Nothing else there 17

The room is small — a side office, probably, with a desk pushed against the wall. Two chairs, a fern dying on the windowsill with brown tips and dry soil because someone forgot it was alive.

The nurse closes the door and the reception disappears into a muffled bass line and the clink of glasses through the wall.

Father sits in his wheelchair between us with his hands folded in his lap. The skin on them is thin, almost translucent, the veins underneath like a map of something winding down.

“I’ll be direct,” he says, and the effort of shifting in the wheelchair is visible — his hands gripping the armrests, his breath catching. “I don’t have time for anything else.”

He looks at Dominic, then at me. His eyes move between us with the same detached precision they had in the reception — a man reading the board before he makes his move.

“Your grandfather built this company, I kept it. One of you will inherit it.” He lets that land. “But the decision and our family’s tradition is that the full transfer goes to the first son who produces a male heir. That was Victor’s wish and I intend to honor it.”

I stare at the fern on the windowsill because looking at it is easier than looking at either of the men in this room.

“I’m dying. Months, not years,” he says. “So whatever you’re going to do… Do it soon.”

The bass line pulses through the wall as Benjamin folds his hands and waits the way he’s always waited. Like he’s given an order and the response is a formality, because the decision has already been made by the only person in the room who matters.

“I married a woman,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. “Not an incubator. I’m not participating in this… baby-maraphon.”

Benjamin looks at me with the tired patience of a man who has watched both his sons disappoint him in different ways for decades. He doesn’t argue. The will is the will — it doesn’t need his defense because it was written by a dead man and dead men don’t negotiate.

I look at Dominic who hasn’t said a word. His face is still — not shocked, not processing. The stillness of a man hearing something he already knows, and the realization hits me like a door swinging open into a room I should have walked into years ago.

“You knew… didn’t you?” I say.

He adjusts his cuff and his voice is flat. “Grandfather Victor told me something like that when I was a boy, but…”

“So that’s what it was about?” My voice is low but the edges are coming off. “The whole time with Aria? The son, the legacy, the pressure… three miscarriages with you standing there making her feel like a broken thing because she couldn’t produce what needed to win an inheritance?”

“It’s not that simple,” he says, his voice is level and I want to put my fist through it.

“It’s exactly that simple. You knew the rules and you played her like a piece on the board.” I can feel my hands shaking and I press them flat against the desk behind me. “When she couldn’t deliver you threw her out and got a newer model.”

His eyes move to mine, dark and flat. “Be careful, Nick.”

“How’s that going, by the way? The newer model.” I lean against the desk and hold his gaze. “Is she pregnant yet? Thought maybe that was the reason. but…”

His jaw tightens and the tightening is its own answer.

“The clock is ticking apparently,” I say. “Dad’s dying, Camille’s not pregnant. And your ex-wife just married your brother and now everyone at your own wedding reception knows about it.” I watch his face and I want him to feel every word. “Must be a tough night, huh?”

The door opens behind us and Camille stands in the doorway, slightly out of breath, scanning the room. The wheelchair, Benjamin, the two of us on opposite sides of a small space that feels smaller by the second.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” She reads the temperature, her eyes moving between us. “Guests are leaving, honey. Maybe we should—”

“Not now, Camille.” Dominic doesn’t look at her, and the dismissal is so automatic, so complete, that for a second I see Aria in her place.

A different woman in a different year being told the same thing in the same tone by the same man. She stays in the doorway, arms crossed, her face doing the recalculation.

“I’ll be outside then,” she says, and pulls the door shut. Her heels click down the hallway and fade.

Benjamin waves his hand. “I’ve said what I came to say. Take me back.”

I open the door for the nurse and she wheels him out. Dominic and I stand in the room with the dying fern and the muffled music and neither of us moves.

“Stay out of my way, Nick,” he says, and the words have the weight of something rehearsed, something he’s been carrying in his pocket all evening.

When he walks out, I’m alone with the bass line and the brown-tipped fern and the glass of water someone left on the desk. I pick it up and pour it into the pot. It’s probably too late but I do it anyway because someone should.

Aria is waiting near the entrance, her coat over her arm, her clutch held against her stomach the way she holds things when she’s bracing.

She straightens when she sees me. “What was that about?”

“Business stuff.” I take her coat and hold it open for her as she turns and slides her arms in. For a second my hands are near her shoulders and I can smell her hair. It makes my mouth water and I step back before I do something I can’t take back. “Let’s go home.”

Aria looks at me, reading me the way she reads everyone — checking whether the words and the face match.

She knows what it looks like when a man isn’t ready to talk because she’s had thirteen years of practice with a man who was never ready to talk. And the difference between me and him is that I’ll tell her everything eventually.

Just not tonight. Not with Benjamin’s voice still sitting in my skull like a verdict.

In the car she buckles her seatbelt and looks out the window while I start the engine and pull out. The city moves past us as I drive and we’re both quiet.

I can’t get Benjamin’s voice in that room from my head.

The first son who produces a male heir.

Dominic’s face when he heard them. The face of a man who’s known the rules his whole life.

Every demand for a son. Every miscarriage treated like equipment failure. Every cold calculation that wore Aria down to nothing… All of it in service of a clause in a dead man’s wishes.

I think about the twins. Two boys. Growing inside the woman sitting next to me with her hand resting on her stomach in the dark.

Dominic doesn’t know. But he’ll look. He’ll dig. He does not lose and he does not stop, and the thing he’s spent his entire life chasing is currently seventeen weeks along in the passenger seat of my car.

If he finds out, this stops being a custody fight and becomes a war.