Page 68 of Secret Baby Daddy

I bring it to Piper before dawn, and she reads the log twice, her expression sharpening into the focus she gets when a case finally makes sense in a way that’s worse than any theory she’d previously allowed herself.

“He’s had access to this family for over a decade,” she says slowly. “Long before Northbridge. Long before any of this started. Which means the current extortion isn’t a new operation. It’s the continuation of one he started building twelve years ago and never finished.”

“Then we don’t fight this like a new threat. We fight it like a cold case with fresh evidence.”

Piper is already pacing, building the shape of something in her head, the way I’ve watched her build press strategies a dozen times, except this time the target isn’t a headline.

“We plant something. Controlled. A piece of false information specific enough that only someone with real archive access could manufacture a response to it; something that requires Roman to reveal exactly how deep his network runs, because he won’t be able to resist correcting a detail he thinks we’ve gotten wrong.”

I let her finish before I say anything, aware that interrupting her mid-thought has never once improved the outcome.

“You want to bait him.”

“I want to give him a story he can’t help but react to. Something that threatens his version of events just enough that he responds instead of waiting us out.”

She looks at me, steady, certain.

“It’s not a lie, Calder. It’s controlled information, released deliberately, designed to draw out a truth he’s spent twelve years protecting. You’ve spent this whole case treating my methods like they’re opposed to yours. This is the same discipline. I’m just running the extraction through a headline instead of a hallway.”

I look at the plan she sketches over the next hour: a leaked detail about the archive’s security logs, subtly wrong in a way that would only matter to someone who actually knows what the real logs contain, planted through a source Roman trusts enough to take seriously.

It’s precise.

It’s patient.

It’s built to expose exactly what we need exposed without giving away that we already have the visitor log in hand.

It’s better than anything I would have designed on my own.

“This is good,” I say, and the total absence of the reflexive correction I usually can’t help offering surprises me. “Better than good. I wouldn’t have thought to bait him through a controlled leak. I’d have gone in with direct confrontation, and he’d have seen it coming from a mile away.”

“You don’t have to sound so shocked.”

“I’m not shocked. I’m,” I stop, choosing the sentence carefully, because for once I want to get it exactly right instead of merely accurate. “I’ve spent a year assuming your methods were a softer version of mine. Something that worked around the truth instead of toward it. This isn’t that. This is better than what I do, Piper. I mean that plainly, not as a concession.”

She goes very still, and something crosses her face that has nothing to do with the case: the vulnerability of a person being told, clearly and without qualification, that the thing she’s spent her whole career being underestimated for is her greatest strength.

“Nobody’s ever said that to me,” she says quietly. “Not like that. Not without a compliment attached that was really just a correction wearing a nicer coat.”

“Then everyone who’s evaluated your work has been doing it wrong.”

“You’re going to make this complicated,” she says, half a laugh, half something more fragile.

“I’m aware.”

We finalize the leak that night, each of us contributing the piece the other doesn’t have: her instinct for exactly which detail will draw Roman out, my knowledge of precisely which security logs he’d need real archive access to correct.

It is the first time since this case began that our two disciplines have stopped competing and started functioning as a single instrument.

I don’t tell her about Blackline.

I don’t tell her that the same instinct she’s just demonstrated is the one I fell in love with a year ago in careful, anonymous fragments, long before I ever knew her face.

I let the praise stand on its own, honest and uncomplicated, because it’s the one piece of truth I can hand her tonight without unraveling everything else.

It isn’t enough.

I tell myself the omission is temporary, a kindness measured in hours rather than a permanent deception.