Nothing else there 10

Nick’s POV

We look like two people who forgot what they were running when they left the house.

Which is accurate, technically. Except the errand is a marriage and neither of us has said that word out loud since we got in the car. Like naming it might make it real in a way the paperwork won’t.

Aria is sitting beside me filling out forms.

I watch her write her name at the top of the form and something in my chest does the thing it’s been doing since yesterday — that low, persistent pull, like a current running under the surface of everything.

Aria Carraway. Thirteen years she’s carried that name.

In about twenty minutes she’ll carry it again. Different reasons, different Carraway, and I genuinely cannot tell if that’s the universe being poetic or just deeply, cosmically cruel.

Probably both. The universe has never been particularly gentle with either of us.

Her pen pauses over a line. I glance sideways — just date of birth, she’s fine — but the pause makes me look at her profile.

The line of her jaw, the slope of her nose, the way her half-dried hair keeps falling forward. How she keeps pushing it back with this absent, automatic gesture like she doesn’t even know she’s doing it.

She doesn’t know she does most of the things that are quietly taking me apart.

The hand on her stomach, for instance.

She’s done it four times since we left the hotel. This unconscious press of her palm below her navel and every single time it happens something in my ribcage responds with a force that bypasses rational thought entirely.

Two lives she’s protecting with that gesture. Two lives that don’t know yet through what their mother went through to fight for them.

When everything was settled and signed, we stepped outside and the October cold hit us both at once.

“So.” She’s still squinting, not looking at me. “That happened.”

“That happened.”

The laugh that escapes her is short and slightly helpless and hits me directly in the chest, because there it is. There it is. Thirteen years older and still the same — unguarded and real and not performing anything for anyone.

God, I’ve missed that laugh.

After another awkward minute of silence, I drive her to her hotel room to get her things and then to the apartment I leased three days ago in both our names. Three bedrooms, a kitchen with good light, a view of nothing in particular.

The third bedroom I’ve already been thinking of as Lily’s. I bought the bedframe yesterday and spent an hour on the phone with a woman at a furniture store asking what color twelve-year-old girls like. Apparently it’s purple.

I haven’t told Aria any of this.

She walks through the space slowly, running her hand along the kitchen counter, opening cabinets and closing them, checking the stove knobs. Turns the faucet on, lets it run, turns it off.

I lean against the doorframe and watch her move through every room like someone pressing on the walls to make sure the whole thing doesn’t give.

She stops in the middle of the living room, arms crossed. “It’s clean.”

“Furnished it this morning. Wasn’t much time.”

“No, I mean…” She shakes her head. “It’s clean. There’s nothing in it.”

I know what she means. The absence of someone else’s life pressed into the walls. No residue. No furniture that was chosen to impress. No décor that was really just territory marked. Just… space.

Clean and unoccupied and hers to fill however she wants.

It makes my throat do something I don’t let reach my face.

“I know one place two blocks east,” I say, pushing off the doorframe. “I was thinking takeout tonight.”

The reflex is immediate — I saw that. Her mouth opens, as if ‘I’ll cook’ was already halfway out before she catches it. Something flickers across her face. Recognition, maybe. The awareness of an instinct trained into her by years of making herself useful before anyone could decide she wasn’t.

I wait.

“Takeout,” she says instead, and the word costs her something small that she doesn’t show. “Yeah. Okay.”

We ordered Thai and she ate more than I expected — green curry, most of the rice, two spring rolls.

I eat across from her at the kitchen table that still has the price sticker on the underside of the leg. She peels it off while chewing and sticks it to the edge of her plate without looking at it.

I almost say something about how she just decorated our first piece of furniture but I don’t because it’s the first thing she’s done in this apartment that isn’t careful.

She tells me about Janet’s filing and Dominic’s lawyers, her voice getting harder as she talks. Then she presses her fingers against her eyes.

“I need to know what happens when this gets ugly. Because it will.” She drops her hands and looks at me across the table. “And I need to know you’re not going to decide it’s not worth the trouble and fly back to Sydney.”

The kitchen is quiet except for the fridge and a siren passing somewhere below us.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I say.

“People say that.” The way she says it — flat, almost gentle, like she’s not even angry about it anymore, just reporting observed data — hits harder than anger would have.

I know who she’s thinking about. The man who said ‘I promise’ with his hands on her face and his mouth against her temple, and meant it for approximately as long as it was convenient.

“I know they do,” I say, and I hold her eyes.

I don’t look away and I don’t add anything because the only thing I could add is the truth.

But the truth is enormous and we are sitting in a kitchen with Thai food containers between us, and she married me nine hours ago, and some things need to stay buried until the timing is something other than catastrophic.

She looks at me for a long moment. Reading, always reading — for the tell, the slip, the place where the surface stops matching what’s underneath.

I let her look.

“Thank you,” she says after a while, quiet. “For all of it. I know this isn’t small.”

“It’s a lease and some paperwork,” I say, which is a lie so large it should be visible from space.

“I mean it.” Her eyes drop to the table. “I’m not… I’m not good at this part anymore. Asking for things, letting people…” She stops, her jaw works once. “He made sure of that.”

Under the table my thumb grinds into my knuckle until the joint goes white.

Nine years. Nine years in Sydney while he systematically took the woman who got her grip on my heart and sanded her down to someone who apologizes for needing things.

I knew what my brother actually was and I left anyway.

That’s the part I don’t get to be forgiven for.

After a while she stands and picks up her plate, then mine. I reach for them and she pulls them back with a short, “I’ve got it,” and a firmness that isn’t about dishes.

So I sit.

She washes them at the sink, her back to me, each plate rinsed twice and set in the rack with careful precision. My jaw tightens watching it — the way she’s still braced even now, even here, even when there’s nobody left to brace for.

It’s going to take time, I think. For her hands to learn no one in this apartment is inspecting.

She dries her hands. Hangs the towel over the oven handle just so. Stands there for a second with her back to me, and I watch her take one slow breath in, hold it, let it go.

Her shoulders rising and dropping with it like she’s putting something down. “Goodnight, Nick.”

“Goodnight.”

I let her walk down the hall. Let her go because that’s the only thing I can offer right now that means anything — the space, the lack of pressure. I hear her bedroom door close. Then the lock — soft, automatic, a sound she probably doesn’t even know she made.

I sit at the kitchen table in the quiet dark and don’t move. Just sit with the weight of this particular Tuesday pressing down on my chest.

She doesn’t know I’ve been writing hers in the margins of everything for years.

She doesn’t know about the purple bedframe down the hall.

She doesn’t know that I’m not here for the leverage, or the company, or the deeply satisfying prospect of detonating Dominic’s narrative from the inside — though all of that is real.

She doesn’t know that I’ve been in love with her. That I flew to the other side of the world because almost was more than I could stand. That every version of my life I’ve tried to build since has been haunted by the sound of her voice.