about what I should say next.

In Dominic’s house I rehearsed conversations before I had them, checked the words for anything he could use or twist. Even small talk had a draft.

This doesn’t have a draft. This is just two people on a couch and one of them made me laugh and I didn’t see it coming. The laughter fades as Nick rolls the pillow between his hands and looks at the ceiling.

“We should tell them,” he says. “Dominic. At the wedding. That we’re married.”

I stare at him. “That’s insane.”

“Hear me out.” He sits up and the book slides off his chest but he catches it, setting it on the floor. “He wants you to feel small — that’s what the invitation was. Camille makes sure you know you’re on the outside while he builds the next version of his life.”

He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and his voice drops into something sharper.

“What if instead you walk in and the room finds out his ex-wife married his brother? He loses the narrative. He loses his composure. He loses his shit, Aria! In front of every person he’s spent the last month performing for.”

I turn it over in my head. The image of it — walking into that room, the faces, Dominic’s face — sits in my chest like a held breath.

“That’s either brilliant or catastrophic,” I say.

“Those are usually the same thing.”

He’s watching me with an intensity that’s new, leaning forward. I can see he’s already thought this through, already mapped the exits and the angles. And the realization that someone is strategizing on my behalf instead of against me makes something in my chest crack open a little.

I pull my knees up and press my chin against them. The apartment is quiet. Through the window the building across the street is dark except for one lit window where someone is moving around their kitchen.

“Nick.” My voice changes and he hears it, straightens slightly, the playfulness dropping from his face. “Nobody knows about the twins, nobody can know. If Dominic finds out I was pregnant when we signed the divorce papers…”

“He won’t.”

“He’ll take them the way he took Lily, he’ll—”

“Aria.” He says my name and it lands like a hand on my arm even though he hasn’t moved. “He won’t find out. Not from me.”

I look at him and my hand finds my stomach through my sweater. “I need you to promise me.”

His face shifts. The grin is gone and his bright blue eyes are steady, his jaw set, and this is the other Nick. The one underneath the jokes and the pelican stories. The one who flew across the world and married the woman he once knew because she was left by his brother with nothing.

“I promise,” he says, and I hold his eyes, searching for the thing I always search for.

The shift, the tell, the place where the words and the face don’t match. I don’t find it.

“Okay…” I sit back and let the breath go. “Okay.”

He picks up his book as I pick at the cushion. The apartment settles around us and the fridge hums and the lit window across the street goes dark.

“So,” I say after a while. “We’re really doing this.”

“We’re really doing this.”

He turns the book over in his hands without opening it, looking at me with something between amusement and something deeper.

“You walk in there tomorrow and every assumption he’s made about you since the divorce — the helpless ex-wife, the woman with nothing — all of it falls apart in the time it takes him to look at your hand and see my ring.”

I think about walking into Dominic’s wedding. Not the woman he threw away. Not the ex-wife on the sidewalk while Camille closes the door.

A Carraway — a different one, the one he didn’t see coming.

“Let’s ruin his damned wedding,” I say.

Nick looks at me from the other end of the couch with his feet touching mine and the pillow behind his head and the grin back on his face. “Now you sound like a Carraway.”