Page 26 of Secret Baby Daddy

“Yes.”

I say it without hesitating, because it happens to be true, and because I understand, watching her go, that the difference she’s asking about is the exact one I have spent this entire case failing to draw for myself, in a different context, with an entirely different man.

I keep my promise to eat something that isn’t wine.

I pour a second glass instead.

*

At midnight, when the apartment is quiet enough that I can hear the refrigerator hum, I open my laptop and log into Blackline.

Cassandra: I have acquired a new professional nemesis. A six-foot-three humorless concrete slab who thinks a press strategy is the moral equivalent of arson.

The reply comes fast, and I picture Atlas the way I always do: a shape without a face, a voice without a body, a man built entirely out of the sentences he chooses.

Atlas: Sounds like someone who’s tired of watching people die for good optics.

Cassandra: He put himself between me and a man twice as dangerous as he looks, today, without asking permission first. Didn’t even seem to notice he’d done it.

Atlas: That sounds less like a nemesis and more like a man doing his job.

Cassandra: He also said “the central fact remains” four times in one meeting, so the jury’s still out on nemesis versus job.

Atlas: Four times is a personality trait, not a red flag.

Cassandra: Careful. You’re starting to sound like you’d take his side.

Atlas: I’d take the side of anyone who steps between you and something dangerous without being asked. That’s not a comment on him. That’s a comment on what I hope people do for you when I’m not around to.

I almost smile at that, alone in my kitchen, the wine going warm in my hand.

I don’t mention any details.

I only tell Atlas the parts that are safe, the parts that are almost the truth.

It has always been enough, before.

Tonight it feels, for the first time, like an omission.

I close the laptop before I can type anything else.

Somewhere across the city, in an apartment I have never seen, a man whose real name I do not know is probably doing exactly what I am doing now, staring at a dark screen, wondering what it would cost to say the truth out loud instead of a well-edited version of it.

I go to bed without finding out.

6

DOMINIC

I have never met a man or woman I couldn’t read in under ten seconds.

Piper Vale takes considerably longer, which is a problem.

Every person I have ever needed to read, hostile witnesses, nervous principals, men holding guns they don’t entirely intend to use, resolves into a legible pattern within the first exchange, once you know which details to weigh.

Piper Vale resolves into three contradictory patterns at once, and I have spent a full year assuming the contradiction was the point, a deliberate obstruction built to keep people like me from finishing the read.

Tonight I am no longer certain the contradiction is deliberate at all.