Nothing else there 11

Aria’s POV

The next morning the ceiling I’m waking up under is wrong, and for a few seconds I just lie there.

Trying to assemble the room around me from pieces that don’t fit. Then it comes back. The apartment. The registry office. Nick’s signature underneath mine on a form neither of us will frame.

My whole life turned over like a card in a deck and I’m still not sure whether what’s showing is better than what was hiding.

Something smells like coffee and eggs, and my body reacts before my brain does — a tightening in my chest, because in Dominic’s house coffee meant a machine on a timer. Nobody made it for anyone.

I get up and pull on the oversized sweater I’ve been sleeping in, push my hair back with both hands. The hallway is long — fifteen steps until I can finally see into the kitchen.

Nick is at the stove with his back to me. Gray t-shirt, sweatpants sitting low on his hips. No shoes — bare feet on the cold tile, utterly unbothered by it, a dish towel slung over one shoulder.

He’s cooking eggs in a pan I know we didn’t have yesterday.

Which means he was up before me. Went out. Bought a pan, eggs, bread, and whatever else is quietly appearing in the previously bare cabinets like evidence of someone deciding to stay.

Nobody has bought me breakfast since… I can remember.

He reaches up for something in the cabinet above the stove and his t-shirt rides up and pulls taut across the width of his shoulders, and I… Notice.

Against my will. Without my permission. My eyes move across the lines of him before I can redirect them, registering things I have absolutely no business registering at 7AM in yesterday’s sweater.

Not the gym-built kind of body Dominic maintained like another line item on his asset sheet. Something quieter than that, leaner but more real. The shoulders of a man who carries his own luggage and has never once thought about who’s watching.

Heat crawls up the back of my neck without warning as I sit down and look at the table.

“Morning,” he says, and his voice is easy, unhurried.

“Morning,” I says trying not to look at him.

There’s a mug at my spot — coffee, pale with milk, the precise barely-there shade I mentioned once before. I’m almost certain I said it the way you say things you never expect anyone to actually retain. A throwaway detail. Background noise.

But he remembered it.

He slides eggs onto a plate and sets it between us, fork on each side, and sits down across from me like this is something we’ve been doing for years.

“You didn’t have to do this,” I say, wrapping both hands around the mug — a deflection dressed as gratitude. “We’re spouses on paper.”

Something moves across his face. “We’re friends too, aren’t we?”

I turn the question over, testing its edges. Are we?

I know the shape of Nick Carraway from thirteen years ago. Careful, polite, the brand of kind that doesn’t perform itself for an audience. But my read on men has a credibility problem these days.

Because I spent twelve years being confidently wrong about one of them.

“Maybe,” I say.

He accepts that without pushing. Goes back to his eggs.

I drink the coffee and it’s good — genuinely good coffee made by a person who was thinking about how I’d drink it. I can feel something in my chest doing a slow, complicated thing I’m not equipped to name before my first cup.

But after that first morning, the strange thing is that it keeps happening.

The second morning the coffee is already made, same mug, same spot. He’s on the couch with a paperback, feet on the cushion.

He looks up when he hears me — something in his face like a quiet registration that I exist and he’s glad about it — and goes back to his book.

In Dominic’s house mornings had a schedule. His alarm at five-thirty, the shower for exactly eight minutes, his shoes on the hardwood, the briefcase clasp, the front door.

If I came downstairs before he left he’d kiss my forehead without stopping. If I didn’t he wouldn’t notice. The kitchen was enormous and always silent and I’d stand at the island and listen to the garage door close. Then the house would be mine, which meant it would be empty.

Here, someone is turning pages on the couch ten feet away from me, and I keep noticing it.

On the second night I walk past the bathroom and the door is open. His toothbrush is sitting on the edge of the sink, bristles still damp, and I stop looking at it. It’s just a toothbrush, I don’t know why seeing it makes my chest feel strange. But I stand there for a few seconds before I keep walking.

He doesn’t comment when I eat standing up at the counter. Doesn’t say anything when I wash my mug the second I finish my coffee or when I fold the dish towel into thirds and hang it precisely over the oven handle.

One morning I leave my shoes by the front door instead of the closet and spend twenty minutes waiting for him to mention it. He steps over them on his way out, steps over them again when he comes back.

I keep waiting. He keeps not saying anything.

On the third evening we’re at the kitchen table with our laptops. The apartment is quiet except for the sound of typing and the fridge cycling on.

“Lily’s teacher called yesterday,” I say, and I can hear myself testing the air, feeling for whether this is the kind of thing I’m allowed to talk about here. “Mrs. Henley. She said Lily’s been asking to eat lunch in the classroom instead of the cafeteria.”

Nick looks up from his screen, and his full attention has a specific quality I’ve started to recognize. Not the performed focus of someone waiting for their turn to speak, but something actual and unhurried and completely on you.

It does things to my concentration.

“She said Lily told her the cafeteria is too loud.” I pick at the corner of my laptop. “But she’s not… Lily’s never been noise-sensitive. She is the noise. She’s the kid who walks into a room and…” I stop, because the reflex is automatic, the instinct to edit myself mid-sentence before I take up too much space. “Sorry. You don’t need the whole…”

“What else did the teacher say?” He closes his laptop. Full stop.

Hands flat on the table, attention undivided, like I’ve said the most important thing in the room and everything else can wait.

My throat tightens without warning.

“She’s withdrawing,” I say. “Not talking to her friends. Eating alone. Mrs. Henley thinks it’s the divorce, which…” A short sound that doesn’t make it all the way to a laugh. “Obviously it’s the divorce. But hearing someone else say it out loud makes it a different kind of real. Like it stops being something that happened to me and becomes something that happened to her.”

He doesn’t tell me it’ll be fine. Doesn’t tell me kids are resilient. He just sits there with his laptop closed and his hands on the table and lets the sentence exist without trying to fix it.

The silence is so clean it almost hurts more than words would.

“She used to be the loudest kid in any room,” I say after a while. “You wouldn’t know it, but she was.”

“I believe it,” he says, and the way he says it — like he can see it, like he’s already imagining her that way — makes my throat tight.

That night I walk down the hallway to my room and reach for the lock, my hand going there on its own the way it goes there every night. My fingers touch the metal and I stand there for a second, before I pull my hand back and leave it unlocked.

I lie in the dark listening to the apartment, and after a while I hear him in the kitchen, running water, putting a glass in the rack.

The next morning he’s at the counter with coffee again and I pour mine sitting down with the mug is warm in my hands.

“Tomorrow’s my weekend,” I say. “I’m picking Lily up.”

He nods and sets his mug down. “Do you want me to be here? Or would you rather have the day just the two of you?”

“Why are you asking?”

The question comes out sharper than I intended, more suspicious, because I’m still not used to being asked instead of told.

“Because it’s your call,” he says, standing at the counter waiting for an answer.

I realize he’s actually going to do whatever I say. Not because he doesn’t care but because he thinks it’s my decision to make. And the simplicity of that, the ordinary kindness of it, lands somewhere in my chest that I thought Dominic had sealed shut years ago.

“Stay,” I say, looking back at the window. “She should see someone else lives here. That it’s a real place.” That I’m not alone. “That it’s real.”