His Brother's Ex, His Unborn Child

Chapter 7

ELENA

The Carter family home on the Upper East Side had a way of making you feel both elevated and irrelevant at the same time.

Four years of coming here and I had never solved that feeling.

Tonight was no different.

Margaret met us in the entrance hall with the warmth she reserved for occasions that required witnesses.

She kissed Liam's cheek first.

"Elena." Her hands around mine. "You look thin. Are you eating?"

"Always," I said.

She made a sound that accepted neither the answer nor the speaker and steered us toward the drawing room. Cousins, an aunt, the hum of a Carter family gathering performing warmth at itself.

I followed Liam in.

And stopped.

He was at the far end near the window. Back partially to the room, one hand in his pocket, looking at the garden with the concentrated stillness of a man who had run out of patience for the evening approximately twenty minutes before it started.

He hadn't turned yet.

I knew before anyone said his name. This must be him.

Nicholas.

Liam had mentioned he was back from Tokyo. Six months away.

In four years of marriage, his brother had been little more than a name. He told me Nicholas was cold, businesslike and not built for people.

That was Liam's portrait, delivered with the careful sympathy of a man describing a condition rather than a character flaw. I had accepted it without questions. It had seemed easier.

Someone across the room said his name. He turned.

I revised everything immediately.

He was not grey. He was sharp. His eyes moved to Liam first. Something passed between them that wasn't warmth and wasn't hostility. It's like the load-bearing silence of two people with a long shared history and an agreement not to unpack it in company.

Then his eyes moved to me.

Something happened in them that I didn't understand. It was like a recognition that arrived and was immediately, deliberately buried. His expression closed over it so fast I would have doubted myself if I hadn't been looking directly at him when it happened.

Then he looked away.

Liam brought me over during pre-dinner drinks. His hand was at the small of my back.

"Nicholas. You haven't met Elena."

Nicholas turned. Up close, the sharpness was more pronounced.He has dark eyes and a jaw that hadn't committed to any expression. He had the composure of a man who had learned to give very little away and found it enough.

"Elena," he said.

"Nicholas." I offered my hand.

He shook it briefly.

"Liam tells me you run a gallery," he said.

"I do."

"The Voss Gallery. On 57th."

"You know it?"

"I know of it."

The distinction was precise and placed deliberately. It's not I've been or I've heard good things. It was as simple as I am aware it exists.

Liam laughed beside me. "Nicholas doesn't do art. Numbers and code, that's his world."

"Numbers have their own aesthetic," I said.

Nicholas glanced at me. Something shifted in his expression, barely perceptible, quickly resolved.

"Some people think so," he said.

"And you don't?"

"I think aesthetics are a luxury for people with time to form opinions about them."

He said it pleasantly. Liam was already turning toward his cousin, already moving on.

I looked at Nicholas Carter and thought, he did that on purpose.

"How fortunate," I said, equally pleasant, "that running a gallery requires both. I'd hate to have to choose."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. The shadow of something, withdrawn before it completed itself. He looked at me for one beat longer than the conversation required.

Then he excused himself and moved back toward the window.

**

Dinner was the Carter family at full volume.

Margaret presiding.

Liam was charming and attentive. His hand finding mine at intervals across the tablecloth. He's like a devoted husband.

The cousin talked about property in the Hamptons. An aunt asked twice about my gallery and what pieces were new.

Nicholas sat across the table, two seats down.

He ate with the focused efficiency of a man present in body and elsewhere in mind. He answered direct questions without elaboration. He didn't laugh at things that weren't funny. Once, and only once he refilled Margaret's water glass without being asked and said nothing about it.

I watched him and tried to understand what I was actually looking at versus what I had been told to see.

Liam said those words, but what I saw was more specific than that. He was selective. Deliberate. He gave his attention the way certain people gave money. Not freely, and not to everyone, but when he gave it, the weight of it was real.

And twice across the dinner table he gave some of it to me in a way that didn't feel like warmth.

It felt like surveillance.

He caught me looking once and held it for exactly one second. His expression was unreadable. A door closed just before I could see what was behind it.

I picked up my wine glass and returned to the conversation on my left.

At some point, Margaret asked me about the gallery's upcoming winter programme and I answered.

Nicholas set down his fork in the middle of my answer.

He didn't say anything.

I lost the thread of what I was saying then found it again and finished.

Margaret nodded warmly and Nicholas picked up his fork.

I didn't look at him again for the rest of dinner.

**

After dinner I slipped out through the French doors onto the garden terrace.

I needed two minutes.

The garden was dark and the city is pressing orange above the trees. I stood at the stone railing and breathed. I let my face do whatever it wanted. I was tired.

The cut on my palm still healing. Two weeks on, pulsing faintly in the cold.

I heard the door behind me.

I didn't turn immediately. I already knew from the quality of the footstep.

Nicholas came to stand at the railing. He kept a fair distance. His hands stayed in his pockets while looking at the garden.

"The gallery closes at seven," he said.

I turned. "I'm sorry?"

"Weekdays. Eight on Saturdays." A brief glance. "I looked it up during dinner."

"Why?"

"Curiosity."

"About the gallery."

"About the hours."

I studied the side of his face. The clean angles of it.

"If you'd like to visit," I said, "I'd recommend coming before six. The light in the east gallery is better in the afternoon."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Do you have other work? Outside the gallery?"

Something in his tone stopped me. Not the words themselves but the certainty underneath them. The tone of a man asking a question he already believed he knew the answer to.

"No," I said. "The gallery is my full time work."

He turned and looked at me then.

Directly.

For the first time all evening without looking away immediately. Something moved in his eyes. Something colder and more decided than both.

"I find that hard to believe, considering..." He stopped.

Then lower — barely audible, the words almost swallowed before they finished.

"...one night—"

He walked back inside.

I stood at the railing and stared at the space where he had been.

Considering one night.

I turned the words over and reached for them. They dissolved before I could get a grip on them — too quiet, too incomplete, the sentence ending before it became something I could hold.

What did that mean?

What one night?

I had never met this man before this evening. I had said nothing, done nothing, given him no reason for any of it.

I was Liam's wife. I ran a gallery on 57th Street.

And Nicholas Carter had just implied something.

I stayed on the terrace until I was sure my face had settled back into something presentable. Then I went inside and found Liam.

**

In the car home Liam's thumb moved in slow circles against the back of my hand.

"It was a good evening," he said.

"Yes," I said.

He talked while I listened but my mind wandered to Nicholas. I don't understand why he would look at me that way.

I turned off the light.

The question stayed in the dark.