Page 66 of Secret Baby Daddy

Nobody notices that much by accident.

Nobody retains it by accident either.

There is a theory I do not let myself say out loud, because it is absurd, because the odds are a rounding error, because if it were true I would have to reassemble every conversation I have had in a year and I do not have the hours or the nerve.

So I do what I do with every absurd theory a client brings me.

I test it.

Thursday night, Calder is across the sitting room with his laptop, working through Hayes’s clearance lists, his phone face-down on the side table beside him the way it always is.

I open Blackline on mine, angled away, and type a single line I know Atlas will answer immediately if he is anywhere near a device, because he always has.

Cassandra: Quick one. Am I right that you told me once you can’t sleep with a door on your left?

I hit send and watch him.

I watch his hands, his phone, the corner of his mouth, the place between his shoulder blades that tenses when a notification arrives.

Nothing.

He turns a page.

His phone stays dark.

I give it a full four minutes, then ten, then twenty, and the little indicator on my screen never once shifts to typing.

Atlas answers at two in the morning, when Calder has been asleep for an hour on the other side of a wall.

Atlas: You’re right. Sorry for the delay. Long day.

I read it twice and feel the theory deflate exactly the way I wanted it to and hated wanting it to.

A negative result.

I know better than anyone that a negative result only means the test was wrong, not the theory, and I file that caveat away with a discipline I would be proud of in a junior associate.

I file it anyway.

Because the alternative explanation is not absurd at all, and I recognize its shape because I have worn it myself, professionally, for a decade: the quiet, methodical work of knowing someone before they have had the chance to decide what to show you.

He hasn’t been getting lucky with his observations.

He’s been doing homework.

The only real question left is how far back the file goes, and whether whatever he found in it is sitting in a folder somewhere with my name on the tab, waiting for the day it becomes useful.

It is an unsettling sensation, being known this completely by someone who keeps insisting, every time I ask, that he barely knows me at all.

I don’t say any of this to Atlas, mostly because I don’t have language for it yet, and partly because Atlas himself has gone strange in his own direction; careful, distant, answering a full day later than he used to, warmth rationed out like he’s afraid of spending too much of it in one place.

Cassandra: You’ve been different this week. Distant. Did I do something?

Atlas: No. This isn’t about you.

Cassandra: That’s exactly the kind of sentence people say right before it turns out to be entirely about me.

Atlas: I’m working through something complicated. It has nothing to do with how I feel about you.