Page 1 of Secret Baby Daddy

Prologue

CASSANDRA & ATLAS

Blackline Secure Session – 11:47 PM

Cassandra: Hypothetical.

Atlas: You always say hypothetical like it’s a safe word.

Cassandra: It is. Now behave. A public figure, let’s call him a philanthropist, the kind who funds hospital wings and gets a wall plaque for it, is partially responsible for a tragedy. Not completely. Partially. Some of what people are saying about him is true. Some of it has been edited into something else. He comes to me the night before it breaks.

Atlas: And you bury the true part with the false part, because untangling them takes longer than the news cycle allows.

Cassandra: I control the disclosure. There’s a difference.

Atlas: There isn’t, from where the dead are standing.

Cassandra doesn’t answer right away.

She’s curled into the corner of a sofa that costs more than most people’s cars, laptop balanced on her knees, and she can feel the old argument settling into her chest like a hand pressing down.

She wonders, not for the first time, whether Atlas would like her at all if he ever saw her face, saw the woman who says these things in boardrooms with her spine straight and her voice sanded smooth, who has never once, in a professional room, admitted the sentence she is about to type.

Cassandra: Truth without context can be a weapon too. You talk about the dead like the living don’t also get destroyed by a fact dropped on them without warning.

Atlas: I talk about the dead because someone has to. Nobody dies of an uncomfortable press release, Cassandra. People die because the version of events that reached them in time was the sanitized one, and it told them the exit was clear when it wasn’t.

Cassandra: That’s oddly specific for a hypothetical.

Atlas: Everything’s hypothetical here. That’s the rule.

Cassandra: Is it a rule you’ve broken? Withheld the true version. Watched it cost somebody something they couldn’t get back.

There’s a pause long enough that Cassandra glances at the little indicator that tells her he’s typing, watches it start and stop three times.

She has learned, over a year of these nights, what his silences mean almost as well as she knows her own.

This one means she has found something.

Atlas: Why do you have to control every conversation? Even this one. Even a hypothetical about a stranger who doesn’t exist.

Cassandra: I asked you a direct question.

Atlas: And I’m allowed to have a silence that’s just mine.

Cassandra: No one is entitled to a silence that costs someone else something. You said so yourself, four sentences ago.

Atlas: That’s a low blow.

Cassandra: It’s an accurate one. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. You’d know, you’re the one who’s obsessed with accuracy.

Another pause.

Cassandra pulls her knees up under her and lets herself feel the ache that only shows up at this hour, with this person, when the rest of the day’s armor has come off.

She thinks about the man she despises in daylight, the one who looked at a spreadsheet for four minutes and found in it what had cost her an entire sleepless night, and said nothing about it except a flat, infuriating there it is, as though her exhaustion were a rounding error, and she thinks, absurdly, that she would like Atlas to be nothing like him.

She has built an entire private mythology on that distinction.