Page 40 of Secret Baby Daddy

I catch a glimpse of the name: Odette.

I watch Piper’s entire posture change before she’s even answered, the sharp, armored angles softening into something younger, more careful, as she asks about a crossword and a physical therapy appointment and whether the tea in that place is still terrible.

She doesn’t rush the call.

She doesn’t check the time once, despite a security briefing in an hour and an extortion deadline that should, by every professional standard, be eating at her attention.

She just listens.

“You’re good at that,” I tell her, once she’s hung up.

“At what?”

“Sitting still for someone. I’ve watched you argue down a hostile reporter in under a minute, and just now you spent twenty minutes listening to a woman describe a crossword clue in exhaustive detail without once looking like you wanted to move the conversation along.”

Something flickers across her face, quick and unguarded before she catches it.

“She raised me. It’s the least I owe her.”

“It’s not obligation. I’ve seen obligation. It doesn’t look like that.”

I sit across from her, closer than the conversation strictly requires.

“I think the volume is armor, Piper. All of it. The blazers, the heels, the way you fill a room before anyone else gets the chance to. I think you learned somewhere that being loud enough meant nobody got close enough to see what’s actually underneath it.”

I do not know when observing her turned into something closer to attention, the kind I usually reserve for threat assessments, except nothing about Piper Vale currently reads as a threat, and I am no longer sure what category to file this vigilance under.

She doesn’t answer right away, and for once, I don’t fill the silence either.

“That’s a very hypocritical theory for a man who checks a locked door four times a night,” she says finally, quieter than I expect.

“I never said I was any different.”

She studies me, something careful and searching in her expression I haven’t seen aimed at me before.

“What’s yours, then. If mine is volume.”

I have perfected several different non-answers for exactly this moment, each polished enough to end a conversation without appearing to dodge it.

I do not reach for any of them tonight.

“Competence.”

I say it plainly, because there’s no point in softening it.

“If I’m the most prepared person in any room, if I’ve already accounted for every exit and every threat before anyone else has finished their coffee, nobody gets close enough to ask why I need to be. It’s easier to be the man who solves the crisis than the man who once failed to see one coming.”

“Jonah,” she says, not a question.

“Jonah.”

I let the name sit between us, unfamiliar in how little it costs me to say it out loud, for once, to someone who isn’t Ingrid.

“I’ve spent twelve years building competence like a wall. Tonight you’re the first person outside my family who’s pointed out that a wall is still just a wall, no matter how well it’s built.”

“I wasn’t trying to accuse you of anything.”

“I know.”