I imagine that Anne set up the whole Nicole seducing the MC thing so she [...] has something to hold over his head.
That would've been so much more interesting than what we actually got.
It's one of the zillions of ways that the monsoon of extracurricular partners ruins any opportunity to tell a meaningful story. (Yes, I accepted years ago that TAC[OS] never had any intention of telling a meaningful story.). But a game in which the relationship between Anne & Nicole (sexual or not, acknowledged or not), the relationship between the MC and Nicole (sexual or not, acknowledged or not), and the relationship between Nicole and Anne's extracurricular partners (e.g. Malcom, with whom they both have sexual history) actually
mattered, and affected the characters' future actions, would be so much more interesting than "young car salesman or old car salesman, neither of whom we'll ever see again."
We know Emma and the MC click. The problem is she cheated with his dad.
And she's back to flying Martin Air on a regular basis. Emma's fundamentally untrustworthy, and will never be otherwise.
In any case, the fact that Emma ever reentered the narrative the first place is an extremely characteristic flaw. There's no way the MC should ever trust her again, much less restart a sexual relationship with her. Even though she's correct about Anne's behavior, the MC shouldn't trust her motives for spilling the beans. But once the MC accepts Anne & Martin, what difference does Emma's reappearance make? On the surface, she's just another set of holes to fuck, and by that point that's all the game is about. Except that it
should matter, because both capitulations remake the MC as a doormat whose only interest is his fetish, and who couldn't possibly care about Anne, Emma,
or his father. By that point, they're all just mindless pawns in his cuckold fanfic.
I've argued for years, going back to very early versions of the original game, that this was always the case. That Tony never cared about what Anne did, nor who she did it with, only that she
did it so he could get his fetish on. He has the verbal complexity of a tree slug and the mental capacity of lichen (nor is Anne any better). There are people who might be able to make this lifestyle work, but Anne and Tony aren't among them. I'm surprised they can feed themselves without assistance.
