Page 116 of Secret Baby Daddy

I think about everything Odette told me, about anger being honest but not being a permanent decision.

I think about Wren reminding me that Roman built a weapon out of true things, and that the antidote was never hiding, only honesty delivered on my own terms instead of someone else’s.

I think about Ingrid’s sentence, the one she said not to excuse him but to explain him, he lied because you were the first person he did not know how to survive losing, and I understand, finally, that an explanation isn’t a demand for absolution.

It’s simply a fact, offered honestly, for me to do whatever I choose with.

I close the laptop, put on my coat, and grab my keys.

I don’t call ahead, don’t give him the courtesy of preparation, because I want to see his face the moment he understands I’ve actually come.

I go to him.

38

PIPER

He opens the door before I finish knocking, like some part of him has been standing there waiting since the moment he sent the last message, and for a long moment neither of us says anything at all.

“You came,” he says, quiet, disbelieving.

“I came.”

I step past him into the apartment, and something about being here, in his space, without a case or a crisis forcing either of us into the same room, feels entirely different than anything that’s happened between us before.

“I read everything. All of it.”

“And?”

“And I’m not here to tell you it’s forgiven.”

I turn to face him, steady, needing him to hear this part clearly before anything else happens.

“I’m here because I finally understood something Cordelia’s story made obvious, and I couldn’t keep pretending I hadn’t. You gave me the whole truth without controlling what I did with it. I owe you the same thing, and I haven’t been giving it to you.”

For the first time since I walked in, all four versions of us are somehow present in the same room at once, Piper and Calder, standing three feet apart in his quiet apartment, and Cassandra and Atlas, still faintly audible underneath every word, the year of anonymous honesty that got us here in the first place.

“I’m not forgiving you because your reasons were romantic,” I tell him. “I’ve spent weeks turning that possibility over and rejecting it every time. I’m forgiving you because you accepted full responsibility without demanding a reward for it, and because you actually changed how you behave once the truth gave me power over you. That’s not the same as being sorry, Calder. Plenty of people are sorry. You’re the first one who let sorry cost you actual control.”

Something breaks open in his face, twelve years of careful composure finally giving way entirely.

“I’m not going to promise you I’ll never be afraid again. Or controlling. I don’t think that fear disappears just because I’ve named it once.”

“I don’t need that promise. Nobody could actually keep it.”

I close the remaining distance between us, close enough now to feel the warmth of him, familiar and terrifying in equal measure.

“I need a different one. Promise me you’ll never again try to obtain my agreement by withholding information that would materially change my choice. Not because you’re certain you’re right about what I can handle. Because you’re not certain, and you ask me anyway.”

“I promise.”

He says it plainly, without hesitation.

“I promise you that, Piper. Completely.”

“Then I need to make the same promise back.”

I press my hand flat against my stomach, still barely showing, still entirely, permanently real.