Page 85 of Secret Baby Daddy

“You don’t have to know today. Just don’t mistake the anger for an answer. It’s a feeling, darling. Feelings tell you the truth about right now. They’re considerably worse at telling you the truth about forever.”

“What if the anger is right, though? What if it’s not just a feeling, but an accurate read on who he actually is?”

“Then you’ll still know that in a month, or in six, once you’ve had time to see it clearly instead of through the fog of the worst week of your life.”

She pats my hand once, the same dry, light gesture she’s used my whole life to settle me.

“I raised you to trust your own judgment, Piper. I didn’t raise you to trust it most when it’s freshest. Wounds lie about how permanent they are. That’s rather their entire function.”

Wren, when I finally loop her fully into the counter-strategy, offers something closer to strategic clarity than emotional wisdom, which I’m grateful for in its own way.

“Roman didn’t just steal your private conversations,” she says, laying out the timeline of the leak with her usual precision. “He built a story out of them. Selectively edited, weaponized, timed for maximum damage. That’s not a man who stumbled onto something true and used it badly. That’s a man who’s been constructing this exact moment for weeks, maybe longer.”

“I know.”

“I just don’t want you conflating what Calder did with what Roman did. They’re not the same category of betrayal, even if they both hurt.”

Wren looks at me carefully.

“You get to be furious at both of them. But only one of them built a weapon out of the truth on purpose.”

I don’t have an answer for that yet.

She hesitates before she gathers her things, and I recognize the shape of that hesitation, because I’ve been watching it flicker across her face on and off for three weeks now.

“There’s something else,” Wren says. “Bad timing, probably the worst timing, and I’ve gone back and forth about even bringing it up while you’re dealing with all of this.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“The Ledger called again. Formal offer this time, not just a feeler. Investigative unit, my name on the masthead, the platform-manipulation work as the flagship piece.”

She says it fast, watching me carefully, the way you watch someone you’re afraid you’re about to hurt.

“I told them I needed time. I meant it. But I’d be lying if I said the timing wasn’t eating at me. You’re in the worst month of your professional life, and I’m sitting on the best offer of mine, and I don’t know how to hold both of those at once without feeling like a traitor either way I choose.”

I feel the old, proprietary instinct rise first, quick and unwelcome, and I set it down deliberately, the way I’ve learned to do with almost everything else this month.

“You’re not a traitor for wanting your name on your own work,” I tell her. “I told you that months ago and I meant it then too. The fact that my life happens to be on fire right now doesn’t change the math on what you’ve earned. I need you right now. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I need you a great deal less than I need you to still respect yourself in five years, and staying out of guilt is a version of loyalty that curdles eventually. I’ve watched it curdle in other people. I don’t want to watch it curdle in you.”

“That’s an extremely generous thing to say to someone who just told you she’s thinking about leaving in the middle of your worst month.”

“It’s an honest thing to say. I’ve had enough of the other kind lately.”

I reach across and take her hand, the same steady grip my grandmother uses on me, passed down without either of us quite noticing.

“Take whatever time you need. Don’t decide anything based on what’s convenient for me. I mean that.”

“I haven’t decided,” she says finally. “I need you to know that isn’t a no. It’s just not a yes yet either.”

“That’s allowed.”

I mean it, even as some small, unguarded part of me is already grieving the version of my company that doesn’t have her in it.

That night, lying awake in the dark, one hand resting over a secret I’m not ready to hand to anyone else, I let myself imagine, just once, telling him.

The look that would cross his face, the way he’d go very still the way he does before every decision that actually costs him something.

I imagine him trying to build a plan around it within minutes, doctors, security, some careful new architecture designed to keep a child safe the way he’s spent his whole career keeping strangers safe.