Page 64 of Secret Baby Daddy

“About the case?”

“Among other things.”

It isn’t a lie, which is the only reason I let myself say it, and she doesn’t press, though something in her expression tells me she’s cataloging the deflection for later, filing it away the way she files everything, waiting for the moment it becomes useful.

I watch her cross to the window, watch the morning light catch the side of her face, and think about how simple it would be to tell her right now, before the day accumulates its own weight.

I open my mouth.

I close it again.

The lie by omission sits easier than I expect it to, which unsettles me more than the lie itself.

“You’re doing the thing,” she says, without turning around.

“What thing?”

“The thing where you’re clearly holding a sentence back. You do it right before you tell me something I’m not going to like.”

She turns, studying me with the attentiveness that used to feel like an interrogation and now feels like the single most dangerous thing about her.

“Is it about the case?”

“No,” I say, and that much, at least, is true.

“Then it can wait.”

She says it gently, giving me the exit I don’t deserve and take anyway.

“We have a security briefing in twenty minutes, and I need you functional, not distracted.”

“Understood.”

I tell myself she deserves better timing than a rushed confession squeezed into the last ninety seconds before a briefing.

I am aware, even as I think it, that better timing is simply a more respectable name for delay.

19

PIPER

Something has shifted in Dominic Calder, and I can’t decide if it’s the best or worst thing that’s happened to either of us this week.

I have spent a year cataloging every version of him I’ve been permitted to see, filing each one under headings like tactical and controlled and occasionally, grudgingly, decent.

I did not have a category ready for this one.

It starts small.

He listens now, actually listens, lets me finish a sentence instead of restructuring it halfway through, asks a follow-up question instead of immediately offering the counterargument he’s clearly already built.

When I lay out a plan for handling the foundation’s board, he doesn’t spend the first two minutes finding the flaw in it.

He just says, quietly, “That should work,” and moves on to logistics like the compliment cost him nothing at all.

It should feel like relief.

Mostly it feels like being watched by someone who’s learned an entirely new language overnight and hasn’t told me where he picked it up.