Page 77 of Secret Baby Daddy

I look over at him, surprised at my own honesty.

“I think you’re only just now teaching me that difference applies to you too.”

He doesn’t answer that, not directly, and something in his silence should probably have told me more than it did.

I am too tired to chase it.

When the surgeon finally emerges near midnight with cautiously good news, clean repair, no complications, a long recovery but a real one, he’s the one who catches me before my knees give out with relief.

Later, once Odette’s settled and sleeping, Calder walks me down an empty corridor toward the family room where I’m meant to try, unsuccessfully, to sleep in a chair beside her bed.

“Thank you,” I tell him, quiet in the fluorescent hush. “For staying. For not making me perform any version of myself tonight.”

“I wasn’t going anywhere.”

He reaches up, brushes a strand of hair back from my face, and something in the gesture is so careful, so achingly familiar, that I lean into it before I’ve decided to.

I kiss him first, there in the empty corridor, needing something solid after a night spent entirely unmoored, and he kisses me back like he’s been waiting on the permission for longer than tonight, and for one unguarded minute, nothing about the last three weeks matters at all.

“Come home with me,” I murmur against his mouth, once we break apart. “Not to the estate. My apartment. Just for tonight. I don’t want to sleep in a hospital chair, and I don’t want to be alone.”

He goes very still, and something crosses his face that I don’t understand yet, guilt, I think, though it makes no sense given what an ordinary request this is.

“I can’t tonight,” he says quietly. “Not because I don’t want to. There’s something I need to tell you, Piper. Something important, and I need to do it properly, when neither of us is running on fear and hospital coffee.”

“That sounds ominous for the second time this week.”

“It’s not nothing. But it can wait until tomorrow morning. I promise you that.”

He presses his forehead to mine, eyes closed, like he’s steadying himself for something.

“Tomorrow morning. I’ll tell you everything.”

I choose, for tonight, to believe it completely, too exhausted to build any of the contingency plans I’d normally construct around a sentence like that.

I let him walk me to the family room, let him settle into the uncomfortable chair outside Odette’s door like he intends to stay there all night, and I fall asleep to the novel comfort of knowing someone is standing guard while I finally let myself rest.

25

PIPER

The package arrives at seven in the morning, before Calder wakes, before either of us has the chance to have the conversation he promised me last night, and it takes exactly four minutes of reading to unmake everything I thought I understood about the last three weeks.

It comes through an encrypted email link, no sender name, just a subject line that reads You should see this before he tells you his version.

I open it in the hospital family room, Odette still sleeping two doors down, Calder still asleep in the chair outside her room, and I read it standing up, because some instinct tells me I won’t want to be sitting down for whatever’s coming.

My hands are steady as I click through it, which surprises me, some professional reflex taking over before the rest of me catches up, the same reflex that’s carried me through a decade of other people’s disasters, arriving now, uninvited, for the one disaster that’s actually mine.

Excerpts.

Pages and pages of them, Blackline conversation logs, Cassandra and Atlas, stretching back nearly a year, every message I thought was private, anonymous, safe, laid out in clean, damning columns with timestamps attached.

I scroll further, and the floor tilts beneath me.

Atlas confirmed as Dominic Calder, see attached identity cross-reference, page 4.

Cassandra confirmed as Piper Vale, see message content match, protective suite reference, page 6.