Page 21 of Secret Baby Daddy

I do not know yet what he wants beyond the company.

I know, with absolute certainty, that whatever he wants, he intends to use me to get it.

Fifteen years ago, I felt a version of this same cold arriving through a different window.

I was twenty-three, three months out of a training program that had taught me how to clear a room and nothing at all about how to walk back into one afterward.

Roman Vasseur found me in a hotel bar in Geneva, nursing a drink I had no intention of finishing, still carrying the stiffness of a man who has just learned that competence and confidence are not the same skill.

He did not introduce himself as a mentor.

He introduced himself as a man who had watched me work a security detail for four days without once seeing me relax, and who wanted to know why.

I told him the truth, because I did not yet know how expensive the truth could be in front of the wrong person.

I told him I did not trust myself to relax.

That relaxing was how people died.

He listened with an attention I had never once received from anyone in my chain of command, asking questions that made me feel, for the first time since I had left home, like someone had looked at the shape of me and found it useful rather than merely adequate.

That was the first lesson, though I would not recognize it as one for years.

Roman’s genius was never really about protocols or tradecraft, though he taught me plenty of both.

His genius was attention.

He made you feel seen in the place you were most hungry to be seen, and then he built, patiently, over months, a version of loyalty that felt indistinguishable from being understood.

He took me on as what he called, with a self-deprecating laugh I now recognize as calculated, a project.

Dinners in Geneva and later in Zurich and Vienna, each one an education disguised as a conversation.

He taught me to read a room in eleven seconds instead of thirty.

He taught me the three protocols I still run through today, verbatim, without ever telling me he had built them not to protect the people I would eventually be hired to protect, but to protect his own operations from exactly the kind of impulsive, feeling-led mistake he claimed to be curing me of.

Jonah Reed came into the operation a year later, younger than I was, sharper in some ways, softer in others, the kind of analyst who read a spreadsheet and saw the people inside the numbers.

Roman recruited him too, more lightly, the way a man collects a second tool he suspects he may only need once.

I liked Jonah instantly, the way you like anyone who has not yet had the softness trained out of them, and some part of me, even then, understood that Roman found that softness useful rather than valuable.

It was Jonah who first said Roman’s name to me the way you say a word you have started to distrust the taste of.

We were two years into the operation by then, deep enough in that questioning it felt like questioning the ground under a building I lived in.

“He never actually tells you what the operation is for,” Jonah said, one of the last nights I saw him whole. “He tells you what it requires of you. Those aren’t the same thing, and I don’t think he wants us noticing the difference.”

I told him he was being paranoid.

I believed it completely when I said it, and that belief, more than the bad address or the compromised safe house, is the part I have never fully forgiven myself for.

There is a memory I have never told anyone, not Ingrid, not the therapist the agency insisted I see after Jonah died, not even the anonymous stranger I have spent a year handing carefully rationed pieces of myself to at midnight.

It surfaces now, standing in this drawing room with Roman’s cologne still hanging in the air.

I was twenty-three, six months into the Geneva arrangement, and Roman took me to dinner alone for the first time, at a restaurant with no menu prices and a maître d’ who greeted him by a name that was not the one printed on his business card.