Page 3 of Secret Baby Daddy

Atlas: It is. You’re the only person who’s ever made it feel like it might not have to be.

Neither of them types anything for almost a full minute.

Cassandra watches the ellipsis appear and vanish on his side, watches her own cursor blink uselessly on hers, and understands that something has just shifted between them that cannot be shifted back.

A year of hypothetical clients and imaginary crises and careful, rule-abiding intimacy has just cracked open into something with nothing hypothetical left in it at all.

Atlas: Tell me something true. Not a case. Not a client. You.

Cassandra: I’m tired of being the only version of myself that has to be perfect. In every room with my real name in it, I have to be certain, controlled, unbothered. Here I get to be uncertain. I don’t know why that feels like the only place I can breathe.

Atlas: Because it’s the only place no one’s keeping score of whether you deserve to be believed. I already believe you. I have for a year. You’ve never had to earn it here.

Cassandra: Say that again.

Atlas: I believe you.

Cassandra reads it three times.

Then she does something she has never once done in a year of these nights. She lets the conversation go where she has always, deliberately, steered it away from.

Cassandra: If you were here. Not hypothetically. If the rules didn’t exist and this wasn’t a screen. What would you do, the first thing, if I told you I was tired of being believed only by a stranger.

Atlas: I’d tell you that you’re not tired of being believed by a stranger. You’re tired of the stranger being the only one who counts. And then I’d stop talking, because I’d rather show you than argue about it.

Cassandra: Show me, then. Since we’re breaking every rule already.

What follows breaks Blackline’s most sacred convention twice over, no case, no client, and now no distance, and neither of them stops to note the violation.

Atlas tells her, with a precision that feels less like flattery than confession, the exact things he has noticed about her over a year of these nights, the way her sentences get shorter right before she says something true, the way she apologizes for feelings she has no reason to apologize for, the way she has never once asked him to be impressed by her.

Cassandra tells him, in return, what she has spent a year not admitting she wanted to hear, that someone had noticed her at all, closely, on purpose, without an agenda attached to the noticing.

Their sentences grow shorter, warmer, punctuated by the small confessions that only ever surface at 1 a.m. between two people who have never seen each other’s faces.

He tells her, half-joking and entirely serious, that he has started listening for the sound her typing makes when she’s about to disagree with him.

She tells him that she has caught herself smiling at her own laptop screen in restaurants, in cabs, in rooms full of people who would find that smile very hard to explain.

When she finally admits, laughing at herself even as she types it, that she has wondered more than once what his actual voice sounds like, there is a pause on his end long enough that she worries she has gone too far, and then he answers, quiet and unguarded even through text, that he has wondered the same thing about hers, more nights than he’d ever intended to admit.

Atlas: That’s never happened. Not like that. Not with anyone.

Cassandra: No. Me neither.

Atlas: I should feel like I gave something away.

Cassandra: You should. So should I. I don’t. That’s the part that scares me.

Cassandra: I have to be in Manhattan tomorrow morning. New assignment. Ugly one, from the sound of it, old money, older secrets.

Atlas: I have a meeting in Manhattan tomorrow morning.

Cassandra: Small city.

Atlas: Enormous city. Small world, apparently.

Neither of them asks the question sitting directly beneath that exchange.