Page 114 of Secret Baby Daddy

“I did it because I liked her, Dominic, in the twenty minutes I spent talking to her. I’d like the chance to like her for longer than that, if you two can find your way to something worth building. But that’s her choice to make, not mine, and certainly not yours to force.”

I sit with that for a long while after we hang up, alone in an apartment that feels larger and quieter than it used to, and understand what it actually means to want something enough to stop trying to control whether you get it.

I spend the following days rebuilding what’s left of my practice, slowly, without the frantic urgency I might once have brought to it.

Two of my former clients return once the story settles into its honest final shape, satisfied that whatever they’d initially feared about my judgment doesn’t survive contact with the actual record.

I take the work quietly, and I find, for the first time in twelve years, that I don’t need it to fill every hour of the day the way I once did.

Odette asks to see me a few days later. I nearly refuse, worried that meeting her without Piper will look like exactly the kind of indirect pressure I’ve promised myself I won’t apply. But Odette makes it clear the request is hers, not Piper’s, and that she has no intention of carrying messages between us.

“You’re not here to ask me to intervene,” Odette says, once I’m seated across from her, sharp as ever despite the walker parked beside her chair. “I can see that much on your face.”

“No. I came because you asked, and because I think you deserve to hear directly from me what happened, rather than whatever version reaches you secondhand.”

She listens to the entire account without interrupting, the same patient, merciless attention I imagine she once gave to men perjuring themselves in courtrooms decades ago, and when I finish, she’s quiet for a long moment.

“You did an unforgivable thing for a very human reason,” she says finally. “That’s not absolution, Dominic. I’m not in the business of granting that on my granddaughter’s behalf, and I wouldn’t if I could.”

Something in her expression softens slightly.

“But I’ve watched a great many men perform contrition in my life. What you just did wasn’t a performance. I recognize the difference, even now.”

“Thank you for saying so.”

“Don’t thank me. Go do something useful with the recognition instead of collecting it like a reward.”

She waves a hand toward the door, dismissing me with the brisk affection she seems to reserve for anyone she’s decided is worth the trouble.

“And Dominic, whatever she decides, you did the right thing sending her the truth without demanding anything back for it. That’s rarer than you’d think. Most people only learn honesty as a tool for getting what they want.”

I leave her apartment with something lighter in my chest than I’ve carried in weeks, not resolution, not yet, but something adjacent to it, the relief of having finally done the difficult thing correctly, regardless of whether it earns me anything at all.

37

PIPER

I read every message twice before I let myself feel anything about them, because that’s the only way I know how to survive something this large without letting it knock me flat.

Calder’s apology doesn’t ask me for anything.

That’s the detail I keep returning to, turning over in my hands like a stone I can’t decide whether to keep.

No justification.

No careful legal hedging designed to minimize what he actually did.

No mention of the pregnancy as leverage, no suggestion that fatherhood should buy him a faster route back into my life than he’s earned through honest reckoning alone.

Just a plain, complete account of exactly what he did and why, followed by an offer of unconditional access to every private word he’s ever written me, with nothing held back and nothing demanded in return.

I understand, reading it, exactly what it cost him to write it this way.

Dominic Calder has spent twelve years building his entire identity around control, around being the man who accounts for every variable, manages every outcome, never leaves a single thread untied.

This apology ties nothing.

It simply lays the truth down and walks away from it, leaving me every possible choice, including the choice to never speak to him again.