Page 47 of Secret Baby Daddy

“Would he tell me? On the record?”

“He’s dying. Lung thing, unrelated, ironic as that sounds.”

Renata almost smiles, the kind that costs something.

“I think he’d tell you anything at this point. I think he’s been waiting twelve years for someone to ask.”

~

Hollis Doyle confirms it in a recliner in a hospice room three days later, an oxygen line under his nose and Dominic’s recorder on the table between us, and gives me, in eleven unhurried minutes, everything the splice in the footage could only imply: Sloane Merrick, nineteen years old, locking the corridor door with her hands shaking so badly it took her two tries; Sloane running, twenty feet, then stopping, then turning around; Sloane going back through smoke thick enough that Hollis himself wouldn’t follow her, screaming a name he didn’t know yet was Mara’s.

“She came out coughing so hard I thought she’d die on the lawn,” Hollis says. “Empty-handed. She didn’t get to her in time. But she went. I want that on your recording, because I’ve left the truth unsaid for twelve years because of money and it’s the only thing about that night I’m actually ashamed of.”

I have my corroboration.

A name, a witness, a timeline that finally matches the footage instead of theorizing around it.

What I don’t have, still, is the one answer that’s mattered more than any of the rest of this from the beginning.

I get it four days later, from Sloane herself, in a room with no cameras and no lawyers, because I ask her plainly and she’s finally tired enough of carrying the question alone to answer it the same way.

“There was a protocol,” Sloane says.

We’re in the small library off the east wing, and she hasn’t looked up from her hands once since I sat down.

“My grandfather drilled it into the whole family before I could legally drive. In a fire, in that specific corridor, you seal it and you evacuate, because the corridor connects to the archive wing, and the archive is where every piece of paper that could sink this company for the last three generations happens to be stored. He never called it that. He called it ‘containing the exposure.’ I was nineteen and I’d heard that phrase in family meetings my whole life, and my body did what nineteen years of drilling told it to do before I’d had a single conscious thought about it.”

“And then?”

“And then I heard her. Actually heard her, not the idea of a person, an actual voice, and every year of training just stopped mattering.”

Her hands are steady now, which is somehow worse than if they were shaking.

“I went back. I didn’t reach her in time. I understand that the second decision doesn’t erase the first one, and I’ve spent twelve years angry that nobody in my family ever taught me the second instinct first.”

“Why not tell the truth then? Why now? Why tell me at all?”

“Because you’re the first person who came here asking what actually happened instead of planning how to make it survivable.”

Sloane looks up, finally.

“And I didn’t know how much I needed someone to ask until you did.”

~

Livia has always been able to hear whatever I’m not saying, which makes her either my best friend or my worst enemy, depending entirely on the week.

She has watched me build three different careers out of other people’s disasters, and she is the only person alive who has never once let me get away with managing her the way I manage everyone else.

I call her from the property’s back terrace, phone pressed to my ear, watching the tree line for no reason except that watching tree lines has apparently become a habit I picked up from spending too much time around Dominic Calder.

It’s just past noon.

Somewhere behind me, in the main house, Calder is running a security briefing with the clipped precision that used to irritate me and now, inconveniently, does not.

“You’ve called me three times this week,” Livia says, by way of hello. “You’re either missing me a lot or having a crisis. Which is it?”

“Can’t it be both?”