Nothing else there 8

Nick’s POV

Seventeen weeks. Twin boys.

I’m sitting in it trying to remember how to breathe while her hand is on her stomach.

She doesn’t know she’s doing it — or maybe she does and can’t stop. The way you can’t stop pressing a bruise to check if it still hurts. The gesture is so instinctive and so guarded that it makes my chest do something I haven’t let it do in thirteen years.

“Does Dominic know?” I ask.

“No.” Her voice is flat. Practiced.

The voice of a woman who has already run every version of this conversation in her head and come out losing in all of them.

“If I tell him, he gets what he always wanted. He’ll delay the divorce, wait for the boys to be born, and take them the way he’s taking Lily. I’ll lose all three.”

I look at my hands because if I look at her face I’m going to say something I can’t take back.

My brother. My blood. The man who spent twelve years demanding a son, who treated every miscarriage like a failed projection, who blamed her body the way you’d blame a machine that stopped producing.

And now she’s seventeen weeks pregnant with two boys and she can’t tell him because telling him doesn’t save her. It gives him more to take.

He was handed her. This woman — brilliant, warm, the kind of person who fills a room just by laughing in it — and he spent thirteen years sanding her down to nothing.

The logic is airtight. It makes me want to flip the table.

“He had you,” I say quietly, too quietly perhaps. “He had all of that. And he…” I stop. Breathe.

The sentence I want to finish is not one she needs to hear right now. Not in this restaurant. Not from her husband’s brother.

Not when she’s looking at me with those eyes. The same brown eyes from the elevator thirteen years ago, except everything behind them has been gutted and rebuilt into something careful and wary and half-alive.

The elevator. I haven’t thought about it in weeks, which is a lie I tell myself because I think about it constantly.

She was twenty years old, laughing at something a colleague said — head back, full-throated, the kind of laugh that doesn’t perform anything. The sound hit me like a fist to the sternum.

I spent two months finding reasons to be on her floor.

Delivering documents that could have been emailed. Asking questions I already had answers to. Timing my coffee runs to hers like a man building a schedule around a woman he couldn’t bring himself to speak to.

I never said a word. Then Dominic walked into that same elevator and did in fifteen seconds what I couldn’t do in sixty days — took her attention, held it, made her feel seen.

He was always faster. Always more certain. Always willing to reach for what he wanted without calculating the cost to anyone else.

I flew to Sydney two months before their wedding. Told everyone it was the job.

What it really was is the impossibility of watching her marry him, smile at him across a dinner table, knowing that she can’t be mine anymore.

Thirteen years. No serious relationship. Women who were smart, beautiful, kind — and none of them were her. I stopped pretending that was a coincidence around year four.

And now she’s sitting across from me. Pregnant and alone, and the version of Aria I’ve carried in my chest, that I love — bright, quick, and full of a warmth that could fill a room — has been so thoroughly dismantled that even hoping has become something she does in hiding.

My brother had her. He had this extraordinary woman and he ground her down to someone who flinches when a man sits too close.

If she’d been mine, I would have spent every day making sure she never stopped laughing. She deserved that. She deserved everything he promised and none of what he delivered.

“Janet says the appeal needs evidence of changed circumstances,” she says. “Stable housing, valid income…” She turns the spoon in her soup without lifting it. “No one will hire me with a twelve year gap in resume and no proper education.”

She almost smiles and it cut me right above my heart.

“I can’t compete with him, Nick. He has the house, the money, the lawyers. I have nothing a judge would weigh against that.”

I’ve been running the math since the courtroom. Since watching my brother’s attorneys spend eleven minutes constructing the narrative that she is loving but insufficient while Dominic sat there calm as a man at a quarterly review.

The math has only one answer.

I’ve checked it from every angle. It’s insane. It’s the only move on the board.

“Marry me.”

Her hand stills on the table. Her face doesn’t change — she’s too trained for that, too many years of absorbing blows without flinching — but something behind her eyes shifts.

A door opening half an inch. Or closing. I can’t tell which.

“An arrangement if you wish, legal and strategic.” I lean forward, my voice low enough that no one can’t hear me proposing something that will detonate our entire family. “You become a Carraway again. With standing, resources, access to the company’s legal infrastructure. My lawyers become your lawyers. My position becomes your leverage.”

She’s watching me the way she watches everything — measuring, waiting for the trap. Thirteen years of Dominic have taught her that every hand extended comes with a contract attached.

“You get stable housing,” I say. “Income. A name the court already recognizes. You get what you need to fight for Lily.”

“And what do you get?”

I have a version that’s true enough to be convincing and false enough to protect the thing I will never say to her. That every move I’m making is for her.

That it has always been for her. That the revenge I want isn’t about the company.

It’s about the fact that my brother was handed a woman like Aria and took her apart piece by piece. That I left for the other side of the world because watching it happening in the real time, in front of me, was unbearable.

“Dominic has run the New York office like his personal kingdom for thirteen years,” I say. “I let him. A marriage to his ex-wife forces a confrontation I should have started a decade ago. It destabilizes his board relationships, his social standing, his whole narrative. It gives me leverage to restructure the company.”

She’s quiet for a long time. The restaurant moves around us.

“So this is about the company,” she says finally.

I hold her eyes. “This is about the fact that my brother has never once faced a consequence. And I’m tired of being the Carraway who let that happen.”

She looks at me, long and steady. Reading me the way she reads everyone — for the shift, the signal, the moment the mask slips. I let her look, I have nothing to hide except the one thing, and that one thing is buried so deep even I can’t reach it most days.

“I’ll think about it,” she says.

Well, that’s certainly better than simple ‘no’.