Page 76 of Secret Baby Daddy

PIPER

The hospital has a specific smell, antiseptic and bad coffee and something underneath it that reminds me of every worst phone call I’ve ever received, and by the time I make it to the fourth-floor waiting room, whatever armor I left the Hudson Valley property wearing has already started coming apart at the seams.

I have sat in enough hospital waiting rooms professionally, managing other families’ worst nights from a controlled distance, and none of it prepared me for how different it feels when the person on the table is mine.

Odette’s surgery runs longer than the surgeon estimated.

Nobody tells me anything for two hours except practiced reassurances that mean nothing, and somewhere around the ninety-minute mark I stop being able to hold the composed version of myself together at all.

I open my laptop in a corner of the waiting room, mostly because I don’t know what else to do with my hands, and I find myself typing to Atlas before I’ve fully decided to.

Cassandra: My grandmother’s in surgery. Fractured hip. They said it’s routine and I keep hearing all the ways routine surgery goes wrong in people her age. I don’t know how to just sit here and wait.

Cassandra: I don’t want to be the composed one right now. I don’t have it in me.

Cassandra: I’m scared, Atlas. I don’t say that word out loud to anyone. I’m saying it to you because you’re the only person who’s never once made me feel stupid for needing to.

I don’t get a reply.

Not for eleven minutes, which is unlike him, unlike the man who usually answers within moments no matter the hour.

I watch the indicator that shows he’s read the messages just sit there, and something in me curls smaller with every passing minute, and some part of me starts building a theory I’m not ready to examine, not tonight, not with everything else already threatening to come apart.

Calder finds me twenty minutes after that, laptop closed now, staring at nothing.

“There are developments in the case,” he says, crouching down in front of my chair, voice low. “Roman’s been quiet. I wanted to update you in person.”

I barely register the words.

Something about his face, careful, searching, entirely focused on me instead of the case he claims brought him here, makes the composure I’ve been fighting to hold finally give out.

“She might not wake up from this the same,” I say, and my voice cracks in a way I haven’t allowed it to crack in front of another adult in longer than I can remember. “She raised me, Calder. She’s the only person who’s ever actually seen me instead of the version of me I present. If something happens to her…”

“Nothing’s happened yet.”

He takes my hand, steady, grounding.

“You don’t have to be composed with me. Not tonight.”

He stays.

He brings me coffee I don’t remember asking for, exactly the way I take it, oat milk and one sugar, foam skimmed instead of stirred, and this time I don’t question how he knows, because I don’t have the strength left to interrogate anything except the surgical update board.

He sits beside me through the rest of the wait, quiet, present, occasionally reaching over to still my hands when I start picking at the hem of my sleeve without noticing.

“Tell me about her,” he says, somewhere in the third hour. “Odette. You’ve mentioned her, but I don’t actually know much beyond that she raised you.”

So I tell him.

About the courtroom stenography, the forty years of watching men lie under oath and learning to hear the shape of a falsehood before it finished forming.

About the crosswords, the pearl-buttoned cardigan, the dry humor she’s used my entire life to say true things gently enough that they didn’t wound on the way in.

He listens without once trying to redirect the conversation toward anything useful, and something about being allowed to simply talk, uninterrupted, about someone I love steadies me more than any reassurance from the surgical staff has managed to.

“She sounds like the reason you’re as sharp as you are,” he says quietly, once I’ve run out of stories.

“She’s the reason I know the difference between being sharp and being armored. I didn’t always.”