Nothing else there 6

The guest room bed is narrow and the sheets smell like lavender sachets from Dominic’s mother’s linen closet.

I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, listening to Camille’s blender through the floor. A sound like gravel being processed, and I wait until it stops before I go downstairs. We’ve developed a choreography, she and I, that requires never occupying the same room at the same time.

She uses the kitchen from six to seven-thirty. I use it after. We don’t speak, and when we pass in the hallway she looks through me the way you’d look through a window that needs cleaning.

Once she left her makeup bag on the bathroom counter — the one I share with Lily — and when I moved it she texted Dominic about boundaries.

Through the guest room window I watch Lily walk to the bus stop at eight — backpack, jacket, the slow walk she does now instead of the run she used to do. She doesn’t run anymore.

The house empties by nine and I sit on the guest room bed with my phone, start making calls.

The legal aid hotline picks up on the fourth ring.

A woman with a tired voice tells me I qualify for representation but the earliest appointment is three weeks. When I say “three weeks?” the silence on her end has the particular texture of someone who hears that reaction forty times a day and has stopped being able to do anything about it.

I call the workforce center and when a counselor named Diane asks about my employment history the pause that follows after I told her is the loudest thing I’ve heard all morning.

“A twelve-year gap makes placement challenging,” she says, and I can hear her pen stop moving. “Any recent certifications? Volunteer work?”

“No. I was a housewife.”

She gives me a website and wishes me luck in a voice that sounds like goodbye. I sit there for hours scrolling through job listings that feel like a language I spoke in a country I left a long time ago.

My phone buzzes at noon and Dominic’s voice brisk — the register he uses for things beneath his schedule. “I need you in my office and sign the preliminary documents. Four o’clock.”

“I haven’t agreed to your terms,” I say, and my hand is gripping the phone so hard the case digs into my palm.

“The terms are not negotiable. Four o’clock, Aria.” The line goes dead.

The irritation I felt during the ride to his company could power a small city and the will I put into making my hand not to tremble with rage is pretty impressive.

The Carraway Group building is glass and steel and the hush of money.

I remember how I walked through these doors at twenty years old carrying files in shoes that hurt my feet because they were the only heels I owned.

At twenty-third floor I step out of the elevator and nearly walk into a man carrying a coffee and a passport wallet. Something in my chest moves before my brain has time to tell me who I’m looking at.

Taller than I remember, sun-darkened, his hair streaked from years of weather that doesn’t belong to New York. He’s wearing a jacket that’s expensive but traveled in — wrinkled at the elbows, collar bent.

Nick Carraway. Dominic’s younger brother.

He left for Sydney long before Lily was born and the last time I saw him was when Dominic proposed to me, standing nearby. He didn’t make it to our wedding.

I knew him before I knew Dominic. Nick was the quiet one, three floors above me during my internship.

Showing up in the elevator with documents that could have been emailed, or asking about my weekend in a voice so careful I thought he was just polite. He held an elevator door for me once for forty-five seconds while I ran down the hallway with files.

He was always kind and reverent to me, though sometimes I saw something else behind his professional behavior. Or maybe I’ve just imagined that and saw what I wanted to see.

Maybe I wanted to see the interest. The one that would mirror my own back in those.

We would talk, have lunch together from time to time, laugh at silly jokes and judge the office’s coffee machine. His smile used to make a heat coil in my stomach, making me wait for the break time just to see him. To talk to him. But there was nothing else.

No dinners. No dates. No touches. No attention above colleagues.

Then I got assigned as Dominic’s assistant and he did in one week what Nick hadn’t done in two months. Showed me his interest, asked me to dinner, was attentive and sweet and romantic even if in the shadows at first.

Nick did nothing about that. And it became my confirmation that whatever I ever felt for him wasn’t mutual. Never could be.

“Aria.” Nick says my name carefully, like a word he hasn’t used in a long time. “I didn’t know you’d be here. How are you?”

“Signing divorce papers,” I say flatly.

Something crosses his face — not surprise, a dark flicker of confirmation.

“So you finally realized my brother is a bastard,” he says, and his hand tightens on the coffee cup.

“Actually, he’s the one divorcing me.”

The flicker dies and his expression hardens into something I’ve never seen on a Carraway face — not calculation, not management, just anger with no strategy behind it.

The elevator behind us chimes and Dominic steps out, his stride breaking for half a second before the composure slides back.

“Nick! Sydney letting you out for good behavior?” He claps his brother’s shoulder with a warm smile that means nothing. “How long are you in town?”

“Regulatory matter,” Nick says. “Signatures.”

“Good.” Dominic turns to me — brother to appointment, seamless. “You’re here. Let’s get this done.”

At the conference room, his attorney walks me through each section and I read the word visitation several times but the letters don’t change.

I sign with a pen that’s heavy and expensive and Dominic doesn’t watch. When I finish the last page he glances up from his phone the way you check whether a download is complete.

“Good. I’ll have copies sent to your…” He pauses, realizing he doesn’t know if I even have a lawyer. “I’ll have copies sent.”

I walk out into the quiet hallway and Nick is leaning against the wall outside the conference room, and he straightens when he sees my face because he can tell without asking.

“When’s the custody hearing?” he says, his jaw tightening.

“Tomorrow,” I say, and the coffee is still in his hand and he hasn’t taken a sip.

“I’ll be there,” he says, and I tell him he doesn’t have to and he says “I know” and holds my eyes.

I look at this man standing in the hallway of his brother’s building offering to show up at a hearing he has no part in. For a woman he hasn’t spoken to in over a decade, and I see the same thing I saw before.

The thing I told myself was the light, except it wasn’t the light and I think I’ve always known that.