Page 91 of Secret Baby Daddy

“How long have you known?”

She goes very still, and the color drains out of her face fast enough that I know, immediately, completely, exactly how right the question was.

“Get out,” she says, low, furious, betrayed in a way that has nothing to do with Roman at all. “Get out, Calder. Right now.”

I don’t move, too stunned by the confirmation to trust my own legs, and the silence that follows is the loudest thing either of us has said in six weeks.

“How long,” I ask again, quieter this time, though nothing about my chest feels quiet at all. “Piper, how long have you known?”

“Three weeks.”

She says it flatly, daring me to react.

“I found out three weeks ago, and I decided, on my own, that you didn’t get to know yet.”

“That’s my child.”

“I’m aware of whose child it is, Calder.”

Her voice cracks, finally, the fury giving way to something rawer underneath it.

“I’ve been aware of it every single morning for three weeks, alone, making every decision about it entirely by myself, because I didn’t trust you to hear this news and do anything other than turn it into another crisis to manage.”

“You took away my choice.”

The words come out before I can soften them.

“You decided, unilaterally, what I was allowed to know about my own child. That’s the exact thing I did to you, and six weeks ago you told me exactly how unforgivable that was.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

Her voice breaks entirely now.

“I have spent three weeks hating myself for exactly this reason. I know precisely how ugly it is, because I’ve been living inside the same pattern I condemned you for in that chapel. Fear. Control. A withheld truth. The belief that I get to decide what someone else can handle instead of just telling them.”

“Then why?”

“Because I was afraid.”

She says it plainly, no defense left in her voice at all.

“Afraid you’d come back into my life managing this instead of loving it. Afraid of watching you build a plan around our child instead of simply being a person who wanted this with me. I know that’s the exact failure you’re guilty of. I did it anyway.”

We sit in silence for a long moment, both of us finally out of anger to spend, and I understand that whatever comes next has to be built out of something other than blame.

“The harms aren’t identical,” I say eventually. “What I did to you and what you’ve just done to me. I don’t think they’re the same size, Piper.”

“No,” she agrees. “They’re not. But the shape is the same. Fear. Control. A person deciding, alone, what the other one is capable of surviving.”

She wipes her eyes, furious at her own tears.

“Neither secret excuses the other, Calder. I’m not telling you this to balance some ledger between us.”

“I understand. I’m not asking you to forgive me because I finally know something you were also hiding. I’m just asking you to let me actually be here now. However angry you still are.”

She doesn’t answer right away, and I don’t push her to.

We sit together in the small coffee shop, two people who have each, in their own way, decided the other couldn’t be trusted with the truth, both finally out of the energy required to pretend that decision was ever really about protection at all.