Page 28 of Secret Baby Daddy

Atlas: She’d say she was protecting the case. I’m not sure I believe her, and I’m fairly certain she doesn’t either.

I stop.

I read the exchange again, unease settling beneath my ribs at how casually I have just described something that happened four hours ago, from the exact perspective Cassandra would recognize if she had been in the room herself.

I tell myself it is a coincidence.

This is what happens when two people spend a year venting about the same industry, the same kinds of clients, the same kinds of colleagues.

I have spent my entire career learning not to trust coincidences, and tonight, worn down by a fatigue I can’t name, I decide not to question this one.

Cassandra: She sounds insufferable.

Atlas: She is.

Cassandra: She also sounds like she counted his pulse before she counted the exits.

Cassandra has never once, in a year of these conversations, defended a stranger she has never met.

She defends principles.

She defends systems and the cold machinery of a well-built plan.

She does not defend people.

Atlas: You’re taking her side.

Cassandra: I’m not taking anyone’s side. I’m saying a person who checks your pulse before your press coverage is not automatically the villain of the story, even if she is exhausting to stand next to.

Atlas: Even if she’s comparing what happened to him to a war crime?

There is a longer pause this time.

Long enough that I picture her, the version I have built out of a year of two-in-the-morning sentences, all elbows and unfiltered honesty, nothing like the woman I was with earlier who wears her blazer like a diplomatic uniform.

Those two women have never occupied the same room in my head.

Tonight, for no reason I can defend under cross-examination, they refuse to stay separated.

Cassandra: She’s not a villain. She’s just tired of being the only one in the room who thinks the truth needs a translator.

Atlas: That’s an oddly specific defense for a hypothetical stranger.

Cassandra: I contain multitudes, Atlas. Don’t read into it.

I read into it anyway.

I have spent twelve hours today watching Piper Vale defend a story she does not fully believe, watching her jaw tighten every time I said the central fact remains, watching her build a folder on her laptop out of pure spite and refuse to let me see the label.

I have also spent a year watching a stranger argue, with the exact same stubborn tilt of logic, that the truth without context is its own kind of weapon.

The evidence is circumstantial.

I have built entire cases on less and watched them collapse under a single contradicting data point, and I am fully capable of applying the same rigor here that I would apply anywhere else.

I choose, deliberately, not to.

Some questions are safer left unasked for exactly as long as the not-knowing still feels like a kindness rather than a failure of nerve.