Page 44 of Secret Baby Daddy

Somewhere past midnight, half dreaming, I catch myself wondering what it would be like to say all of this to Atlas instead; and then I remember that Atlas is a stranger behind a screen, and the man breathing steadily an arm’s length away is the one who heard it first.

Atlas knows the woman I never show anyone.

Dominic is beginning to know the woman standing in front of him.

And somewhere in the dark, with his breathing steady on the other side of the pillow wall, I am no longer sure which version of being seen scares me more.

12

DOMINIC

Eleven seconds doesn’t sound like much until you’ve spent twelve years learning that eleven seconds is exactly how long it takes for a man to die in a locked room.

Hayes restores power a little after six, and by seven Piper has the extortion footage back up on her laptop at the small desk in the sitting room, sleeves pushed to her elbows, the same fierce concentration on her face that she aimed at me across a marble table on the first morning of this entire mess.

Neither of us mentions the pillow wall, or the conversation that happened on either side of it.

We have both, by unspoken agreement, filed it under things to examine later, when there is time to survive the examining.

But she has not quite met my eyes since I sat down, and I have spent the last four minutes finding reasons to stand closer to her chair than the footage strictly requires.

We are both, apparently, choosing competence as the safer language this morning.

I am beginning to recognize that choice, in both of us, as its own kind of tell.

“Look at this.”

She drags the cursor back, frame by frame, and taps the screen at the moment Sloane reaches the door.

“Here. Watch the timestamp.”

I lean over her shoulder.

The numbers tick forward, ordinary, until they don’t: a jump, small enough that I’d have missed it without her pointing at it, eleven seconds vanishing between one frame and the next like they were never recorded at all.

“You found this last night?”

“I found the earlier jump last week. I found this one at four this morning, when I couldn’t sleep and decided reviewing footage of a burning building was preferable to lying next to you overthinking.”

She says it lightly, but there’s something more honest underneath it that neither of us acknowledges.

“Eleven seconds, gone clean, no static, no visual artifact. Whoever built this had professional editing tools and a lot of time to use them.”

I take the laptop, angle it, and run the frames just before and just after the cut through the same forensic overlay I used on the metadata.

The camera angle has shifted, subtle enough to miss on a casual watch, obvious once you know to look: a few degrees to the left, the kind of correction that happens when a camera loses power briefly and resets on reboot.

I have spent twelve years trusting exactly this kind of granular detail over the more comfortable, more human theory sitting next to it, and some part of me still braces for Piper to argue for the simpler story anyway.

She doesn’t.

She leans in instead, matching my scrutiny frame for frame.

“This isn’t one continuous shot,” I say slowly. “It’s two. Spliced together at the eleven-second mark.”

“Two different moments in the same corridor.”

“Two different moments in the same corridor, edited to look like one uninterrupted sequence.”