Page 81 of Secret Baby Daddy

No explanation.

Just the answer I should have gotten before any of this became something he had to apologize for.

His voice breaks slightly, the first real crack in his composure since we walked into this room.

“Piper, I swear to you, I never once sat down and planned to use anything Cassandra told me against the woman standing in front of me. It didn’t feel like strategy. It felt like falling in love with the same person twice, from two directions, and being too much of a coward to tell either version of you what I already knew.”

“Intent does not change what you did.”

I say it quietly, and the quiet makes it land harder than shouting ever could.

“I don’t care how it felt from inside your head, Calder. I care what it did to me. You had my trust in two separate rooms, and you spent it in both of them without ever telling either version of me what the other one already knew.”

“What do you want me to say?”

His voice is hoarse now, stripped of every careful register I’ve ever heard him use.

“Tell me what would actually fix this, and I’ll do it. I’ll tell you everything, every message, every night I lay awake trying to find the courage to say it and failing. I’ll give you all of it, right now, if it helps.”

It is exactly the kind of solution he’d build for a client, efficient and thorough and entirely beside the point of what’s actually broken between us.

“It doesn’t help. That’s the part you still don’t understand.”

I press the heel of my hand against my eyes, willing myself not to fall apart entirely in a hospital chapel at seven in the morning.

“This isn’t a puzzle with a missing piece I need you to hand me so it finally resolves. You can’t retroactively make the last year honest by finally being honest now. The dishonesty already happened. It already shaped everything.”

“I know that.”

“Do you? Because you spent days knowing exactly who I was, deciding, over and over, that tonight still wasn’t the night to tell me. That’s not a single mistake, Calder. That’s a pattern. And patterns don’t get undone by one good confession, however honest it finally turns out to be.”

He doesn’t argue.

He stands there, absorbing it, and something in his face is so plainly wrecked that some old, familiar part of me wants to reach for him anyway.

I don’t let myself.

I recognize the impulse for what it is, the same instinct that let Roman manipulate an entire family for over a decade, the belief that understanding why someone lied is the same thing as excusing it.

“I need you to leave,” I say finally. “Not just this room. The case. Whatever we were building together, professionally or otherwise. I can’t work beside you right now, and I certainly can’t do anything else.”

“Piper.”

He says my name, and I feel the finality of it settle somewhere permanent, a door closing on something I hadn’t fully realized, until this exact second, I still wanted open.

“You don’t get to say my name like that anymore.”

My voice finally, fully breaks, and I let it, because there’s no one left in this room I need to perform composure for.

“Not until I decide you’ve earned it back. Maybe not even then.”

I turn and walk out of the chapel before he can answer, before I can watch his face fracture any further and feel the old, dangerous pull to comfort him instead of myself, and I don’t look back to see whether he follows.

He doesn’t.

That, somehow, is its own small, terrible mercy.

I walk the length of the corridor without looking back, telling myself the not-looking is strength and not simply fear of what I’d do if I saw him coming after me.