Page 38 of Secret Baby Daddy

Atlas: I’ve never once had a reason before. I don’t love that I do now.

Cassandra: For the record, there’s nothing here. He’s a professional obligation with excellent fire-building skills and an alarming number of tactical opinions.

Atlas: For the record, I don’t entirely believe you, and I think some part of you doesn’t either. I’d rather you tell me the truth eventually than keep handing me a smaller, safer version of it because you think it’s what I want to hear.

I close the laptop before I have to answer that, because I don’t have an answer yet that isn’t a lie, and because I can hear Calder’s footsteps in the corridor, unhurried, familiar already in a way a few days shouldn’t have made possible.

He finds me exactly where he left me, and I fold the guilt away somewhere he can’t see it, the way I fold away everything that doesn’t survive daylight, and tell myself it is only a small omission, the kind that costs nothing as long as I keep it small.

I watch the fire settle into something steady and orange, and I think, with the sinking clarity of a woman who has spent her whole career reading a room, that I am no longer certain which fire in here I should be more worried about.

10

DOMINIC

I have negotiated hostage situations with more predictable outcomes than a woman arguing with her grandmother about whether canned soup constitutes an acceptable dinner.

Piper does not raise her voice.

She does not need to.

The stakes register anyway, all the way across the room, in the particular set of her shoulders.

I step into the small alcove off the sitting room, more out of habit than any real hope of privacy; the suite isn’t built for it, and Piper is close enough by the fire that she’ll hear every word.

“You sound tired,” I tell my sister.

“I sound like a woman who spent six hours resetting a dislocated shoulder and telling a very drunk groomsman that no, the wedding will not be postponed on account of his poor decision-making.”

I can hear her moving around her kitchen, something set down too hard.

“You sound like you’re hiding in a closet.”

“I’m in an alcove.”

“That’s a closet with better branding, Dominic.”

I can hear the smile in it, the one she reserves for me alone, the one that has survived every version of me I’ve ever let her see.

“How’s the case?”

“Complicated.”

“You always say that. It’s your version of fine, and it means absolutely nothing to anyone who actually knows you.”

Her tone softens.

“Is it the Merrick thing? The girl from the fire?”

“Yes.”

“And how are you doing with it? Actually. Not the story you give clients.”

I glance toward the fire, where Piper has gone very still over the book she isn’t reading.

“I’m managing it.”

“That’s also not an answer.”