Page 43 of Secret Baby Daddy

Just the sound of Calder breathing on the other side of a ridiculous line of pillows and the strange realization that I don’t feel responsible for filling the silence.

For someone who has spent most of her adult life believing silence means you’ve lost control of the room, that feels dangerously close to peace.

“Can I ask you something,” I say eventually, “and you don’t have to answer if you think it’s a trap.”

“Questions are always a trap with you. Ask anyway.”

“Early in my career, I told my agency not to defend a client. The evidence was going to come out eventually, and defending the lie was going to cost us more than the truth ever would.”

I keep my eyes on the ceiling, easier than looking at him while I say it.

“They didn’t listen. The truth came out anyway, exactly like I said it would, and somehow I ended up the one who took the fall for the strategy I told them not to run.”

“You were a scapegoat.”

“That’s the job, apparently. I learned that being right doesn’t matter if nobody in the room wants to believe you.”

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.

“So I stopped waiting for people to believe me on their own. I started making sure the story was airtight before anyone got the chance to doubt it. It’s not about spin, Calder. It’s about never standing in that room again, being right, and watching it cost me everything anyway.”

He’s quiet long enough that I think he might have fallen asleep, until he speaks, low and careful in the dark.

“I had a client once. Early in my career. He told me something dangerous was happening, and I didn’t believe him enough to act on it the way I should have.”

His voice doesn’t change, but something underneath it goes very still.

“Someone I trusted told me he was unreliable. I listened to the wrong person, and it cost him everything. Not a job. Not a reputation. Everything.”

I understand, without him saying the words, exactly the size of what he isn’t telling me.

“You still carry that.”

“Every day. It’s why I don’t trust a sanitized version of anything anymore. It’s why the central fact always matters to me more than the story wrapped around it.”

A pause.

“I imagine that’s difficult to be on the receiving end of, given what you do for a living.”

I have never told anyone that story in full, not even Wren, who knows more of my professional history than anyone alive.

There is something about the dark, and the fire burning low, and a man three feet away who has just handed me an equivalent wound of his own, that makes the telling feel less like a confession and more like evidence finally being allowed into a case I’ve kept sealed for years.

“It’s difficult,” I admit. “But I don’t think you’re wrong to want it. I think we’ve just spent a year assuming the other person’s method was the enemy, instead of noticing we were both just trying to keep people from dying in different ways.”

Neither of us says anything else for a while.

He gave me something he has carried for twelve years without asking me to fix it, soften it, or turn it into a better version of the story.

For once, I don’t try.

I simply let the truth be what it is and stay beside him while he carries it.

“Goodnight, Piper,” he says eventually, quiet enough that it sounds almost like a question.

“Goodnight, Calder.”

I don’t sleep for a long time after that.