Nothing else there 27

“How are you feeling?” Nick says, setting the mug in front of me the morning after Benjamin’s dinner.

The ceramic is warm under my palms and I wrap my fingers around it. “Like yesterday I spent forty-five minutes being vivisected across a dinner table? He stared at my stomach like he could see through skin if he just looked hard enough.”

“I know.” Nick leans against the counter with his own mug, and I watch the way his throat moves when he swallows. “He’s going to push. I mean legally, he’ll challenge it.”

“Dom can challenge whatever he wants,” I say, looking at him across the kitchen. “He’s not getting a paternity test.”

I mean it in a way I wouldn’t have meant it three months ago. Back when Dominic’s name alone could send me spiraling. Back before I knew what it felt like to be someone’s entire world instead of someone’s afterthought.

Nick watches me for a second, nods and doesn’t push. He picks up his coffee and drinks it standing the way he does every morning — feet bare, one ankle crossed over the other.

At the office I’m at my desk by nine — except I can’t get to my desk.

Three arrangements are covering it: white roses, peonies, and something exotic I don’t recognize. All of it draped over the keyboard, the monitor, the stack of files I left out yesterday. There’s a small and cream-colored card:

I made mistakes. Let me make them right. – D

The handwriting is careful and deliberate, feminine — he probably had his new assistant write it. I put the card in the trash and move the flowers to the conference table so I can reach my keyboard.

At ten-fifteen the elevator chimes and I hear footsteps on the marble.

I know those footsteps before I see him. The particular weight of a man who’s never been told no. The rhythm of someone who expects the world to rearrange itself around him like furniture.

Dominic stops at my desk in a dark suit with no tie. His collar is open. His eyes drift to the conference table where his roses are sitting and something crosses his face—satisfaction, like the first act went according to plan and now it’s time for the crescendo.

“You got them,” he says.

“They’re suffocating the conference table.” I don’t look up. “Your new wife might want them.”

“Did you read the card?”

“I read it.” I lean back in my chair and look at him. “Say what you came to say, Dominic and let’s get over it.”

He pulls a chair from the conference table and sits across from my desk, closer than he needs to be. The cologne is the same one he wore for thirteen years and the smell hits me in a place I didn’t know was still wired.

Not an old attraction or nostalgia, something more like a bruise being pressed.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said at dinner.” He folds his hands — the patient posture, the boardroom posture. “I don’t believe it, the timing doesn’t work. You were my wife, Nick was in Sydney until September, I know that.” He tilts his head. “The math doesn’t add up, Aria.”

His voice drops into the register I know from late nights when he wanted something and wore patience like a suit.

“If those boys are mine, I have a right to know. As their real father.”

I look at his hands folded on my desk. The same hands that signed divorce papers without watching. The same hands that scrolled through emails while Lily sobbed in the hallway begging him to say goodnight.

The same hands that never once reached for me the way Nick’s do. Like I’m something precious instead of something convenient. Now they’re folded neatly between twenty hundred dollars worth of flowers and an apology he had someone else write.

“You had twelve years to be a father, Dominic.” I keep my voice steady. “You weren’t interested, ever.”

“People change,” he says, and his face does the thing it does when he’s performing sincerity — the slight softening around the mouth, the eyes going warm. “I’m ready to be different now.”

“Yeah. But you don’t. So from now on, you can go back to your floor, deal with your acquisitions and your meetings and your nineteen-year-old wife, and never come back here unless it’s about work.”

He’s quiet and his jaw moves once. Then he stands straightening his jacket and touches one of the peonies on the conference table on his way past. A small proprietary gesture, like he’s checking on an investment.

“I’ll be in touch,” he says finally and walks to the elevator without looking back.

I sit at my desk with my hands steady and my heart hammering.

At eleven the elevator chimes again — I hear heels this time, fast and sharp — and Camille rounds the corner. She stops when she sees the flowers on the conference table.

God, when will they stop wandering on this floor of the building?

“Those are from Dom?” she says, her eyes narrowing. “I know this flower shop.”

“They are.” I keep typing without glancing at her.

“He sent you flowers?” She walks to the conference table and fishes the card from the trash, reading it aloud and flat: “I made mistakes. Let me make them right.” She then looks at me and drops the card. “You’re unbelievable…”

“I didn’t ask for them, Camille.”

“You didn’t have to.” Her hands are shaking and she can’t hide it. “This is what you do — you sit there looking helpless and tragic and vulnerable so men orbit around you.”

“You’ve found the card in the trash, if you didn’t mention that. Stop making a scene.”

“But you kept the flowers!” She steps closer, her perfume strong with vanilla and coconut. “The pregnancy, the timing, the dinner… You’re trying to steal my husband!”

“Your husband was mine for thirteen years.” I stand up because I am done sitting while someone towers over me. “I’m not trying to steal anything. Especially someone like him.”

“Those babies are his, aren’t they?” Her voice is rising, her composure cracking. “You got pregnant on purpose so you’d have leverage—”

“Camille.” I pick up the nearest arrangement — white roses, heavy, water dripping from the base — and hold it out to her. “I didn’t get pregnant on purpose. I didn’t ask for flowers. I didn’t ask your husband to come to my desk and play concerned father after twelve years of treating his daughter like an inconvenience.”

She stares at the roses in my hands, water dripping onto the floor between us.

“Take them. They’re yours.” I hold her eyes. “Everything he’s giving me right now is because he wants something. You should know how that works — it’s exactly how he got you.”

Her mouth opens and closes and she doesn’t take them.

I set the roses on the conference table and sit back down and turn to my screen. She stands there for another ten seconds before turning and walking back to the elevator. Then finally the doors close and the floor goes quiet.

Nick’s office door opens and he leans against the frame. “I heard most of that.”

“I know — your door is thin.” I look at the peonies wilting on the conference table. “He’s not sending flowers because he wants me back. He’s sending them because he wants the twins.”

“I know,” Nick says, and his voice is quiet and steady.

“And now this girl Camille is going to make my life difficult because she thinks I’m a threat, isn’t she?”

“You are a threat,” he says, but he’s not smiling.

I know he means it differently than Camille does. And the way he says it makes me feel less like a target and more like a force.

“Take the flowers home,” he says after a moment. “Lily will like them.”