Nothing else there 2

I don’t remember running away from the office. I don’t remember driving home.

The ride is a blank — my hands must have steered, my feet must have worked the pedals. The only thing I carry from the parking garage to the front door is the sound of his voice.

Aria. That’s not what you think.

I’m in the bedroom now with the closet open, pulling clothes off hangers and shoving them into the suitcase we bought for our honeymoon. My face is wet but my hands know what they’re doing. Every blouse I fold is a sentence.

I am leaving. I am leaving. I am leaving.

The tissue-wrapped test is still in my coat pocket on the chair. I can’t think about it right now. If I think about it I’ll stop packing, and if I stop packing I’ll stay, and if I stay I’ll become someone I don’t want to meet.

The front door opens downstairs and I hear his footsteps on the stairs, unhurried and measured. He appears in the doorway and leans against the frame.

“Aria, baby. Please, stop.” His voice goes to the soft place. The one that’s always made me feel like the only person in the room. “Let’s talk about this.”

I don’t stop, my hands keep moving. A sweater. The dress I wore to his Christmas party. The fabric blurs.

“She means nothing.” He takes a step into the room. “It was just… nothing. You are my wife, Aria. I love you, only you.”

His hand reaches for my arm and I pull it back so hard the hanger clatters between us. “Don’t touch me.”

“Okay.” Palms up, patient. So goddamn patient! “I won’t touch you. But I need you to listen.”

“I just watched a woman button her blouse in your office, Dominic. After you kissed her on your desk. I think I’ve seen enough.”

“It was a mistake. A stupid, meaningless—”

“Don’t you dare call it meaningless while her lipstick is still on your collar!”

He goes quiet while studies me. And then his voice changes as he speaks again — drops to something softer, sadder even. Like what he’s about to say costs him. “Aria. Where would you even go?”

The question lands like a hand on my chest.

“Your mother’s apartment?” He tilts his head, and his eyes are so full of concern it makes my skin crawl because I can’t tell if it’s real. “The old couch? The heating that barely works?” He takes a step closer. “I’m not asking to be cruel. I’m asking because I love you and I need you to think clearly about what you’re doing right now.”

My hands are shaking so hard the zipper won’t close.

He’s not wrong. I have nothing. No job. No money. No apartment with my name on the lease. I left everything when I married him because he promised and gave me more than that.

“I built this for you. For us.” His voice is still low but the softness is thinning. “This house. The clothes on your back. The jewelry and diamonds. Everything you never had growing up… I gave you that. Every single piece of it.”

“And now you’re throwing it in my face?”

“I’m just stating a fact, baby. I’ve given you everything. And you want to pack a suitcase at midnight because of one mistake?”

“One mistake.” I slam the suitcase lid down, voice rising. “You were with another woman. She knew my name, she knew you have a wife, Dominic — she pitied me. How many times has this happened? How many nights you came home late, how many business trips…”

“Lower your voice, dear.”

His patience is wearing through now, and something harder showing underneath — the boardroom voice, the one I’ve heard through closed doors. But I don’t care.

“No.” The word comes out raw and I don’t recognize the sound of it. “No, I will not lower my voice. I left everything for you! My job, my independence. My entire life before you existed. I didn’t keep my friends because you said we didn’t need anyone else. You said that. You looked me in the eye on our wedding day and told me I was enough—”

“You are enough.”

“Then why was she on your desk?”

My voice breaks and the break makes me angrier. Because I don’t want to crack in front of him, not now. Not when I need every piece of myself to stay standing.

“Why was she there? Why was I at home like an idiot making dinner and waiting for you to come home while you… While she was sitting where I used to sit, while you—”

“Aria, enough.”

“While I’m pregnant!”

The words rip out of me with a broken cry before I can catch them. Not planned. Not rehearsed. Just the one true thing left in my body, tearing free because I’ve run out of room to hold it and everything else at the same time.

The room goes still. Like the air itself stops moving.

I watch it happen on his face. The hardness dissolves as his eyes fall to my stomach. His lips part. His hands, which were half-raised in argument a second ago, lower slowly to his sides.

“A baby?” His voice is different now, much softer. He crosses the room and his hands find my shoulders, so gentle it makes my throat close, because I haven’t been touched like this in weeks. “Our baby, Aria….”

His voice cracks on my name, and I can’t tell if it’s real or performance.

“That’s how you treat your pregnant wife?” I don’t pull away but I don’t lean in. “That’s what you do while I’m carrying your child?”

His jaw tightens as his hands move to my face, thumbs on my cheekbones, tilting me toward him.

“I didn’t know. I swear to you, if I had known… This changes everything. Everything.” He pulls me against his chest and I have no more power to resist. “I was stupid. I’m so sorry, baby. So fucking sorry. I promise, I’ll spend the rest of my life making it right for you. For you and for our son.”

His hands drop from my face to my stomach. And there it is.

The reverence in his fingers. The baby is what changed his face. Not my tears. Not the suitcase. Not the woman standing in front of him with mascara on her cheeks. The baby. I could be anyone. I could be a stranger. As long as I’m carrying what he wants, his hands would hold me exactly this way.

But his arms are around me and his voice is in my hair and he’s describing our future — the nursery, the family, the name we’ll choose — and every word is warm and every word is a door closing so softly I can barely hear the lock turn.

He talks about the color of the nursery walls. He talks about how he’ll teach our child to swim. He talks like he’s already built the next thirty years and I’m standing inside them.

He guides me to the edge of the bed. I sit. He lowers himself beside me and puts his arm around my shoulders. I’m exhausted. I’m pregnant. And I have nowhere to go that doesn’t look like my childhood.

I don’t take his arm away.

“I promise,” he says. His mouth against my temple. His hand still on my stomach. “I’ll make everything right. I’m going to be the best father this child has ever seen.”

I want to believe him. So I do.