Page 74 of Secret Baby Daddy

I lie there, watching the gray light creep in around the curtains, and make myself say the truth in my own head, plainly, without the strategic language I’ve been using to disguise it from myself for days.

I did not stay silent last night because the timing was wrong.

I stayed silent because I wanted the night exactly as it was: Piper beside me, unguarded, choosing to trust me without knowing there was still one truth I had kept from her.

That is not protection.

The first night we slept together, I didn’t know she was Cassandra.

Last night, I did.

Nothing physical happened between us beyond a few kisses and the simple intimacy of falling asleep together, but that doesn’t make the omission harmless.

She was still making choices about me without the whole truth.

And I let her.

Because I was afraid that once she knew Dominic and Atlas were the same man, she might decide she wanted neither.

Roman taught me what it looks like when a man turns omission into a weapon.

What I’ve done is not what he has done, not remotely, but I recognize something in my own behavior this morning that I don’t like.

I have been shaping the truth around the outcome I wanted.

I have spent a career distinguishing between people who withhold information to protect someone else and people who withhold it to protect themselves.

That line has always felt clean when I was drawing it around other people.

This morning, I have to admit which side of it I’m standing on.

I ease out of bed and stand at the window, watching the tree line lighten from black to gray to the pale gold of an actual morning.

I give myself a deadline, the way I give myself deadlines for everything that terrifies me too much to leave open-ended.

Tonight.

I will tell her tonight, regardless of the case, regardless of Roman, regardless of whatever convenient crisis presents itself between now and then.

Piper, I’m Atlas. I have been for over a year. I figured out you were Cassandra after we slept together the first time, and I should have told you the moment I knew. I didn’t. Every day since then, I’ve let you trust me without giving you the one piece of information that might have changed what that trust meant.

It is not a good sentence.

It does not make me look better than I am.

It is, finally, entirely true, and true is the only currency I have left worth spending on her.

I say the deadline out loud once, quietly, to the empty room, as if speaking it might make it harder to abandon later.

Some part of me is already, quietly, building the case for one more day.

She wakes an hour later, soft and unhurried.

“You look serious for this early,” she says, stretching, unguarded in a way that makes the coming conversation feel like a violence I’m about to commit against something fragile.

“I need to talk to you about something. Tonight, when we have time to actually sit with it properly.”

“That sounds ominous.”