Page 82 of Secret Baby Daddy

27

DOMINIC

Roman doesn’t release the truth.

He releases a version of it, curated with the precision of a man who has spent twelve years learning exactly which details make a lie unnecessary.

The excerpts hit three major outlets simultaneously at six in the morning, timed for maximum damage before anyone has coffee in hand to think clearly.

They’re not fabricated, which is the particular genius of it: every line is something Piper or I actually wrote, lifted verbatim from Blackline and arranged, selectively, stripped of context, until the two of us look like architects of the exact scandal we spent three weeks trying to solve.

Cassandra, discussing “the Sloane situation” with unusual specificity months before it became public.

Atlas, referencing “the footage” and “the timeline” in language that reads, out of context, like men constructing a crisis rather than managing one.

There is no message in the entire archive where either of us discusses manufacturing anything.

There didn’t need to be.

Roman simply removed enough surrounding text that two people processing a real, ongoing catastrophe read, to anyone without the full picture, like two people who built it together for profit.

I read the excerpts a second time from a purely technical angle, searching for a single factual inaccuracy I could challenge directly, and find, with a kind of grim professional respect, that there isn’t one.

Context was always going to be enough.

Ashworth Kline’s executive committee suspends Piper within four hours of the story breaking.

I lose my first client, a modest security contract, nothing that matters financially, but the first domino falling always tells you how many more are lined up behind it.

Northbridge issues a statement by noon demanding Sloane’s resignation from the board and calling for an emergency acquisition vote in eight weeks, framing the manufactured scandal as proof the family can no longer be trusted to govern itself.

I spend the day watching a career I built over twelve years dismantle itself in real time, and I feel almost nothing about it.

The only thing that registers is the eight-week window Roman just handed us without meaning to: an emergency vote requires preparation, requires the illusion of due process, requires exactly the kind of runway that gives me time to undo what he’s done before the deadline arrives.

I spend that first night drafting a statement.

Full responsibility, unambiguous, no hedging.

I confirmed Piper Vale’s identity as a Blackline correspondent without her knowledge or consent. I withheld that information for personal reasons. Any implication that we coordinated to manufacture the Merrick crisis is categorically false, and I take sole responsibility for the deception that made such an implication possible.

I read it back a dozen times, refining the language, and somewhere around the eighth revision I stop and actually look at what I’m doing.

I am, once again, deciding which version of the truth Piper is allowed to live with.

My intent is different this time; I want to take the damage onto myself and protect whatever is left of her reputation.

But Piper was right.

Intent doesn’t change what you did.

I decided for her with Atlas. Now I’m about to do it again, dressed up as penance instead of cowardice.

I close the laptop without sending anything.

Hayes finds me an hour later, grim-faced, with confirmation that the emergency vote is being fast-tracked through whatever procedural channels Roman has spent years quietly buying access to, confirmation that eight weeks is a hard deadline, not a suggestion.

“You look like a man who’s given up,” Hayes says.