Page 39 of Secret Baby Daddy

Ingrid sighs, the long-suffering sound she’s been making at me since she was nine and I was supposed to be teaching her to ride a bike instead of teaching her every possible way she could fall off it.

“You’re used to building things you can control, so you wouldn’t have to risk feeling things you can’t. This case has your voice sounding like you’re back in that alley with Jonah.”

“I don’t need the diagnosis, Ingrid.”

“You need someone who isn’t afraid to say it out loud, since you clearly won’t.”

A pause, gentler.

“Is there anyone out there worth telling the truth to? For once?”

I don’t answer quickly enough, and my sister, who has spent a career reading silences in emergency rooms, hears exactly what she needs to hear in the gap.

I could end the silence in half a sentence.

I could say her name, not Cassandra’s, Piper’s, and let my sister hear exactly how much weight it carries when I do.

I do not.

Some part of me is still counting the cost of being wrong, and some smaller, more honest part has already stopped believing I am.

“There is,” she says, delighted. “Dominic Calder, you complete disaster.”

“Goodnight, Ingrid.”

“Tell her about the tuna guy in the surveillance van. Women love that story.”

I stand in the alcove a moment longer, phone still warm against my ear, cataloguing exactly how much of myself I just handed to a woman thirty feet away who was never meant to be listening, and finding, against every professional instinct I own, that I do not particularly mind that she was.

When I come back into the sitting room, Piper doesn’t look up from her book immediately.

“You’re very different on the phone with her,” she says eventually.

“Different how?”

“Patient. Almost playful.”

She marks her page and meets my eyes.

“I’ve spent a year watching you dismantle grown men with a single sentence. I didn’t know you had a setting where you let someone tease you and just took it.”

“Ingrid’s the only one who’s earned the privilege.”

It’s true.

At least, it used to be.

There is another voice now that slips past my defenses with alarming ease, another person who interrupts my carefully constructed answers with irritating accuracy and expects the truth instead.

Cassandra earned that privilege somewhere between late-night arguments and quiet honesty offered without obligation.

I have told myself for months that Cassandra and my sister occupy the same category by coincidence, two women who ask questions I cannot deflect.

I am no longer certain that is true, and I am less certain what it costs me to keep pretending otherwise in front of the one person in this suite who might actually understand why.

“Must be nice,” she says again, the same quiet words from two nights ago, and this time I catch the ache underneath them.

Her own phone rings twenty minutes later.