Page 107 of Secret Baby Daddy

I don’t let myself decide.

That choice belongs to her as much as it belongs to me.

“Send everything.”

“Already sent.”

Of course it is.

I almost smile.

Hayes starts cataloguing the room while I stand in the middle of the archive Roman spent twelve years believing he controlled and listen to the quiet after him.

For most of my adult life, I imagined closure would feel like certainty.

A confession.

A handcuff.

Some perfect piece of evidence powerful enough to rearrange the past.

It doesn’t.

Jonah is still dead.

I still moved him.

Roman still gave away the address.

All of those things remain true at once.

The difference is that none of them belongs to Roman alone anymore.

By the time I leave the archive, Piper already has tomorrow morning’s press conference drafted.

Federal investigators have acknowledged receipt of the evidence package.

Northbridge has no idea yet that the story they’ve spent twelve years controlling is about to become public without their permission.

And Roman Vasseur is somewhere in Manhattan, probably making calls, destroying whatever he still can, believing, because men like him always do, that there must still be one version of the truth he can control.

There isn’t.

Tomorrow, Piper tells the whole thing.

34

PIPER

There is exactly one way to take a weapon out of a manipulator’s hands, and it isn’t hiding from the truth.

It’s getting there first.

I book the press conference for ten in the morning, a Tuesday, deliberately unglamorous timing, no red carpet lighting, no soft-focus optics designed to make anyone look more sympathetic than they’ve earned.

Just a plain room, a podium, cameras from every outlet that covered the original scandal, and a story I have spent weeks building with more care than I have ever built anything in my career.

I have built press conferences before for clients who wanted to look sympathetic.