Page 16 of Secret Baby Daddy

I lean back, rubbing my temples.

“This sequence is too dramatically perfect. The lingering shot on the locked door. The cinematic exit. Real life is sloppy, Calder. Real emergencies are chaotic. This is a villain arc built for a headline.”

Calder reaches over my shoulder and hits play again.

“A manipulated video doesn’t mean every element is false, Piper.”

“It means the story is a lie.”

“It means they edited the footage.”

He points at Sloane.

“Look at her hand. She presses the sequence. The lock engages. The edit doesn’t change the physical action on the screen. The central fact remains. She activated the lock.”

I twist in my chair to face him.

“You’re missing the entire point. If they cut the middle of the video, they cut her intent. What if she went back? What if someone else opened it after she left? You’re looking at a puzzle with half the pieces missing and calling it a complete picture.”

He says it like the missing pieces are an inconvenience rather than the entire case.

I want him to understand that in my line of work, the story people believe becomes the only fact that matters, regardless of what actually happened in that corridor twelve years ago.

Truth is not self-executing.

It requires someone willing to fight for how it gets told.

“I’m looking at a locked door and a dead girl.”

His gray eyes are hard and unforgiving.

“You want to spin this into a misunderstanding. I want to know why she locked it in the first place.”

My teeth grind together.

We are right back in the trench we dug six months ago at the Consortium gala in Dubai.

I spent three weeks curating a flawless press tour for a tech billionaire who needed public confidence to secure a merger.

Then Calder received an anonymous threat profile, dragged the CEO out the back door of a luxury hotel, shoved him into an armored SUV, and destroyed my fifty-million-dollar narrative.

He didn’t care about the optics.

He only cared about the exit route.

I stood in the wreckage the next morning, watching three separate outlets run headlines about a billionaire “fleeing in the night amid fraud concerns” that did not exist, and understood for the first time that Calder does not calculate reputational cost.

He calculates survival, full stop, and everything downstream of survival is somebody else’s department.

“You can’t throw her to the wolves just because you like the taste of raw data,” I tell him, keeping my voice dangerously quiet. “I won’t let you tear down my defense strategy.”

“Your defense strategy relies on pretending the lock didn’t engage.”

“My defense strategy relies on proving the extortionist is a liar.”

“Enough.”

Cordelia Merrick speaks from the far end of the room.