Page 37 of Secret Baby Daddy

“You’re stalling,” he says.

“I’m tending a fire. It’s a skill. Some of us learned it at summer camp instead of whatever you did instead, which I assume was reading tactical manuals by flashlight.”

“I learned to build a fire from my sister, actually. Ingrid. She was better at it than I was.”

He says the name easily, without the guarded weight he carries around everything else, and the softness catches me off guard.

“She used to say I built fires like I was defusing them instead of starting them.”

“That tracks.”

I get a proper flame going and settle back into the armchair.

“Do you talk to her often?”

“Every week. Sometimes more.”

A pause, careful, like he’s deciding how much of himself to hand over.

“She’s the only person who tells me when I’m being unbearable and expects nothing from me in return except that I actually listen.”

“Must be nice,” I say, and I don’t mean for it to come out as quiet as it does. “Having someone like that.”

He doesn’t press me on it, which I’m grateful for.

Calder checks the perimeter one final time before he’ll let himself sit still, the fourth pass of the evening, and I use the minutes it buys me to do the thing I’ve been resisting since we got locked into this drafty, cedar-scented suite together.

I open my laptop.

Cassandra: Update on my professional nemesis. He builds fires like he’s defusing them. Apparently he learned it from a younger sister.

Atlas: That’s an oddly specific detail for a man you described a few days ago as a six-foot-three concrete slab.

Cassandra: People contain multitudes, apparently. Even the concrete ones.

Atlas: Careful. That sentence has a dangerous amount of warmth in it for someone who claims to hate him.

Cassandra: I never said I hated him. I said he says “the central fact remains” too often.

Atlas: You’re doing the thing where you deflect with a joke instead of answering the actual question.

I look up at the fire before I answer, listening for footsteps in the corridor, some old instinct checking the exits the way, I realize with a small, unwelcome jolt, Calder does everywhere he goes.

Cassandra: Fine. He noticed I was cold before I noticed it myself tonight. Built the fire without being asked. Hasn’t once, since this assignment began, made me feel like admitting a fear was the same thing as being weak. I don’t know what to do with a man who doesn’t require me to perform competence at him.

Atlas: I know exactly what to do with that information, and it isn’t nothing, and I think you know that too.

Cassandra: Don’t.

Atlas: I’m not going to tell you what to feel about a man I’ve never met, standing in a room I’ll never see. I’m only going to say that I’ve watched you build an entire career out of not needing anyone to notice when you’re cold, and if someone finally did, without you having to ask, that’s not a small thing to wave off as a professional inconvenience.

Cassandra: You sound almost jealous.

Atlas: I sound like a man who has spent a year getting the parts of you nobody else gets, and who is trying very hard not to be an idiot about a stranger you mentioned three times this month, in increasingly less hostile language, without seeming to notice you’re doing it.

I stare at that longer than I mean to, the fire popping softly in the grate, my chest going tight in a way that has nothing to do with the case and everything to do with the two men occupying separate, careful compartments of my life: one a stranger who somehow knows me better than anyone alive, the other a man three feet away, checking a lock for the fourth time because some part of him doesn’t trust the world to hold still.

Cassandra: You’ve never once been jealous before. Not in a year.