Page 29 of Secret Baby Daddy

Atlas: You are unusually interested in my new colleague tonight.

Cassandra: You brought her up first. Twice.

Atlas: I’m making an observation.

Cassandra: You’re deflecting. It’s a very specific tone you get right before you deflect. I’ve had time to learn it.

She is rarely wrong.

It used to comfort me.

Tonight, with Jonah Reed’s authorization key still glowing on the second monitor, it does not.

Atlas: Fine. Observation withdrawn. What did your day look like?

Cassandra: Grandmother. Protégée. A folder I named out of spite. My new colleague is a man who makes the word “we” feel like a threat assessment.

I go still.

A folder I named out of spite.

I think of Piper’s fingers over the keyboard this afternoon, the deliberate, punishing weight of each keystroke, the way she closed the laptop like she was slamming a door in my face.

I think of the words Cordelia left on the table between us the first morning.

Managing Mr. Calder.

I think of the phrase Cassandra just used, a man who makes the word “we” feel like a threat assessment, which is, nearly verbatim, the accusation Piper threw at me across the marble this morning.

One year of Consortium logistics meetings.

One year of a woman across the table who argues exactly the way Cassandra argues, who deflects exactly the way Cassandra deflects, who is, at this moment, somewhere across the city in her own apartment, still wearing tonight’s confrontation with Roman like a second skin, same as I am.

The logical next step is obvious.

I could type one sentence, a single verifiable detail only Piper Vale would recognize, and end the uncertainty in under a minute.

I have built entire operations around smaller leaps of faith than that.

I do not take it.

I tell myself it is tactical restraint.

It is something closer to cowardice, dressed carefully enough that I almost believe the disguise myself.

I am not ready for what confirmation will cost me, and some small part of me that I do not enjoy meeting wants one more night of not knowing for certain.

Atlas: Get some sleep, Cassandra.

Cassandra: You too, Atlas. Try to actually rest, for once.

I close the laptop.

I sit in the dark guest room, listening to the old pipes tick behind the plaster, and let myself think, for exactly one unguarded minute, about the similarities between Cassandra and Piper Vale.

Then I put the thought away, along with everything else I cannot yet afford to feel, and I go back to the authorization key, because Jonah Reed has waited twelve years for me to finish the job I started, and grief, unlike Piper Vale, has always been patient with me.

There is one more thing I do before I sleep, though I will not admit it to Cassandra, or to Piper, or to myself in any daylight hour.