Page 75 of Secret Baby Daddy

“It’s important. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

I press a kiss to her forehead, aware even as I do it that I am borrowing against a trust I’m about to spend the whole day preparing to break.

“Tonight. I promise.”

She studies me a moment longer, then lets it go, trusting me with a patience I don’t currently deserve.

We make it exactly forty minutes into the day before the deadline gets taken out of my hands entirely.

Piper’s phone rings while we’re reviewing the server data with Hayes, and I watch her face change the second she answers it, the color draining, her hand tightening around the phone until her knuckles go pale.

“When,” she says, already standing, already reaching for her jacket with hands that have started to shake. “Is she stable? I need, I need to know if she’s stable.”

“Piper.”

I’m beside her before I’ve fully processed moving.

“What happened?”

“It’s Odette.”

Her voice cracks on the name, the armored version of her finally, completely gone.

“She fell. She’s in the hospital. They don’t know yet how bad it is.”

I feel the deadline I built for myself this morning collapse under the weight of something far more urgent, and for one guilty, ashamed moment, I feel something that isn’t grief for Odette at all: a flicker of relief, ugly and immediate, that the confession has just been postponed by a crisis I didn’t have to manufacture myself.

I hate myself for feeling it.

I feel it anyway.

“We’re leaving now,” I tell her, already reaching for the car keys. “I’ll drive. You call the hospital.”

The drive to the city takes ninety minutes.

Piper spends the first thirty on the phone, voice clipped and precise even now, extracting information out of a nurse who clearly wasn’t prepared for the force of Piper Vale in crisis mode.

By the time she hangs up, some of the color has come back into her face, though her hands are still not entirely steady in her lap.

“Fractured hip,” she says quietly, staring out the window at the passing trees. “She’s stable. They’re prepping her for surgery this afternoon. The nurse says it’s routine, as much as any surgery at her age can be routine, but,” she stops, presses the back of her hand against her mouth for a moment. “She’s eighty-one, Calder. Routine doesn’t mean nothing.”

“No,” I agree. “It doesn’t.”

I reach over and take her free hand, lacing our fingers together on the console between us, and she lets me, gripping back hard enough that I know exactly how much effort the composure in her voice is costing her.

I think about the confession still sitting unspoken in my chest, about the deadline I set less than two hours ago, already dissolved.

I tell myself this is simply bad timing.

Some smaller, more honest part of me recognizes the shape of what I’m actually doing, reaching, again, for any available reason to postpone a conversation I am still afraid to have.

“Thank you,” Piper says quietly, somewhere past the halfway point, “for not asking me if I’m okay. I don’t think I could answer that right now without falling apart, and I need to hold it together until we’re actually in the building.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell her, and I mean it as simply as I’ve ever meant anything, even as some traitorous part of my conscience notes the irony of promising permanence while still withholding the one truth that might determine whether she wants me to stay once she has it.

We drive the rest of the way in silence, her hand still in mine, the confession riding along in the space between us like a third passenger neither of us has agreed to acknowledge yet.

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