Page 49 of Secret Baby Daddy

The question lands somewhere I don’t have a ready defense for, and I find myself grateful, briefly, that this conversation is happening over a phone line and not across a table where she could watch my face fail to answer it convincingly.

“I want you to actually think about that,” she says, gentler now, “instead of rationalizing it in the next four seconds like I know you’re already trying to do.”

“I’m not rationalizing it.”

“You rationalized my entire life once, Piper. I recognize the face you make when you’re doing it to yourself.”

She lets that sit a moment before softening further.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you for wanting both things. I think you’ve just never let yourself believe you were allowed to have them without it costing you something.”

She’s right, and I hate that she’s right, and I hate more that some small, exhausted part of me has been waiting years for someone to say it to my face.

“Everything costs something eventually.”

“Not everything. Not the good things, if you actually let them stay.”

Valentino’s voice again in the background, warm and low, and her own voice shifts instantly, softer, the register she reserves only for him.

“Sorry, one second.”

A muffled exchange, a laugh, and then she’s back.

“Sorry. He’s making lunch and apparently needs my opinion on whether Nico is allowed to eat crackers shaped like dinosaurs before noon.”

“Is he allowed?”

“Absolutely not, and it will absolutely happen anyway.”

She sighs, fond and unbothered.

“That’s the thing nobody tells you about a life like this. It’s not less complicated. It’s just complicated in ways that don’t feel like they’re going to kill you.”

I laugh despite myself, because years ago she was hiding behind a mask at a masquerade in Venice, all careful distance and inherited caution, before Valentino Ferretti dismantled every wall she’d built with nothing but stubborn, patient honesty, and now she’s teaching Nico to stop treating the living room like a racetrack in a house that actually feels like a home.

I used to think her softness was luck.

Listening to her now, I am beginning to wonder if it was simply the result of finally letting someone see all of her at once, instead of doling herself out in careful, curated pieces the way I still do.

“How did you know,” I ask, quieter now, “that you didn’t have to choose?”

“I didn’t know. I just stopped assuming the choice had to look like the one everyone told me it should.”

A pause, warm.

“You’ll figure out your version of it. You’re smarter than I ever was, and considerably more stubborn, which usually works in your favor eventually.”

“Usually.”

“Usually,” she agrees. “Go back to your insufferable, controlling man, Piper. And maybe stop pretending the other one doesn’t count just because you’ve never seen his face.”

I laugh again, quieter this time, and something in my chest loosens at being told, so plainly, that wanting both things might not be the character flaw I’ve spent years assuming it was.

We talk about Nico’s newest obsession with dump trucks until Valentino calls her back into the noise of her own good life.

When I hang up, the tree line hasn’t changed, and neither has the question sitting underneath everything Livia said, but something about it has gotten louder anyway.

Behind me, the door opens, and Calder steps out onto the terrace, tie loosened, looking for me the way he’s started to lately, like I’m the piece of information he actually needs before he can finish assembling the rest of his day.