Page 2 of Secret Baby Daddy

It is one of the only clean things left in her life.

Atlas: You want to know if I’ve lost someone to the version of events I thought was true.

Cassandra: I want to know if that’s why you sound like this. Like the world owes somebody a confession and you’ve appointed yourself the collector.

Atlas: Careful. That’s the most honest sentence you’ve written to me all year.

Cassandra: I contain multitudes. Answer the question.

Atlas: Yes.

Just that.

One word, sitting alone on the screen, and Cassandra feels something in her chest go soft and unguarded in a way she does not permit in any other part of her life.

She has spent a year building a sense of self out of never being caught unprepared, and here is a stranger, faceless, nameless, breaking that architecture with a single syllable typed at midnight.

Cassandra: I’m sorry.

Atlas: Don’t be sorry. Be honest instead. Tell me the thing you’ve never told anyone in a room with your actual name in it.

Cassandra: That’s not how this works.

Atlas: It’s exactly how this works. That’s the whole reason we’re both still awake.

Cassandra sets the laptop down, presses the heels of her hands against her eyes, and thinks how strange it is that the only place she has ever been fully, catastrophically honest is a platform with no last names, built for people who lie for a living.

Cassandra: I told the truth once.

Early.

It mattered, and I said it clearly, and I was ignored, and then when the true version came out anyway, later, ugly, undeniable, I was the one they blamed for not having stopped it.

As if the problem had been my telling and not their not listening.

Atlas: That’s not a hypothetical.

Cassandra: No.

Atlas: Cassandra. The seer nobody believed.

Cassandra: Don’t. Don’t do the thing where you say my name back to me like it explains something.

Atlas: It does explain something. It explains why you’d rather manage the story than trust the world to hear it straight. You’re not protecting your clients. You’re protecting the twenty-four-year-old who watched grown men decide her honesty was the liability.

Cassandra goes very still.

On the other side of an anonymous, encrypted, rule-bound platform designed expressly to prevent this kind of intimacy, a man she has never seen has just reached into the oldest room in her chest and turned on the light.

She should be furious.

She finds, instead, that her eyes have gone hot, and that some clenched, permanently braced part of her has simply stopped bracing.

Cassandra: And what does Atlas explain, then? Since we’re doing this.

Atlas: Atlas is the one who thinks the whole sky falls if he sets it down for even a second. He’s not carrying the world because he’s strong. He’s carrying it because once, a long time ago, he put something down that he should have kept holding, and it broke, and he has never once since then trusted himself to let go of anything again.

Cassandra: That sounds exhausting.