Page 57 of Secret Baby Daddy

The words hang between us longer than either of us seems willing to claim them, and I understand that whatever I have just admitted cannot be filed away as adrenaline or gratitude or the ordinary aftermath of danger survived together.

It is simply true, and now that it is spoken, there is no version of tomorrow where I can pretend otherwise.

I do not sleep that night, not really, and somewhere near two in the morning I do the thing I have not let myself do in three days.

I open Blackline.

Atlas: I told a woman today that she mattered to me. Out loud. I’ve never done that before, not once, not with anyone, and I don’t fully understand why it happened tonight instead of any of the other nights I’ve come close.

Cassandra: That’s a significant sentence to drop at two in the morning with no context.

Atlas: I know. I’m aware I’m being unfair, handing you half a story and expecting you to sit with it.

Cassandra: You’ve never been unfair to me before. I’ll allow it once.

I stare at the screen a long moment, the fire in my own grate long since burned to embers, my hands finally still after an evening spent watching them shake in front of a woman I am not supposed to feel anything this specific for.

Atlas: I’ve spent twelve years telling myself attachment makes you slower. Worse at the job. I built an entire philosophy out of that theory, and tonight I watched it collapse in about four seconds, standing in front of someone in actual danger, and I didn’t feel slower. I felt like the only clear thing in the room.

Cassandra: That doesn’t sound like a theory collapsing. That sounds like a theory finally being tested against real evidence instead of the version of the world you built it in.

Atlas: That’s exactly what it felt like. I don’t know what to do with that yet.

Cassandra: You don’t have to know tonight. For what it’s worth, the version of you I’ve gotten to know in this room has never once sounded like a man who lets attachment make him worse at anything. If anything, you sound like someone who’s spent twelve years being excellent specifically because you cared too much to let yourself be anything less.

I read that twice, something in my chest going dangerously warm, the particular warmth of being understood by someone who has never seen my face and somehow still sees more of me than most people who have.

Atlas: You have a talent for reframing my worst fears about myself into something almost bearable.

Cassandra: I have a talent for recognizing self-flagellation dressed up as professional philosophy. It’s a specialty of mine. I’ve had a great deal of practice on myself.

Atlas: Is that an admission?

Cassandra: It’s a hypothetical. Everything’s hypothetical here. That’s the rule, remember.

Atlas: I remember. I’m starting to think the rule was always going to have an expiration date.

There’s a pause long enough that I watch the little indicator start and stop twice, the silence I’ve learned to recognize as her deciding how much of the truth to hand me.

Cassandra: I think about that too. More than I used to.

I do not tell her about Piper.

I do not tell her about the archive log, or the authorization key, or the twelve years of grief I finally have a name for.

I tell her the one true thing I can afford tonight, and let the rest sit in the same careful compartment where I have kept every other omission this week, telling myself, the way I have told myself for twelve years, that the ones I choose to keep are smaller than the ones that got Jonah killed.

Atlas: Goodnight, Cassandra.

Cassandra: Goodnight, Atlas.

I close the laptop and sit a while longer in the dark, listening to the old stone of the house settle around me, and think, for the first time since this case began, that I am no longer entirely certain which of the two women currently occupying my attention I am more afraid of losing.

17

PIPER

Some arguments are never actually about the thing they claim to be about.