Page 27 of Secret Baby Daddy

The guest suite Cordelia assigned me has good bones, a single deadbolt on a door that leads to a service corridor and a window latch a determined twelve-year-old could defeat.

I spend forty minutes rerouting a motion sensor before I let myself sit down at the desk.

It is nearly one in the morning.

Roman Vasseur’s cologne is still at the back of my throat, six hours after he left the building, like smoke that won’t clear a room.

I run the authorization key again.

AUTH_KEY: JR_8842_SEC.

I have run it eleven times since Hayes pulled it from the metadata.

It does not change.

Jonah Reed’s ghost is stamped into a file currently sitting in the inboxes of three television producers.

I close the laptop.

I open it again.

I have never once needed to check a fact this many times to make it feel true.

Data does not soften with repetition.

Only the person reading it does, and I do not particularly like what I am becoming as the night wears on.

Roman’s voice keeps replaying underneath everything else.

You always were too emotional for this line of work, Dominic.

He called Piper a storyteller who does not know when a story is over, and I watched her step directly between us without hesitating, without checking whether it was strategically sound, because the room had turned dangerous and she decided, on instinct, that she would rather absorb the danger than let it reach me.

I check Blackline instead.

Cassandra and I messaged nearly an hour ago, the exchange still open on the second monitor between passes at the motion sensor.

I check Blackline most nights around this hour, later if the day has been difficult, which by any honest accounting makes it less a habit and more a dependency I have declined to examine.

Cassandra keeps different hours than any client I have ever worked for and never once complains about mine.

It is one of the few relationships in my life that costs me nothing to maintain and asks nothing of me I am not already willing to give.

Cassandra: He also said “the central fact remains” four times in one meeting, so the jury’s still out on nemesis versus job.

I read the line again, and something in me, tired enough tonight to stop guarding the impulse, decides to even the score.

Atlas: If we’re trading candidates, I have one of my own. I’ve been assigned to work alongside a woman who treats a burning building as a branding opportunity.

The reply takes four minutes.

I know it takes four minutes because I watch the timestamp the entire time, which is its own small humiliation.

Cassandra: Some of us understand that a story only gets to exist if the people in it survive long enough to tell it.

Atlas: She stepped between me and a man who was actively trying to provoke me into doing something career-ending today. Didn’t hesitate. Didn’t check whether it was strategically sound. Just planted herself in the way.

Cassandra: Sounds like she was protecting you.