Page 67 of Secret Baby Daddy

I read that three times, and something about the careful phrasing, how I feel about you, present tense, deliberate, settles into me with more weight than I know what to do with.

I think of Calder’s flash of panic over the coffee cup.

I think of Atlas rationing his own warmth like it might run out.

Two men, both suddenly guarded in ways they weren’t a week ago, both working through something they won’t name to me directly.

For the first time since this tangled mess began, I feel something closer to fear than confusion.

“You’re losing them both,” I say to my own reflection that night, quiet enough that no one else hears it, and I don’t fully believe the sentence until I’ve said it out loud.

I don’t know whether the two withdrawals are connected.

I ran one test, and it came back the way I wanted, and I am choosing, tonight, to trust it, which is the first time in my professional life I have let a result stand because it was comfortable rather than because it was sound.

Somewhere down the hall, I can hear Calder still awake too, pacing the length of his room the way he does when a case won’t resolve.

I almost get up.

I almost walk down that hallway and demand he tell me whatever it is he’s been circling all week.

I don’t.

It’s not patience.

It’s fear, dressed carefully enough that I can almost mistake it for something calmer.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I don’t want to be the one who figures it out first.

20

DOMINIC

Twelve years of files, and it takes one overlooked signature to unmake everything I thought I understood about the night Jonah died.

I have spent a career teaching junior analysts never to trust a single uncorroborated source.

I failed to apply the lesson to the one source that mattered most.

I find it at two in the morning, buried three folders deep in the archive Hayes finally finished digitizing from the old Merrick property records, a visitor log from twelve years ago, the ink faded but legible, a name signed into the guest register at the family archive four days before Jonah made the call that got him killed.

R. Vasseur.

Two words, and a carefully constructed grief just lost its foundation entirely.

Roman told me, twelve years ago, that Jonah was unstable, that the information he’d surfaced about the Merrick family’s finances was unreliable, fabricated by a man too far gone to be trusted.

I built my entire understanding of that night on Roman’s account, because Roman was the only person I trusted enough to ask.

I never once considered that Roman himself might have had reason to want Jonah discredited: access to exactly the kind of information Jonah was trying to expose, motive to make sure nobody believed him before he could prove it.

Roman was inside the Merrick archive four days before he told me to move a man he called unreliable.

That isn’t coincidence.

That’s a man clearing a scene before he arranges for the only witness to be silenced.

I do not yet know how to feel about the cruelty of that, so I file it, temporarily, under things to feel later, once the case allows the luxury.