Nothing else there 9

Aria’s POV

At three in the morning the hotel ceiling has a water stain shaped like something I keep almost recognizing and then losing.

I’ve been staring at it for two hours, turning back and forth in sheets that smell like industrial detergent. My body won’t settle — on my side the pillow is too flat, on my stomach the twins press against the mattress and I shift onto my back.

Seventeen weeks. They don’t kick yet but sometimes I imagine I can feel them. A flutter, something that might just be my own pulse racing because Nick Carraway’s voice is still echoing in my skull.

Marry me.

Like marriage was something you proposed to your brother’s hollowed-out ex-wife over bread rolls and untouched water.

The last time I said ‘yes’ to a Carraway I was twenty-one with a dress and borrowed earrings and I believed every word because nobody had ever looked at me like that.

Now my shirt is still stretched at the collar where Lily grabbed it and I haven’t changed it because it still smells like her shampoo. And if I change it, that smell goes away and then I have nothing of hers left in this room.

I pick up my phone, put it down, pick it up again and stare at the screen.

3:14 AM. Janet won’t answer at 3:14 AM, I know that. But I also know I’m not going to sleep. I haven’t slept more than three hours since the dinner. Since Dominic sat across from the candles I lit and told me I was being replaced like a lease that expired.

At six I give up and the shower is small and the pressure pathetic and I stand under it with my hands braced on the tile until it runs cold. I get dressed in the same jeans from yesterday and sit on the edge of the bed and call Janet at eight.

She picks up on the second ring and I can hear her car, the engine, the blinker clicking. “I need to ask you something. Legal something.”

“Okay.”

“If I got married.” My eyes close. “If I married someone with… I don’t know. Money. A name. Stability. Would that change the custody case?”

She’s quiet. I hear the blinker again and the sound of her switching lanes. “Who?”

I press my thumbnail into the seam of my jeans hard enough that the skin beneath goes white. “Does it matter?”

“Aria.” Her voice goes flat. “Who?”

“Nicholas Carraway.”

The blinker clicks again, twice, three times, and then it stops because she’s pulled over. “Dominic’s brother?”

“Yes.”

She let out a long breath and I counted four seconds of it.

“It transforms your case. Overnight,” she says finally, carefully, feeling each word before she sets it down. “Stable housing, income, legal infrastructure. And the name… a judge sees Carraway on your filing and the math changes completely.”

I press my thumb into my knee. “But..?”

“But it also gives Dominic a story. A bitter, desperate ex marries his brother, seduces him, destabilizes the family…” She pauses. “His lawyers will use it.”

“Let them.”

Something hardens in my chest as I say it — clean and cold, like steel that’s finally cooled.

Let them. Let them say whatever they want about me. I’ve spent thirteen years being careful about what people said about me and what did it buy me? A hotel room with lavender sachets and visits with my own daughter.

She’s quiet again and I shift the phone to my other ear. “Are you sure about this?”

I look at the ceiling and my jaw aches from clenching it since three in the morning. “There isn’t anything else, Janet.”

She waits while the heater clicks off. “Okay,” she says. “Call me after then.”

I hang up and sit there with the phone in my lap. My hair is dripping onto my shoulders, soaking the collar, and I should dry it but I don’t move. I just sit on the edge of this bed in this room that isn’t mine.

I grab my coat, check the pocket — the ultrasound is still there, folded into the lining, and the crinkle of it under my fingers is the only proof I have that any of this is real.

His hotel is eleven blocks from mine. I walk with the cold cutting through my wet hair and by the time I reach his lobby my ears are numb and my hands won’t stop shaking.

Nick opens his door in a t-shirt and suit pants, no shoes. Coffee on the desk behind him, steam still rising. He looks at me and something moves across his face, quick and unguarded, before he steps back to let me in.

The room is nicer than mine, bigger, with papers spread across the desk and a laptop still open. I stay standing by the door while he leans against the desk and waits.

“I have conditions,” I say, before he can offer me coffee or pleasantries or anything that might make this feel like something other than the calculated survival strategy it is.

“Name them,” he says, leaning against the desk.

He doesn’t crowd me, doesn’t step forward, doesn’t do any of the things Dominic would have done. The hand on my arm, the voice dropped to the register designed to make you feel held when what you actually were was managed.

Nick just… waits. Like he has all the time in the world and the patience to match.

“Separate bedrooms.” My nails press into my palms through the coat lining. “A contract with exit terms. Clear ones, written down. Not terms you decide later.”

“Done.”

“And no decisions about my life without my consent. Not where I live, not what I do, not…”

My voice catches and I swallow and look at the carpet because his eyes are too steady and if I keep looking at them I’m going to cry and I refuse to cry in front of another Carraway.

“I’ve had enough of that.”

“I know.” Quiet. No flinch, no defense. Just I know, delivered like he means it.

“Then yes,” I say, and the words come out quieter than I expected, like my voice knows the weight of them even if my brain hasn’t caught up.

His fingers tighten on the desk edge, just once, and then he straightens up and there’s something in the way he moves. Faster, looser, like a wire that’s been pulled taut for hours just released.

“Cool,” he says. “Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“Registry office.” He says it the way you’d say grocery store or the corner, already moving toward his jacket on the back of the chair.

I stare at him. “Like… right now?”

“You have any more conditions?” He’s pulling the jacket on, patting the pockets until he finds his keys.

“I… no, but…” I gesture down at myself. “Nick. Look at me.”

He looks. Slowly. The kind of look that travels and takes its time, that notices things, that doesn’t rush to get anywhere because it’s perfectly comfortable exactly where it is.

Heat moves up the back of my neck without my permission.

“Yeah,” he says finally, the corner of his mouth doing something I refuse to acknowledge. “You look adorable. Let’s go.”

I keep standing in his doorway with my hand on my stomach. The last time I got married I had a white dress and flowers and a man who held my face and told me I’d never worry again.

Now I have wet hair and yesterday’s jeans and a man pulling on his shoes without asking me to sit down first.

“This is going to work,” he says, and I think about the jewelry wrapped in socks and Lily’s cold fingers holding mine on the white bedspread while Camille’s heels clicked somewhere above us.

We’re going to get you back, I think, the words moving through me like a promise I’m making to all three of them at once.

My daughter, and the two small lives who have no idea what their mother is walking out the door to do.

I take a breath. Step forward.

“If this goes sideways,” I tell him, pulling my coat tighter as I walk past him into the hallway, “I’m blaming you.”

“Noted,” he says, falling into step beside me, and it sounds like he’s smiling.