Page 45 of Secret Baby Daddy

I pull up the second half of the footage, the part with smoke rolling into frame, and compare it against the first half showing Sloane at the keypad.

“The lighting’s inconsistent. Fire hadn’t reached this section yet in the first clip. By the second clip, it’s already thick enough to obscure half the frame. That’s not eleven seconds of missing footage. That’s considerably longer, condensed and stitched to look brief.”

Whoever built this splice had time, skill, and access to software most amateur extortionists never bother acquiring.

That specificity worries me more than the missing eleven seconds themselves.

Someone planned exactly how much truth to leave visible and exactly how much to bury.

Piper goes very still beside me, and I watch her mind work through the same conclusion mine has already reached, both of us arriving at it from opposite directions, the way we seem to be doing more and more lately.

“She went back,” Piper says quietly. “That’s what they cut.”

“I can’t confirm that from a splice point alone. But the timeline only makes sense if something happened between those two clips that the editor needed gone.”

I set the laptop down.

“The physical action in the first clip is real. She engaged the lock. But whatever happens in the gap changes everything about what that action means. If she went back in for Mara, the entire narrative flips. She’s not a girl who locked a door and walked away. She’s a girl who locked a door for one reason, realized what it meant, and tried to fix it before the building came down around her.”

“That doesn’t erase the fact that she locked it in the first place.”

“I know that.”

Piper’s voice sharpens, not at me, I realize, but at the problem itself.

“That’s exactly the trap, Calder. I could build a defense around the missing eleven seconds and it would be true, and it still wouldn’t be the whole truth, because the whole truth includes the fact that she made a choice that helped kill a girl, even if she tried to undo it. If I only tell the sympathetic half, I’m doing exactly what the extortionist did. I’m just doing it in the other direction.”

It is the exact argument I have spent a career failing to make persuasively to clients who would rather feel innocent than be honest.

She has just made it better than I ever have, and she has made it to herself, which is a considerably harder audience.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that,” I tell her. “That the sympathetic version isn’t automatically the right one.”

“I’ve always known it. I just usually decide it’s not my job to say it out loud, because clients don’t hire me to make them look complicated. They hire me to make them look innocent.”

She closes the laptop, slower than the moment requires.

“This is different. If we bury the fact that she went back, and the extortionist releases the full footage later, we lose everything. Not just the case. The last shred of anyone believing a word either of us says ever again.”

“Then we don’t bury it.”

“Then we don’t bury it,” she agrees, and something passes between us that feels like an actual accord, the kind neither of us has managed with anyone else in this line of work.

“We tell the whole thing. The lock, the fire, the return. All of it, timed correctly, so nobody gets to edit it into something smaller or larger than what it actually was.”

“That’s a harder story to sell.”

“It’s the only one that survives contact with the truth.”

She meets my eyes, steady, none of the performance she reserves for rooms full of cameras.

“You were right, you know. From the first morning, before I would have admitted it. A sanitized version gets people killed. I’ve just spent my whole career calling it something softer.”

I don’t have an argument left for that, and for the first time since Cordelia put us in a room together, I don’t want one.

I have spent a career watching people choose the comfortable version of a story over the true one, and I stopped expecting anything different from anyone, including, if I am honest, from Piper.

Watching her choose the harder, riskier truth instead, without me arguing her into it, feels like watching some private theory about her collapse under the weight of better evidence.