Page 84 of Secret Baby Daddy

I’ve registered a name, sketched a client list on the back of an old case file, run the numbers on overhead twice just to make sure the second time wasn’t wishful thinking.

I keep telling myself it’s a contingency, a hedge in case the review goes the way everyone already suspects it will, but contingencies don’t usually come with a logo mockup and a folder labeled Piper Vale Communications sitting open on my desktop at one in the morning.

There’s a grim satisfaction in discovering exactly how much of my value never actually depended on the agency’s letterhead in the first place.

The exhaustion I initially blame on stress.

The nausea I blame on the same thing, plus bad coffee, plus the low-grade dread of checking my phone every morning to see what new distortion Roman’s people have managed to plant overnight.

It takes missing my period entirely before the pieces start assembling themselves into a shape I’ve been actively avoiding.

I buy the test on a Tuesday, alone, at a pharmacy four blocks from my apartment where nobody’s likely to recognize me from the news cycle currently making my face mildly infamous.

I take it standing in my own bathroom, hands steadier than I expect.

It’s positive.

Unambiguously, immediately positive, the second line darker than the first within seconds.

I sit on the edge of the bathtub for a long time afterward, doing math I don’t want to be doing, counting backward through the last few weeks until I land, inevitably, on the one night none of this makes sense without.

The argument that turned into something else entirely, adrenaline and fear and a year of pretending finally burning off into something neither of us fully understood at the time, and afterward, in the dark, the condom that hadn’t held, a fact he told me plainly and I waved off with a statistic because I wanted the quiet more than the conversation.

Almost six weeks, by the doctor’s dating, once I finally make the appointment I’ve been avoiding for four days.

There is no possibility that it isn’t Calder’s.

I don’t tell him.

I turn the decision over for days, examining it from every angle I know how to examine anything, and I keep arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion.

I don’t trust him yet, not with this, not with something this large and permanent and unfixable by any careful statement or eloquent confession.

I’m afraid, specifically, that he’ll return to me the way he returns to every crisis: managing it, containing it, building a plan around it with the same brisk efficiency he brought to moving Sloane out of a compromised building.

I don’t want to be managed.

I want, if this ever happens at all, to be loved through it instead of handled, and I don’t yet know which version of Dominic Calder I’d be handing this news to.

“I am withholding a life-changing truth,” I say out loud to my empty apartment, “because I am afraid of what he will do with it.”

I hear the irony in my own voice as I say it, sharp enough to almost make me laugh, except there’s nothing funny about it at all.

I have spent three weeks furious at a man for deciding, unilaterally, what truth I was allowed to have.

And now I am doing precisely the same thing to him, for reasons that feel, from inside my own chest, entirely justified.

I do it anyway.

Odette, when I finally tell her, because I have to tell someone, and she is still, after everything, the only person whose reaction I trust completely, doesn’t tell me what to do about Calder at all.

“Your anger is honest,” she says, propped up in her recovery chair, crossword abandoned on her lap, watching me with the same pale, merciless attention she’s given me my whole life. “I’m not going to tell you it isn’t earned, or that you owe him forgiveness on any particular timeline. But Piper, anger is not a plan. It’s not a permanent decision, and it’s not a substitute for making one. Eventually you’ll need to decide what you actually want, separate from what he deserves to be punished for.”

“I don’t know how to separate those two things right now.”

“I know.”

She reaches for my hand, papery and steady.