Page 118 of Secret Baby Daddy

Wren finds me there, predictably, because Wren has never once knocked before letting herself into a room I am standing in alone.

She has a garment bag over one arm and an expression that suggests she has already decided this conversation is happening whether I am ready for it or not.

“The final draft came back from the printer,” she says, and drops a folder on the arm of the glider chair like it’s nothing, like she hasn’t spent four months managing the single most complicated press rollout of Piper Vale Communications’ entire existence. “Cordelia signed off personally. She wants it to run the same week the foundation gala goes public.”

I open the folder.

It’s the final piece on everything the Merricks have done since the truth came out: the compensation fund, the reforms, the records they’ve finally opened instead of buried.

Wren’s name is on the byline, and Sloane Merrick’s statement runs beneath it, unedited.

I read it once more out of old habit and realize, with something like relief, that I’m checking it for accuracy instead of damage control.

“It’s good,” I tell Wren. “It’s actually good.”

“It’s the best thing this firm has ever put its name on,” Wren says, entirely without modesty, because Wren has never once undersold her own work and I have stopped trying to make her. “Also, you’re aware you have four minutes before Ingrid gets here and starts making everyone move furniture.”

I am, in fact, aware.

Ingrid has taken the role of Opinionated Aunt with the same ferocious competence she brings to a trauma bay, which is to say she arrived twenty minutes early with a folding table she’d apparently had in her trunk for exactly this purpose, and has spent the better part of an hour rearranging the living room into what she calls a functional gathering, and what Dominic calls, under his breath, an emergency medicine intervention on our furniture.

I hear him before I see him, his voice pitched low and amused down the hall, some private argument with his sister that neither of them actually wants to win.

“Absolutely not,” Dominic is saying, coming around the corner with his sleeves pushed up and a box of what I recognize as christening cards balanced against one hip. “The couch faces the window. It has always faced the window. It will continue to face the window regardless of your professional opinion of foot traffic patterns.”

“Your foot traffic patterns are the reason your last dinner party had a bottleneck at the kitchen island,” Ingrid says, not looking up from the folding table. “I’m a doctor. I understand flow.”

“You’re a doctor for gunshot wounds, not sofas.”

“The principles transfer.”

I watch the two of them argue with the easy fondness of people who have never once doubted the other would show up, and think about the version of Dominic I first met across a boardroom table, the one who would rather manage a room than be caught inside one of these arguments, unscripted and losing.

He catches me watching and crosses the room to press a kiss to my temple, one hand settling, out of habit now rather than performance, against the small of my back.

“She’s rearranging our entire life,” he says. “I want it on record that I objected.”

“Your objection is noted and ignored,” Ingrid calls from across the room.

“That’s fair,” he concedes, and I laugh, because six months ago the version of him who could concede a losing argument out loud, in front of witnesses, without needing the last word, did not exist yet, not fully, not the way he does now.

Later, after Ingrid has declared the furniture arrangement complete and gone to reheat something involving an unreasonable amount of garlic, I find myself alone in the kitchen with my grandmother, who has claimed the good chair by the window and the last of the coffee, and no intention of moving for either.

“You look tired,” Odette says, which from her is not an accusation but an opening.

“I’m thirty-four weeks pregnant and apparently carrying a child who has strong opinions about three in the morning,” I tell her. “Of course I’m tired. Good tired. The kind that comes from something worth being tired over.”

She studies me over the rim of her cup with the same unhurried attention she’s used my entire life to see straight through whatever version of myself I’ve brought into the room, and I feel, for once, that there’s nothing underneath for her to find that I haven’t already said out loud.

“You used to call me from hotel rooms at midnight,” she says, “and tell me everything was fine. I always knew it wasn’t. You have a very particular voice for fine that means the opposite.”

“I don’t have that voice anymore.”

“No,” she agrees, setting down her cup. “You don’t. I noticed. It only took thirty-four years.”

I sit with that for a moment, the ache of being seen this plainly by the one person who has never once let me get away with performing composure instead of having it, and find it doesn’t sting the way it used to.

“It took the right person asking the right question at midnight,” I tell her. “And you, mostly. You told me the truth costs more up front and less later. I didn’t believe you for a long time.”