Page 71 of Secret Baby Daddy

I catalog every reason this isn’t the moment, the way I catalog every variable before an extraction, building a case for delay with the same precision I’d bring to defending a client.

I discovered her identity without her consent, through a test message she doesn’t know I sent.

Confronting her with it now, in the middle of a live threat against Sloane, with Roman still somewhere in the shadows arranging his next move, is not strategically sound.

We are both running on adrenaline and too little sleep.

All of that is true.

None of it is the actual reason.

The actual reason sits underneath all the strategic language, small and ugly and entirely unprofessional: I am afraid that the moment she learns Atlas is me, she will understand exactly how much I already knew about her before either of us admitted anything to each other honestly, the pillow wall, the confession about her grandmother, the raw truth she handed a stranger because a stranger felt safer than a colleague.

I am afraid she will feel exposed instead of found.

I am afraid, more than anything else I have been afraid of in twelve years, that she will look at me the way she looked at Roman Vasseur the night he manipulated the truth into a weapon, and I do not think I survive being filed into that category in her mind.

So I have not sent it, for a week now, and I have changed instead in smaller ways, the ones I tell myself don’t count as confession because they’re not spoken aloud.

Two nights ago, when Blackline pinged, Cassandra opened with something warm, something that a week earlier would have drawn an equally warm reply out of me without a second thought, and I answered with a restraint I have never used with her before, careful, distant, the tone of a man pulling back from a ledge he has only just noticed he is standing on.

Cassandra: You’ve gone quiet the last two days. Everything alright?

Atlas: Long few days on my end. Nothing that needs explaining.

Cassandra: That’s very unlike you. Usually you’d rather over-explain than let me worry.

Atlas: I’m working through something. I’ll tell you when I understand it better myself.

Cassandra: That’s fair. I’m not going anywhere.

I have read her reply a dozen times since, and something in my chest tightens every time at the easy, unguarded trust in it, trust I am currently doing nothing to deserve.

I’m not going anywhere.

Every version of the confession I have drafted and deleted is built on the unspoken fear that telling her the truth is exactly the thing that will make that sentence stop being true.

I have built an entire identity around the conviction that the sanitized version gets people killed.

Tonight I am the one sanitizing.

I close the laptop, and I decide, finally, cleanly, the way I decide everything once the variables stop shifting.

Today I tell her.

I rehearse it in the shower, in the mirror, in the quiet space between the bedroom and the stairs, and by the time I find Piper in the sitting room, laptop open, hair still damp from her own shower, I have the sentence ready.

Simple.

Direct.

No strategic softening.

I don’t get the chance to say it.

“Calder.”

She’s staring at the property’s old security schematic, the one Hayes finally finished digitizing overnight, and there’s an urgency in her voice that erases every rehearsed word out of my head.