Nothing else there 28

We drive home from the office and the car smells like peonies. Three stems for Lily, wrapped in damp paper towel on the backseat. The rest I left for the cleaning crew to deal with.

Nick glances at them in the rearview mirror.

“She’s going to put those in every glass we own.”

“As long as she doesn’t ask where they came from.”

He’s quiet for a block. “You handled Camille well today.”

“I handed her flowers like a delivery person.”

“It’s more than that.” He reaches across the console and squeezes my hand once before letting go, and the squeeze says more than the sentence did.

At home I put the peonies in a jar on Lily’s desk and Nick heats the pasta. We eat at the kitchen table with the day sitting between us, neither of us brings it up because we’ve earned the quiet.

The next afternoon Nick leaves for a meeting downtown. He kisses me on the way out and the apartment feels different without him, emptier in a way it didn’t used to.

While Lily is at a friend’s house until tomorrow, I sit on the couch with Janet’s latest filing on my laptop. At five-thirty the buzzer goes and Dominic’s voice comes through the intercom: “It’s me. I need five minutes.”

I should say no. I should say call my lawyer. I buzz him up because part of me wants to watch him stand in the rooms Nick built and understand what he lost.

He comes through the door in a cashmere coat and no briefcase — hands empty, which is deliberate, because Dominic never arrives without an agenda unless he wants you to think he doesn’t have one. He looks around the apartment, the bookshelves Nick built, Lily’s shoes by the door, and says “It’s smaller than I expected” — a measurement, a verdict.

“What do you want, Dominic?”

He sits on the arm of the couch — not the seat, the arm, high ground, looking down — and the positioning is so familiar it makes my skin crawl because this is the geometry of every conversation we ever had in his house. I close the laptop and stand up so he can’t look down at me anymore.

“I miss you,” he says, and the words hang in the apartment like something that doesn’t belong here — like his cologne filling a room that smells like Nick’s coffee and Lily’s shampoo.

“Looking at you at that dinner — you were glowing.” He takes a step closer. “I realized what I lost.”

“You didn’t lose me, Dominic.” I hold my ground. “You threw me out.”

“I’m here now,” he says, his voice dropping into the softness he used in the early years. “No lawyers. Just me, asking if there’s anything left.”

I look at his face — thirteen years I studied it, every micro-expression, every carefully arranged display of feeling. I used to think I couldn’t read him. I can read him perfectly. I just didn’t want to believe what the reading said.

“There’s nothing left,” I say.

He steps closer and his hand comes up and his fingers touch my jaw, light and careful, the touch he used when he was still building the cage and calling it a home. “I think about you every day.”

“What we had was you controlling every part of my life while I said thank you.” I hold his eyes. “Don’t touch me.”

His hand stays on my jaw. His eyes drop to my mouth and he leans forward and I say “Dominic, don’t” and he kisses me anyway — his mouth on mine, his hand on my face — and every cell in my body recoils. I put both hands on his chest and push hard and he steps back and I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Get out of my house.”

The front door opens.

Nick is standing in the doorway with keys in hand and his eyes move across the room in the order they always move — me first, then the rest. He sees my face. He sees Dominic standing too close with his hand still raised. He sees me wiping my mouth.

The keys hit the shelf and he doesn’t say a word. He crosses the apartment in four steps and his fist connects with Dominic’s jaw — the sound thick and short, bone against bone — and Dominic staggers back into the kitchen island and a glass falls off the counter and shatters.

Nick grabs Dominic by the collar of his cashmere coat and pulls him upright and hits him again and Dominic’s head snaps sideways and blood appears at the corner of his mouth.

“She said don’t touch her.” Nick’s voice is low and even and that’s what makes it terrifying — not the volume, the control. “She said get out.”

Dominic steadies himself against the island, blood on his lip, and his face has finally cracked — not the boardroom composure, not the calculated warmth, something underneath, something ugly and cornered.

“You’re making a mistake,” he says, his voice thick through the blood. “Both of you.”

Nick pulls him toward the door and Dominic stumbles and catches himself and Nick lets go and opens the door and says “Get out” with the quiet finality of a man who will not say it again.

Dominic straightens his coat and touches the blood on his lip and looks at it on his fingers, then looks at me across the room where I’m standing by the counter with my hands on my stomach.

“Those are my sons,” he says. “And I will prove it.”

Nick closes the door and locks it and stands with his back against it, breathing. Then he turns and crosses the room to me and his hands find my face — the same gesture Dominic made two minutes ago except nothing about it is the same because his fingers are shaking and there’s blood on his knuckles smearing against my cheek and I don’t care.

“Are you okay?” His voice is rough and cracked. “Did he hurt you?”

“No. He kissed me and I pushed him off.”

“I should have been here,” he says, and his jaw is tight and I can see the guilt already building behind his eyes.

“You’re here now,” I say, and I put my hands over his where they’re holding my face.

He presses his forehead against mine and his breathing slows and we stand there with glass shattered on the kitchen floor and Dominic’s blood on the island and his cologne in the air that will take hours to clear.

I pull his hand from my face and look at the knuckles — split across two fingers, already swelling. “You need ice,” I say.

“Aria—”

“You need ice, Nick,” I say, and I pull him to the kitchen table and he sits down and I wrap ice in a dish towel and hold it against his knuckles the way you hold something broken, carefully, with both hands.

His other hand finds my stomach and rests there, and the twins kick against his palm.

“He’ll come back,” I say, pressing the ice against the split skin. “And he’ll bring lawyers.”

“I know,” he says, and his thumb moves on my stomach the way it always moves — slow, gentle, a circle that means I’m here.

“Are you scared?” I ask, looking at his face — his steady eyes, his set jaw, his brother’s blood drying on his hand.

“No,” he says. “Are you?”

I press the ice against his knuckles and the twins kick against his other palm and the apartment is quiet except for us.

“No,” I say, and I mean it — not the way I used to mean it when I said it to survive, but the way you mean it when you’ve stopped being afraid and the not-being-afraid is so new it still surprises you.