Page 51 of Secret Baby Daddy

Atlas: Because I think you’ve spent a year making him smaller than he actually is, and I’m curious what’s left once you stop doing that.

Another pause.

When she answers, something in the rhythm has changed, slower, more careful, like she’s handling the sentence with both hands instead of throwing it at me.

Cassandra: He’s exhausting. He treats every conversation like a threat assessment and every silence like evidence of something. But sometimes he looks at me like he’s not listening to the words I’m actually saying. Like he’s listening to everything underneath them instead; the part I’m not saying, the part I’ve spent my whole career learning to bury under a better sentence. Nobody’s ever done that. Not like he does it. Not without me asking them to.

I read it once.

Then again, slower, and my heart does something I would flag as a medical concern in a principal.

I have spent a year building a private mythology out of a woman I’d never met, assembling her one honest sentence at a time into someone I trusted more than almost anyone alive.

I did not expect that mythology to collapse into the exact shape of a woman I already, separately, could not stop thinking about.

Atlas: That sounds like more than attraction.

Cassandra: Don’t. I already know what it sounds like. I’m not ready to confront what it sounds like.

Atlas: Alright.

Cassandra: What about you? Anyone making you reconsider your entire personality lately?

The question sits there, patient, waiting, the way she waits for every honest answer I’ve ever eventually given her.

I have come close, twice now, to simply telling her, to writing yes, you, the version of you down the hall who fell asleep on the other side of a pillow wall two nights ago and letting the fragile architecture we’ve built collapse into whatever comes next.

I don’t do it.

I tell myself the case isn’t finished, that Roman is still circling, that this is not the moment to detonate the one honest thing either of us has left.

All of that is true.

None of it is the actual reason.

The sentence sits in my chest like a verdict I have already read and refuse to deliver, because delivering it means finding out, in real time, whether the woman who has spent a year trusting a stranger will forgive that stranger for being the man she already, separately, decided not to trust with anything real.

Atlas: There’s someone. It’s complicated in the same direction as yours is.

Cassandra: The person you complain about, or a new one?

Atlas: The same one you’d assume, if you knew me well enough to guess.

Cassandra: I like to think I know you fairly well by now.

Atlas: You do. Better than almost anyone.

I copy the messages before I close the conversation.

Blackline discourages it; the rules exist precisely to prevent this kind of accumulating evidence, but I save the sentence about listening to everything underneath her words, because it is the truest thing anyone has ever said about me without knowing they were saying it to my face.

I have spent my entire adult life believing competence was the only currency I had to offer anyone, Ingrid excepted, and even that took years to earn.

Cassandra just told me, without meaning to, that the thing she actually values isn’t the competence at all.

It’s the listening underneath it.

The part I didn’t think anyone could see, let alone want.