Page 65 of Secret Baby Daddy

The coffee is what finally makes me say something.

He brings it to me Tuesday morning without being asked, sets it down beside my laptop, and I’ve got the cup halfway to my mouth before I stop, staring at it.

Oat milk.

One sugar.

A precise pour that leaves room at the top for the foam I always ask baristas to skim instead of stir in.

It is, exactly, to the smallest detail, the order I described to Atlas four months ago in a rambling three a.m. message about the tragedy of coffee shops that don’t understand foam ratios.

Hayes does not know my coffee order.

Cordelia’s staff does not know my coffee order.

There is exactly one place on earth that detail has ever been spoken aloud, and it was not in any room Dominic Calder has ever been standing in.

“How did you know this is how I take it,” I ask, careful, watching his face.

Something flickers there, gone almost before I catch it, a flash of what looks, absurdly, like panic, before he recovers into something smoother.

“I asked Hayes. He’s observant about that sort of thing.”

“Hayes barely knows what he takes in his own coffee.”

“I must have guessed, then.”

He says it lightly, already turning back toward his laptop, but I watch him take the cup back a half-second later and swap it wordlessly for a second one he’d apparently prepared as backup, slightly different, closer to what an outside observer might reasonably assume a woman like me would order.

“Try this one instead. I think I mixed up the order.”

I file the recovery itself as evidence, separate from whatever caused it, because a man with nothing to hide doesn’t need a backup answer rehearsed and ready.

It isn’t the first strange moment this week.

He’s started finishing my sentences with the exact word I was reaching for, has twice referenced conversations we’ve apparently never had, catches himself each time with a small, private wince I’ve started cataloging without meaning to.

Wednesday it’s a reference to Odette’s crossword habit, dropped so casually into a conversation about the foundation’s board that I almost miss it entirely, until I realize I’ve never once mentioned my grandmother’s crosswords to him directly.

Thursday it’s a comment about Livia, about Venice, about a masquerade I described once to exactly one person in my life, and that person wasn’t sitting across from me in a security briefing pretending he’d read it in a background file.

“Where did you hear that,” I ask, sharper than I mean to.

“Hear what.”

“About Livia. The masquerade. I’ve never told you that story.”

“You must have mentioned it. I have a good memory for details.”

He doesn’t quite meet my eyes when he says it, and the deflection lands wrong, too smooth, too rehearsed, like a man reciting a line he’s practiced for this contingency.

“You have a good memory for details you were never given,” I say slowly. “That’s not the same thing, Calder.”

“Piper—”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m telling you I notice things. It’s the job.”

I let it go, mostly because I don’t have a better answer yet, but the sentence sits wrong in my chest for the rest of the afternoon, the way a lie sits wrong even when no one’s told one yet.