Page 119 of Secret Baby Daddy

“You believe most things eventually,” Odette says, picking her crossword back up, entirely unsentimental now that she’s gotten what she wanted out of the exchange. “You’re just slow about it. Runs in the family.”

*Four Months After That*

DOMINIC

The gala is exactly as loud as I expected and considerably less exhausting than I’d braced for, mostly because Piper is standing three feet away instead of somewhere across a strategy table calculating my liabilities.

Cordelia Merrick, seventy-something and entirely unbothered by the size of the room she’s just walked the truth into, has the bearing of a woman who has spent a year deciding that dignity and honesty are not, as she once assumed, opposing forces.

I watch her take the podium without notes, without a single line of the careful language I would have drafted for her a year ago, and understand I am watching someone choose, deliberately, to survive on the harder version of the truth.

“Jonah Reed died trying to uncover truths my family and my company spent too long treating as liabilities instead of responsibilities,” she says. “Tonight, this foundation begins with a commitment we should have made years ago: we will not bury the truth simply because it is inconvenient.”

There is a version of me, not so long ago, who would have flinched at a client saying that sentence out loud with cameras in the room.

I don’t flinch.

I watch Piper instead, watch the small, private satisfaction cross her face, the pride of someone who spent four months building the exact conditions that made this sentence survivable to say.

Roman Vasseur is not here tonight.

He accepted a federal plea agreement three months ago and is now serving a sentence that will keep him well occupied for a considerable stretch of years, the extortion charges compounded by obstruction and the evidence surrounding Jonah Reed’s death.

I do not think about him often anymore, which is its own kind of victory, considering there was a decade of my life where I thought of almost nothing else.

“You’re doing the thing,” Piper says, appearing at my elbow with two glasses of something far better than the bottle we never got around to opening the night any of this began, in a sealed suite with a pillow wall neither of us respected by morning. “The thing where you go somewhere else in your head at parties.”

“I was thinking about Roman.”

“Was it useful thinking?”

“No,” I admit. “It rarely is.”

Her hand finds mine, not urgent, not managing anything, simply present, and I understand that this, more than any of the rest of it, is the thing I could not have imagined a year ago: being allowed to think an unproductive thought out loud and have it cost me nothing.

“Ingrid texted,” Piper says, checking her phone with the harried affection she now extends automatically to my sister, whom she has adopted with roughly the same ferocity Ingrid extended to her. “She says the babysitter situation is, quote, entirely under control, and that we should stop checking in every forty minutes.”

“We checked in once.”

“We checked in three times. I’m relaying her assessment, not endorsing it.”

Our daughter is eleven weeks old, asleep at home under the entirely capable supervision of a woman who reduces cardiac arrests to their component parts for a living and therefore does not consider one sleeping infant a significant professional challenge.

We named her Odelia.

We had considered Odette, but Piper insisted it was too much, too sentimental, and that her grandmother would be unbearable about it for the rest of her natural life.

So we chose a derivative instead.

Odette has, predictably, been unbearable about it since the day we told her, and shows no signs of stopping.

“Come dance with me,” Piper says, and it isn’t a request so much as a fact she’s decided about the next several minutes of my life, which I have learned, over the past year, is one of the more reliable ways to know I am about to enjoy myself.

We dance badly, deliberately, in the corner of a ballroom full of people who paid too much money to watch the Merrick family survive its own worst year, and somewhere in the middle of it, with her cheek against my shoulder and a string quartet doing its diplomatic best with a song neither of us requested, she says, quiet enough that it’s only for me: “Atlas would never have believed this. A year ago, typing to a stranger at midnight, he’d never have believed any of it was possible.”

“Cassandra didn’t believe it either,” I tell her. “She just wanted it enough to risk finding out.”

The old names settle over us for a moment, gentler now than they’ve ever been, no longer a secret either of us is protecting, only the true, strange beginning of the two people we actually turned out to be.