Page 48 of Secret Baby Daddy

“With you, it’s always both.”

I can hear Nico shrieking with laughter somewhere in her background, followed by Valentino’s low, amused voice telling him to slow down before he takes out a lamp.

Livia’s world, these days, sounds exactly like this: settled, warm, a little chaotic in the way a house full of people who chose each other tends to be.

“Give me a second. Valentino, can you grab him? Thank you. Okay. I’m yours.”

“How’s domestic bliss.”

“Loud. Sticky. Better than anything I thought I wanted five years ago.”

I can picture the exact look on her face, the soft one she never used to let anyone see back when her father still ran her entire life from a distance.

“Stop deflecting. Tell me what’s actually going on.”

I have spent years half-convinced domestic happiness was a story people told themselves to justify giving up the sharper parts of their ambition.

Watching Livia build an actual life out of it, unglamorous and loud and entirely hers, has slowly worn down a theory I used to hold with more confidence than I currently have left for it.

“There’s a man. Work thing. Insufferable, controlling, thinks every problem has exactly one correct answer and it’s always his.”

“That’s not a crisis, Piper, that’s your type. You’ve dated worse and liked it more.”

“It’s different this time.”

I say it before I’ve fully thought it out, which is unlike me.

“We spent the night stuck in the same room during a power outage. We talked. Actually talked, not the poised version I usually show people. And this morning he looked at me like I’d handed him something he didn’t know he was allowed to want.”

It is easier, usually, to workshop a feeling before I hand it to anyone, the way I workshop a headline before it reaches a client.

Livia has never once let me get away with the workshopped version.

“And?”

“And there’s someone else too.”

I keep my voice light, careful, the way I’ve learned to keep anything involving Atlas.

“Someone I’ve been talking to for a long time. Anonymously. It’s complicated to explain. He knows me in a way almost nobody does. I’ve never had to perform for him. It’s the only place I’ve ever gotten to just be honest.”

Livia is quiet for a moment, and I know that silence.

It’s the one she uses right before she says something I don’t want to hear and turns out, infuriatingly, to be right about.

“So you have a man who sees the parts of you that you show the world,” she says slowly, “and a man who sees the parts of you that you don’t show anyone. And you’re telling yourself this is a love triangle.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I don’t think it is, actually.”

I hear her settle onto a couch, the creak of the old farmhouse furniture she described to me in exhaustive detail after she and Valentino bought the place.

“I think you’ve spent your whole life so busy managing what people see that you split yourself into pieces without noticing you did it.”

“That’s not what this is.”

“Isn’t it, though? Are you sure you want two men? Or do you want two different things no single man has ever given you before?”