Page 63 of Secret Baby Daddy

The timestamp on my message to Piper’s phone.

Thirty seconds apart, exactly enough time for a person to read one message, glance up, and pick up a second device.

There is no version of this that isn’t true anymore.

I say the sentence out loud, quiet in the dark alcove, as if hearing it in my own voice might make it easier to carry.

It does not.

Piper is Cassandra.

The woman asleep in the next room, the woman I have spent the last several hours with in ways I am only beginning to understand the weight of, is the same woman I have trusted with every unguarded piece of myself for an entire year.

I have told her about Jonah, in pieces, in the careful anonymous dark.

I have told her things I have never told anyone but Ingrid.

And she has told me, tonight, without knowing it, that she slept with a stranger who understands her better than anyone, a stranger who is, in fact, me.

I was never confessing to a stranger at all.

I was confessing to the one person whose opinion of me I have spent a year telling myself did not matter enough to risk losing.

She has no idea.

She has absolutely no idea that Atlas is sitting down the hall, laptop open, hands finally steady again for the wrong reason entirely.

I think about walking back into that room right now.

Waking her.

Telling her everything in one unbroken sentence before I lose the nerve.

I’m Atlas. I only just figured out that you’re Cassandra. I should tell you now, before this discovery has the chance to become a secret of its own.

I get as far as standing, as far as crossing half the distance to the doorway, before the rest of the sentence catches in my throat like something physical.

She is asleep, finally peaceful after a night that nearly ended in violence before it became something else entirely.

If I wake her now, I don’t hand her clarity.

I hand her whiplash, grief and desire and betrayal all arriving in the same five minutes, with no time to separate one from the other.

I tell myself that’s the reason for the silence.

I tell myself it’s mercy, not cowardice.

I don’t fully believe myself.

I sit back down anyway.

I sit in the dark long after the certainty finishes settling, turning over every version of tomorrow this discovery could produce, and understand that for the first time in twelve years of careful, controlled decision-making, I have absolutely no idea which choice is the right one.

She wakes an hour later, soft and unguarded in the gray morning light, and I say nothing at all.

“You look like you haven’t slept,” she says, pulling a sweater on over her shoulders, hair still loose from the night before.

“I had some things to think through.”