Page 79 of Secret Baby Daddy

He watched me try to choose between two men while knowing there had only ever been one.

And that, more than the anonymity itself, is what breaks something open inside me.

Not that Dominic Calder turned out to be Atlas.

That he learned I was Cassandra and still let me keep making decisions without the truth.

There’s a final message at the bottom of the package, Roman’s, unmistakably his voice even without a signature.

Cordelia Merrick’s foundation, and Piper Vale’s entire career, survive only if the investigation into Northbridge ends immediately. You have until tomorrow evening. I trust Dominic will find the decision easier now that you understand precisely what he’s been capable of hiding.

I set the laptop down very carefully, the way you set down something that might shatter, and stand in the middle of the hospital family room for a long moment, feeling something enormous and cold settle into the space where, twelve hours ago, there had been something that felt almost like happiness.

The coffee he brought without asking.

The masquerade story he shouldn’t have known.

The night in the sealed suite when he told me, in careful pieces, about a client he’d failed, the same story I’d heard, in fragments, from a stranger behind a screen for the better part of a year.

The test I ran on Thursday night, and the negative result I chose to trust because it was comfortable.

He wasn’t guessing.

He didn’t run a background check.

He was remembering.

Every single time.

I think about last night, the corridor, the kiss, the way he told me he had something to tell me tomorrow morning, and I understand, with a clarity that makes me feel sick, that he was going to let one more night pass before he handed me a truth Roman has just handed me instead, colder and crueler and less kind than whatever version Calder might have chosen.

I look down the hall toward the chair where he’s still sleeping, unaware that the deadline he set for himself has just been detonated by someone else entirely, and something in my chest goes very quiet and very still, not the sharp, immediate anger I’d expect, but something worse.

Something closer to grief for a version of this story I apparently never actually had.

I close the laptop.

I walk down the corridor.

I wake him myself, because whatever comes next, I refuse to let Roman Vasseur be the one who gets to control the moment I finally say it out loud.

He wakes slowly, disoriented, blinking up at me in the fluorescent light, and whatever he sees on my face in that first half-second tells him everything before I’ve said a word.

“Piper.”

His voice is already breaking on my name.

“Whatever you saw, however he framed it—”

“Get up,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel, flat and quiet in the way I’ve only ever used on people I’m about to end things with professionally. “We’re not doing this in a hospital hallway. Odette’s asleep. I need somewhere private, and I need you to tell me the truth yourself, right now, before I hear one more word of it from anyone else.”

He stands.

He doesn’t argue.

Some part of me registers that as its own kind of confession, a man who has spent his entire career controlling every variable in every room, finally offering no resistance at all to whatever judgment is about to land on him.

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