Page 80 of Secret Baby Daddy

PIPER

We end up in the small chapel off the hospital’s east corridor, empty at this hour, the only room in the building that offers anything resembling privacy, and it strikes me, distantly, as a fittingly grim place to watch something die.

I chose it deliberately, somewhere neutral enough that neither of us could claim it as familiar ground, somewhere without a single memory attached to make the conversation easier to survive.

“Tell me,” I say, standing several feet away from him, arms crossed, every ounce of the composure I’ve spent a career building deployed now against the one person I never thought I’d need it for. “All of it. Don’t make me drag it out of you one confirmed detail at a time.”

He doesn’t try to escape it.

That, at least, I have to give him: no deflection, no strategic softening, none of the careful language he uses to manage everyone else’s crises.

“I’m Atlas,” he says. “I have been for over a year. I suspected you might be Cassandra before we slept together, but I didn’t know. Not for certain. I confirmed it afterward. You messaged Atlas about what had happened between us. You mentioned details only Piper could have known, and I sent a test message to your phone while we were talking on Blackline. Your phone lit up. That’s when I knew.”

“And you said nothing.”

“I said nothing.”

His voice doesn’t waver, doesn’t reach for absolution.

“I told myself I was protecting you from another complication in the middle of an active case. That we were both exhausted. That telling you immediately would turn one impossible situation into three. Some of that may even have been true. But it wasn’t the real reason.”

He swallows.

“The real reason was that I was terrified. I’d spent a year falling for Cassandra and weeks falling for you, and suddenly I knew they were the same woman. I had everything I’d wanted without ever believing those things could exist in the same person. And I was afraid the second I told you, I’d lose both. I chose silence because I wanted the night we had, unclaimed by consequence, more than I wanted to be honest with you.”

“You had opportunities. More than one.”

“More than one,” he says, and he doesn’t look away. “The morning after I figured it out. That night on Blackline when you talked to me about both of us without knowing you were talking to the same man. The day I decided I would tell you and let the case interrupt me. The night you told me you were choosing me, exactly as I was, and I still couldn’t make myself say the one thing you needed to know.”

His jaw tightens.

“I kept telling myself I was waiting for the right moment. Eventually I understood there wasn’t going to be one. I was just buying time because I was afraid of what the truth would cost me.”

“You let me confide in you about you.”

My voice finally cracks, the flat control giving way to something rawer.

“Do you understand what that actually means, Calder? I told Atlas things I’ve never told another living person. I told him I was falling for you. I told him I was ashamed of wanting both of you at once, and the entire time, there was no both. There was just you, watching me tie myself in knots over a choice that was never actually a choice at all.”

“Yes.”

Just that.

No defense.

“And you had every right to know who was listening.”

“You didn’t build both relationships knowing who I was,” I say. “I understand that now. You didn’t know when we first slept together. You didn’t know for most of the year Atlas and Cassandra were talking.”

My throat tightens around the part that matters.

“But once you did know, you let the version of me who trusted Atlas completely keep talking to you. You let me tell him about Dominic. You let me be confused. You let me wonder which man I wanted while knowing there had only ever been one. That’s the betrayal, Calder. Not that you somehow planned this from the beginning. You didn’t. It’s that once the truth became yours, you decided when it was allowed to become mine.”

“I know.”

“No. You know it now. After you spent days deciding for me. You don’t get to decide which truths I’m ready for, Dominic. The first night wasn’t the betrayal. You didn’t know then. But the second you did know, the choice stopped belonging only to you. You should have given it back to me.”

“I should have.”