Page 46 of Secret Baby Daddy

Hayes knocks a few minutes later to confirm the generator’s stable and the east wing’s finally cleared, and the ordinary machinery of the day resumes: briefings, calls, Cordelia’s assistant summoning us both to the main house.

Piper packs her laptop with her usual brisk efficiency, but she pauses at the door, glancing back at me.

“For what it’s worth,” she says, “thank you. For not making me feel foolish for taking this long to get there.”

“You got there. That’s the part that matters.”

I follow her out into the corridor, the cold morning air a sharp contrast to the closeness of the suite behind us.

“Most people in your position never do. They find the comfortable version and stay there.”

“I’m aware I’m supposed to be the person who prefers comfortable versions.”

“You were,” I say. “I’m not sure you still are.”

She doesn’t answer, but something in the set of her shoulders tells me she’s still turning the sentence over, weighing it the way she weighs every headline she’s ever had to build.

I match her pace without deciding to, and think that somewhere over the last several days I stopped keeping score of who was right about which theory, and started, instead, simply wanting to be in the room when she worked the next one out.

13

PIPER

Mara Reyes has a sister.

It takes me four hours and two calls I’m not proud of to find her, because the Merrick settlement from twelve years ago came with a confidentiality clause thorough enough that most of Mara’s own family stopped using her name in public afterward, as if grief itself might violate the terms.

Renata Reyes still lives forty minutes from the property, still keeps a framed photo of her sister on a bookshelf that faces the door, and does not, when I call, sound like a woman who’s spent twelve years waiting for someone to finally ask her the right question.

“You’re the one working for them,” she says, not a question either, when I show up at her door instead of calling back. “The Merricks.”

“I’m working for the truth about what happened to your sister. Right now those two things overlap. I understand if that doesn’t reassure you.”

She lets me in anyway.

“Mara wasn’t supposed to be in that corridor,” Renata tells me, turning her coffee cup without drinking from it. “She covered a shift for a friend with a sick kid. She did that a lot. She was twenty-three and she thought everyone’s problems were a little bit her problem. It was the nicest thing about her and the thing that got her killed, and I’ve spent twelve years unable to decide which.”

She looks at the photo on the shelf.

“The official report said she died from smoke inhalation near the corridor’s east exit. That’s true. It’s just not where they found her.”

“Where did they find her?”

“Thirty feet further in. Past a supply chute nobody uses, in the opposite direction from every exit on that floor.”

Renata finally looks at me directly.

“I asked the fire marshal about it, once, before the settlement money made asking feel like it came with a price tag. He said bodies move during a fire. Panic does strange things. I believed him for about six years.”

“What changed?”

“A man named Hollis Doyle. Overnight maintenance, twelve years ago. He signed a confidentiality agreement same as everyone else, but he came to my mother’s funeral last spring, and grief makes people careless about things they’ve spent a decade being careful about.”

She sets the cup down.

“He told me, at the graveside, that he saw the Merrick girl go back in. Screaming somebody’s name. He didn’t stop her because he didn’t think anyone would believe a nineteen-year-old had it in her to try, and by the time he found the nerve to say something official, the settlement was already signed and his silence was already worth more to his family than his conscience was worth to mine.”

I sit with that for a moment, the weight of a witness who’s been sitting on the truth for over a decade, not out of malice, but because of a system efficient enough to make silence the rational choice for everyone involved.