Page 110 of Secret Baby Daddy

She receives us in the same study where Calder and I once argued about relocating Sloane, the same room where I first watched him study a floor plan like it was the only language he trusted.

Cordelia looks older than she did three months ago, the weight of twelve years finally visible on her now that she’s set it down.

“I owe you both an explanation,” she says, once we’re seated, her hands folded with the composure of a woman about to say something she’s rehearsed extensively. “Not for hiring you. For hiring you together.”

“We assumed that was simply practical,” Calder says. “A security consultant and a communications strategist, working the same case.”

“It wasn’t practical. It was deliberate.” Cordelia’s gaze moves between us, steady and unflinching. “Jonah Reed came to me shortly before he died. He was frightened. Not only by what he’d discovered, but by how easily the truth could be buried once the people involved understood what he knew.”

Calder goes very still beside me.

“He left me one warning,” Cordelia continues. “Not instructions. A warning. He said that if the truth about the fire ever resurfaced, I should never allow one person to control both the evidence and the story told about it.”

“He believed that was how people like Roman survived,” she says. “Control the evidence and you control what can be proven. Control the narrative and you control what everyone believes. Jonah wanted those powers separated.”

Calder looks at her. “So you hired us.”

“I interpreted his warning.” Cordelia nods. “I needed someone who would refuse to accept a convenient story without proof. And I needed someone who understood that proof means very little if the wrong person gets to explain it first.”

Her eyes move to me.

“Dominic was the first person I thought of for the evidence. You were the first person I thought of for the story.”

“You knew about Calder’s history with Jonah,” I say slowly.

“I knew Dominic had tried to protect him. I knew he’d carried what happened afterward for twelve years, and I suspected that would make him relentless about finding out what actually happened, even if the answer hurt the Merricks.”

She looks at me then.

“And I’d watched your career long enough to believe you were capable of doing something equally difficult, Piper. Not erase Sloane’s guilt. Not sacrifice her to save the family. Hold two uncomfortable truths at the same time and make the world look at both.”

The architecture of the last three months rearranges itself once more.

We weren’t the final instruments of some dead man’s perfectly designed plan.

Jonah had simply understood the danger.

Cordelia chose the people she believed could answer it.

“Why didn’t you tell either of us this from the start?” Calder asks, something careful in his voice, like a man testing ground he’s not certain will hold his weight.

“Because I didn’t know, when I hired you, whether one of you had already been compromised by Roman.”

Cordelia’s composure finally cracks slightly, twelve years of fear briefly visible underneath it.

“He’d had access to this family for over a decade by the time I brought you both in. I tried to follow what Jonah left behind after he died. By then records had disappeared, witnesses had been paid into silence, and every avenue I pursued seemed to lead through someone I could no longer be certain I could trust. Eventually, without proof, all I had was a dead man’s warning and a family already determined to bury what had happened. I had no way of confirming, with certainty, that either of you was entirely clean. Concealing part of the truth felt, at the time, like the only responsible option available to me. I understand now that it cost you both considerable time you might have used more wisely, had I trusted you sooner.”

I recognize the logic immediately because I’ve used versions of it myself: withhold part of the truth because knowing less feels safer, right up until the omission becomes its own kind of damage.

“There’s something else,” Cordelia says before we can leave.

Something in her voice makes Calder look up.

“Hayes found another file during the final forensic sweep of the old archive material. It was buried inside Jonah’s protected directory and tagged with the same authorization key that surfaced in the original footage.”

Calder goes completely still.

“What file?”