Page 25 of Secret Baby Daddy

“Always.”

I lean against the counter, giving her the full attention I don’t always manage outside of a crisis, and feel a small, familiar guilt about that.

“The Ledger called me again. Third time this month.”

She says it fast, like ripping off a bandage.

“Investigative desk. They want to build a unit around the platform-manipulation reporting I did on my own time last year, the stuff I never even pitched you because I knew you’d tell me it wasn’t billable.”

I set the wine down.

“Wren.”

“I’m not taking it.”

She says it too quickly, the way people say things they haven’t fully decided.

“I just wanted you to hear it from me instead of finding out some other way. I didn’t want it to be a secret sitting in the room every time we work a case together.”

I study her, this woman I hired at twenty-three because she asked me a question in an interview I’d never been asked before, not how do you win, but how do you decide it’s worth winning, and understand, with the ache of watching someone outgrow the shape you built for them, that I am looking at exactly the ambition I trained into her, aimed now somewhere I don’t control.

“You built that reporting on your own time,” I say carefully. “That means it’s yours. Whatever you decide to do with it is yours too.”

“That’s a generous way of saying you’d rather I stayed.”

“It’s an honest way of saying both things are true at once.”

I pour her a second glass she hasn’t asked for and hand it to her anyway, because some conversations need something to hold.

“I’d rather you stayed. I’d also rather you never once made a decision about your own career based on what would be convenient for me. I’ve had enough people manage me lately. I’m not going to start doing it to you.”

She turns the glass slowly, not drinking.

“The work we do here, it’s good work, most days. I believe that most days. But the Ledger piece would run under my name. Nobody would ever describe it as yours with an assist from me. I’ve spent three years being excellent at making other people’s names the story.”

That lands somewhere honest, because it is true, because I built my entire career on exactly that architecture and never once asked the people working beside me whether the arrangement cost them anything.

“I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t sting to hear,” I tell her. “I’m also not going to pretend it isn’t fair. Take the meeting, Wren. Whatever you decide, take the meeting without feeling like you’re betraying me for wanting your own name on your own work.”

“I haven’t decided.”

“I know. You don’t have to, tonight.”

I mean it, mostly, even as some old, proprietary part of me is already calculating what her absence would cost the agency, and hating myself a little for doing it even here.

“Go home. Think about it without me in the room, since apparently I’m not capable of being neutral about it.”

She almost smiles at that.

“For what it’s worth, the offer’s the reason I noticed the Northbridge accounts so fast tonight. I’ve been keeping my instincts sharp for an audition I hadn’t admitted I was taking.”

“That’s either the most honest thing you’ve said all year, or the most alarming.”

“Probably both.”

She pauses a second time, hand on the frame.

“You’d tell me if you needed me to stay. Actually needed me, not just found it useful.”