Page 23 of Secret Baby Daddy

“I am not limping.”

“You’re favoring your left heel. You do that when you’ve been standing too long.” She sets the crossword aside and looks at me, and her eyes are the same pale, merciless blue mine will be in forty years. “Sit down and tell me what’s wrong.”

I sit.

I cross my ankles the way she taught me.

“It’s a work thing. Client’s granddaughter is in the middle of a media situation. Nothing I haven’t handled a hundred times.”

“Mm.”

Odette picks the crossword back up.

“And the man.”

“There is no man.”

“There is always a man involved when you start talking to me like you’re at a press release.”

She taps her pen against her knee.

“You used to tell me everything, Piper. Now you tell me the headlines and hide the true story.”

She is not wrong, and she is not angry about it either.

I could tell her about Calder.

I could tell her about the girl who died in a fire twelve years ago, about the video, about the security consultant who looks at me like I’m a liability.

I could tell her about Atlas, the stranger who somehow already knows the parts of me I edit out of every other conversation.

I tell her none of it.

“It’s under control,” I say instead.

“Everything is under control right up until it isn’t.”

She pats my hand once, dry and light as paper.

“I raised you to manage a room, darling. I didn’t raise you to believe you have to manage every room alone.”

She goes back to her crossword.

“Nine down. Six letters. ‘Withholds the truth to keep the peace.’”

I do not answer that one.

She doesn’t expect me to.

I kiss the top of her head on my way out, the way I have since I was tall enough to reach it, and she catches my wrist for a second, her grip still surprisingly strong.

“Whatever it is,” she says, not looking up, “don’t manage it alone for too long. Even I needed a second chair, eventually.”

I do not ask what she means by that.

I already know, and I am not ready to hear it out loud.

Outside, the city has gone the beautiful gray of autumn late afternoons, and I stand on the sidewalk a moment longer than necessary, unwilling yet to become Piper Vale again.