Page 69 of Secret Baby Daddy

I have told myself a great many comforting things this week.

I am beginning to lose track of which ones I actually believe.

Hayes finds me on the terrace an hour later and hands me a printout without a word: a secondary confirmation, a wire transfer from a Northbridge shell account to a records-management firm the Merrick family used twelve years ago, timed three days before Roman’s visit to the archive.

“He didn’t just have access,” Hayes says. “He paid for it.”

“Then this was never opportunistic. He built the pipeline before he ever needed it. Get me everything else that firm touched. If he was buying access twelve years ago, I want to know what else he’s been quietly buying since.”

Hayes nods and leaves, and I sit alone with the weight of it, turning over the particular cruelty of finally understanding that Jonah didn’t die because I trusted the wrong man’s judgment in the moment.

He died because that man had been building the conditions for his death for years before I ever picked up the phone to ask for advice.

It should feel like vindication.

It mostly just feels like grief, arriving twelve years late and heavier than I remember it being the first time.

21

PIPER

I tell Atlas the truth at one in the morning because I’ve run out of ways to keep it from being true just by not saying it out loud.

Cassandra: I think I’m developing feelings for him. Not just the physical thing. Actual feelings. It terrifies me more than the fire, more than the extortion, more than any of it.

Atlas: Tell me.

Cassandra: With you, I’ve never had to hide anything. You know my mind better than anyone alive, the parts I don’t show clients, the parts I don’t even show my own grandmother. It’s the safest I’ve ever felt being honest with another person.

Atlas: And him?

Cassandra: With him, I feel alive. Not safe, exactly. Something more dangerous and more necessary than safe. He sees the parts of me I’ve spent my whole career trying to make disappear, and instead of flinching, he just stays. Watches. Doesn’t ask me to perform any version of myself except the real one.

I stop typing, staring at what I’ve just admitted to a stranger I’ve never met, and something hot and uncomfortable settles under my ribs.

Cassandra: I’m ashamed of how much I want both of you. I know that’s not how any of this is supposed to work. I know I’m supposed to choose. I just don’t know how to give either of you up, and I hate what that says about me.

The reply doesn’t come immediately.

I watch the indicator, typing, stopping, typing again, the rhythm of someone drafting something he isn’t sure he has the right to say.

Atlas: You’re not a bad person for wanting both. But I don’t think that’s actually what’s happening here.

Cassandra: Then what is?

Atlas: Maybe you do not want two men. Maybe you finally want one man in front of whom you do not have to hide.

I read it three times, and something about the phrasing lands strangely, too precise, too close to a sentence I might have built myself if I were the one saying it instead of receiving it.

Cassandra: That’s a nice thought. I’m not sure it’s true. They’re very different men, Atlas. He doesn’t even know you exist.

Atlas: Are you certain of that?

I type out three different follow-ups and delete each one, unsettled by how much the sentence seems to want an answer I don’t have.

Before I can settle on a fourth, Cordelia’s assistant knocks, apologetic, informing me Sloane’s attorney needs a signature on a filing due at nine and would I review it tonight, and by the time I’ve handled it and come back to my laptop, the moment for asking has passed, and Atlas has gone quiet again, the way he’s been quiet for days.

I file the strangeness of it away with all the other small, inexplicable coincidences I haven’t yet found the courage to add up, and with the test result I have decided to trust because it is comfortable.