Page 90 of Secret Baby Daddy

“Get to the point, Roman.”

“Very well.”

He studies me over the rim of his glass, something calculating shifting behind the paternal warmth he’s never fully abandoned, not even now.

“Piper Vale will never forgive you. You understand that, I assume. A woman like that doesn’t rebuild trust once it’s been dismantled this thoroughly. I’d know. I’ve spent a career dismantling exactly this kind of trust for a living.”

“Is that the entire reason you asked me here? To offer relationship advice?”

“I’m offering you an exit.”

His voice drops, softer, more intimate, the tone he uses right before he says something designed to cut.

“Claim she seduced you through Blackline. Say she extracted confidential case information from you under false pretenses, manipulated you into compromising the investigation. It’s not even entirely a lie, is it? She did learn things about you she shouldn’t have. The narrative writes itself, Dominic, and it saves your practice, your reputation, everything you’ve spent twelve years building. All it costs is her.”

I feel the old, familiar anger rise, sharp and immediate, the fury I haven’t fully controlled since he said Jonah’s name in Cordelia’s drawing room.

I recognize the impulse instantly, the desire to stand, to say something I can’t take back, to give him exactly the confrontation he engineered this entire meeting to provoke.

I don’t do it.

I reach instead, quietly, for the recorder in my jacket pocket, already running since before he arrived, and I let him keep talking.

“I have no interest in destroying her further,” I say, once he’s finished detailing exactly how convenient a betrayal narrative would prove for both our careers. “I’ll take responsibility for my own actions. I won’t manufacture a story to protect myself at her expense. I’ve done enough of that already.”

Something flickers across his face, disappointment, maybe, or simple recalculation, before he retreats into pleasant unbotheredness, and we finish the meal with nothing further of substance exchanged, both of us performing civility for an audience neither of us cares about.

I don’t confront him with the recording.

I want to, badly, the old instinct screaming at me to use it immediately, to end this at the table before he can build whatever comes next.

I take the recording, unused, and I bring it to Piper instead, because I have spent this entire case deciding, alone, what to do with information that concerns her, and I am done making that mistake even once more.

She meets me at a neutral coffee shop two blocks from her apartment, the first time we’ve been in the same room in six weeks, and something in her face when she sees me is guarded in a way that costs me more than I expect.

“Roman tried to get me to blame you for everything,” I tell her, sliding the recorder across the table. “I recorded it instead of confronting him. It’s yours to use however you decide is right. I’m not making that call for you.”

She takes it without comment, and we sit for a moment in a silence that isn’t quite as hostile as the one in the hospital chapel, though it isn’t warm either.

It’s while we’re reviewing the recording together, heads bent over the small device, that I notice the things I haven’t let myself notice properly in six weeks apart.

The untouched coffee in front of her, ordered out of habit and then pushed away after one sip.

The way she pales slightly when the barista carries a tray of something fried past our table.

The careful way she’s eating, small portions, plain foods, nothing like the woman who once described to me, in exhaustive Blackline detail, her opinions on the correct foam-to-coffee ratio.

And then, watching her reach for the recorder, I see her hand drift, unconsciously, toward her abdomen, resting there for half a second before she catches herself and moves it away.

I don’t magically know.

I am not building a theory out of certainty.

But twelve years of reading rooms for threats has taught me to notice patterns before I fully understand their meaning, and every piece in front of me is assembling itself into a shape I don’t want to name out loud until I’m certain.

“Piper.”

My voice comes out quieter than I intend.