Page 70 of Secret Baby Daddy

I close the laptop and sit with the shame Livia predicted weeks ago, the ache of wanting two different kinds of intimacy and not knowing whether that makes me greedy or simply, finally, honest about what I actually need.

Are you sure you want two men? Or do you want two different things no single man has ever given you before?

I told her, at the time, that it wasn’t the same thing.

Sitting here now, replaying Atlas’s sentence, I’m no longer sure I built that argument in good faith.

I think about the version of myself that walks into a room and fills it before anyone else gets the chance; the woman Calder tackled to a marble floor, the woman who forced Roman Vasseur out of a mansion with nothing but a bluff and a raised chin.

That woman doesn’t need saving.

She built herself specifically so she’d never need it.

And then I think about the other version, the one who exists only in the dark, typing confessions to a man whose face I’ve never seen, the one who told a stranger about my grandmother’s crossword habit before I ever told the man standing three feet away from me in the flesh.

That version doesn’t perform.

She just says the true thing and trusts, somehow, that it will be received with care instead of leverage.

I have spent my entire adult life keeping those two women very carefully apart, convinced that letting them occupy the same room would mean losing whatever protection the separation provided.

Tonight, for the first time, I let myself wonder what it would actually cost to let them meet.

It occurs to me, distantly, that Calder has never once asked me to choose between the two versions of myself.

He’s simply started, somehow, addressing both of them at once, the armored woman across the conference table and the unguarded one who talked about her grandmother in the dark, without ever seeming to notice he was doing it.

I don’t let myself follow that thought all the way to its conclusion.

Down the hall, I hear Calder’s door open.

I don’t go to him.

I fall asleep with Atlas’s sentence still circling, unresolved, and some small, stubborn part of me already suspects the answer is simpler and far more frightening than anything I’ve let myself consider so far.

22

DOMINIC

I draft the same message eleven times before dawn.

I delete it eleven times.

Each version is more honest than the last, which is precisely why none of them survive.

I have drafted difficult confessions before, to clients about to lose everything, to families about to receive the worst possible news, and none of them cost me anything close to what these eleven attempts cost tonight.

In every other confession, I had nothing personally at stake in how it landed.

Piper, I need to tell you something before this goes any further.

Piper, there’s a version of the last year you don’t fully understand, and I owe you the truth before you learn it any other way.

Piper, I’m Atlas.

Three words.

The simplest sentence I’ve ever failed to send.