Page 109 of Secret Baby Daddy

We just took away the only material he had to build it with.

The story that runs by evening takes almost exactly the shape I hoped it would: not a scandal about two people caught lying, but an account of a family finally choosing honesty over decades of concealment, two professionals whose private correspondence was stolen and weaponized, and one man willing to admit publicly where his own choices made that weapon more powerful.

Dominic’s mistake is still in every version of the story.

It should be.

The difference is that Roman no longer gets to frame it for him.

And Dominic doesn’t ask me to carry any part of it.

Roman is arrested by federal investigators within hours of the press conference, the evidence package from the archive operation giving them what they needed to move.

Northbridge’s emergency acquisition vote collapses within the week, the board unwilling to attach itself publicly to a man now facing charges connected to both extortion and, pending further investigation, a death twelve years cold.

I stand backstage afterward, exhausted in the way that only follows finishing something enormous, and Calder finds me there, quiet, not quite touching me, giving me exactly the space I haven’t yet told him whether I want closed.

“It’s over,” he says. “The case, at least.”

“The case,” I agree. “Not everything.”

“No,” he says quietly. “Not everything.”

Wren finds me a few minutes later, phone already lit up with the first wave of coverage.

“It’s landing exactly the way you built it. Three major outlets are already framing it as accountability rather than scandal. Cordelia’s team is fielding requests, but the tone’s completely different from three months ago.”

“Good. That’s the whole point. You don’t survive a story like this by hiding from it. You survive it by getting there first, honestly, before anyone else gets to decide what the truth means.”

“You built that instinct a long time before this case, you know.”

Wren studies me for a moment, something warmer than professional respect in her expression.

“I used to think you were just good at spin. I don’t think that anymore.”

“What do you think now?”

“That you’re good at truth.”

She squeezes my arm once, brief and sincere.

“I hope you remember that about yourself, whatever happens next with him.”

I don’t have an answer for that, not yet, and she doesn’t wait for one, already moving on to the next call, the next outlet, the next piece of the machinery still running long after the hardest part is finished.

I find Cordelia in a quiet corner near the exit, still absorbing the scale of what’s just happened to her family’s twelve-year secret, laid bare in a single morning after over a decade of careful, exhausting concealment.

“Thank you,” she says quietly. “For not making Sloane into either a villain or an innocent. I don’t think anyone else would have found that particular balance.”

“She earned the honest version,” I tell her. “That’s all I did. I just refused to give her anything less than what actually happened.”

Cordelia studies me a moment longer, something searching in her expression that I don’t fully understand yet, and I don’t press her on it, too tired to chase one more mystery today.

35

PIPER

Cordelia asks to see us together three days after the press conference, once the worst of the media cycle has started to quiet, and something in the careful way she arranges the meeting tells me this isn’t going to be a simple thank-you.