Page 117 of Secret Baby Daddy

“About this. About our future. I withheld the pregnancy from you for three weeks because I was afraid of exactly the same thing you were afraid of, that the truth would take away my choice about who you’d become once you had it. I understand now how fear can make withholding feel like protection. That doesn’t make what you did okay, and it doesn’t make what I did okay either.”

“We’re not building this on the baby,” he says quietly, and I hear, underneath it, the care he’s taking not to make the pregnancy into leverage even now, even standing this close to everything he wants. “I need you to know that clearly. Whatever we decide about us, it has to be a separate choice from whatever we decide about co-parenting. I won’t let our child become the reason we stay together if staying together isn’t actually what you want.”

“I know.”

I look at him, steady, certain in a way I haven’t let myself be in weeks.

“That’s exactly why I’m choosing it separately. I’m not staying because of the baby, Calder. I’m choosing you because you finally became the kind of person worth choosing, and because some stubborn, exhausted part of me never actually stopped wanting to.”

We speak for hours after that, openly, about everything, the pregnancy, the practical shape of what comes next, the promises we’re making to each other about honesty going forward, none of it treated as proof that the romance has to survive, all of it simply the truth, laid down plainly between two people finally choosing to build something out of it instead of around it.

It’s near midnight when he finally kisses me, slow and unhurried, nothing like the desperate collision of adrenaline and fear that first brought us together, nothing like the second night either, when half the truth was still hidden between us.

This is different.

This is the first time either of us has touched the other with absolutely nothing left unspoken, no Atlas, no Cassandra, no careful omission waiting to detonate somewhere down the line.

“Stay,” he murmurs, against my mouth.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him, and for the first time in this entire story, I mean it completely, with nothing held back, and nothing left to confess.

When his hands find me in the dark, there’s no ghost of Atlas standing between us anymore, no earlier draft of me he’s quietly working from, just Calder, present entirely, learning me again as though for the first time, because in the one way that actually matters, it is the first time.

“I love you,” he says, quiet and unguarded. “Not Cassandra. Not some idealized version I built out of a year of careful messages. You. Exactly as complicated and armored and unwilling to be handled as you actually are.”

I believe him completely.

“I love you too.”

Saying it now feels different than it would have months ago, when half of what we felt for each other was still happening in the dark, addressed to strangers neither of us had the courage to name.

Later, tangled together in the quiet, his hand resting over the place where our child is still barely more than a possibility, I understand what it feels like to be known without anything hidden underneath it.

“What happens now?” I ask, half-asleep.

“Now we figure it out together,” he says. “Slowly. Honestly. No hidden accounts, no careful omissions, no deciding for each other what the other one can handle.”

He presses a kiss to my temple.

“I don’t know exactly what it looks like yet. I just know I want to find out with you instead of around you.”

For once, I don’t need to know what comes next.

I close my eyes and let that be enough.

Epilogue

PIPER

Six Months Later

The nursery still smells faintly of paint, even six weeks after Dominic swore he’d aired it out for a full week before we’d let Odette anywhere near it with her opinions about color.

Sage green, in the end, over his campaign for navy and my campaign for absolutely nothing gender-coded at all.

Odette won, as she generally does, on the grounds that sage was “the color of a child who will not embarrass either of you by having main character energy before the age of ten.”

I stand in the doorway a moment longer than I need to, feeling the unhurried quiet of a room built for someone who hasn’t arrived yet, and understand that this waiting no longer has anything anxious folded inside it.