Page 33 of Secret Baby Daddy

I have the Hudson Valley property’s floor plans open on the table between us, the ones I had Hayes pull the moment the badge came back registered to a contractor who does not, on paper, exist.

“Level three access means a spy could be standing in a stairwell right now. I am not running a controlled evacuation past someone who already knows this building’s blind spots.”

“If Sloane vanishes without a narrative, the story writes itself without us. Merrick heiress goes into hiding after fire footage surfaces. That’s as good as a confession.”

I want to tell her she is wrong.

I have wanted to tell her she is wrong for a year, reflexively, on principle, like reaching for a lighter before you’ve finished pulling out the cigarette.

I do not do it this time.

I think of a sentence Cassandra wrote to me eleven hours ago, she sounds like she counted his pulse before she counted the exits, and something in me refuses to dismiss the woman in front of me quite as easily as I have been trained to.

I have made a career out of trusting only conclusions I can trace back to evidence, and I have just let a sentence a stranger wrote to me at midnight steer an operational call involving a woman’s safety.

I tell myself the conclusion would have arrived the same way regardless.

I am not entirely convinced.

“Then give me something that isn’t a lie,” I say instead. “Because I am moving her today. That part isn’t a negotiation.”

Piper goes quiet in a way I haven’t seen from her.

Not defeated.

Calculating.

It’s the same stillness I use right before I map an extraction route, and watching it on her face is its own unsettling recognition.

“A retreat,” she says slowly. “Not a disappearance. A long-planned strategic retreat, timed to precede the anniversary of the fire, framed as Sloane stepping back from public appearances to focus on the foundation’s compensation initiative for Mara Reyes’s family.”

She’s already pulling a legal pad toward her, writing faster than I can follow.

“We leak it ourselves, quietly, to exactly one sympathetic outlet, before anyone can frame it as flight. Grief, not guilt. She’s not hiding. She’s grieving in private, the way any decent person would, and doing something useful with the time.”

“That buys us cover. It doesn’t buy us a route out of the city that a man with internal clearance can’t anticipate.”

“Then build the route.”

She looks up at me, and there is nothing performative in her expression now, none of the practiced composure she wears for cameras and Cordelia alike.

“You handle the part where nobody sees us leave. I’ll handle the part where nobody asks why we’re gone. That’s the job, isn’t it? Equal authority.”

I study her a moment longer than the situation requires.

“That’s the first plan you’ve proposed that isn’t built entirely out of spin.”

“It’s the first plan you’ve asked for instead of just overriding me.”

She caps her pen.

“Try it more often. You might find I’m less exhausting than advertised.”

I don’t answer that, because the honest answer involves admitting I have already stopped finding her exhausting, somewhere between the marble floor at the gala and this exact sentence, and I am not prepared to say so out loud.

We move fast after that, and it is, against every instinct I have spent a career building, easier than moving alone.

I route Sloane and her core team through the service level in three staggered groups, in vehicles that don’t match any registered to the family, timed against the gap in the contractor shift change I confirmed at midnight.