Page 83 of Secret Baby Daddy

“I’m not giving up. I’m recalculating. Whatever we do from here, it isn’t going to be me deciding for her again. If I’ve learned anything from the last three weeks, it’s that.”

“And if she won’t talk to you?”

“Then I fight this for Sloane, and for the truth, and I let Piper decide, entirely on her own terms, whether there’s anything left standing between us once the dust settles. I don’t get to script that outcome, Hayes. Not anymore. That’s exactly the mistake that got us here.”

Hayes doesn’t have anything to say to that, and neither, for once, do I.

Ingrid calls that evening, her voice careful in the way it gets when she already knows more than she’s letting on.

“It’s all over the feeds. Are you alright?”

“I’ve had better weeks.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

A pause, and I can hear her settling somewhere quiet, giving me her full attention the way she always does when the question actually matters.

“Dominic. Are you alright?”

I consider lying, the way I’ve considered lying about most things this month, and find I don’t have the energy left to manage even that small a deception with my own sister.

“No. I’m not. I did something unforgivable to someone I love, and I don’t know yet whether unforgivable is a permanent state or just a very long one.”

“What did you do?”

I tell her.

All of it, plainly, without the careful legal language I’ve been drafting into statements all day: Atlas, Cassandra, the suspicion I refused to confirm until after Piper and I had already crossed the line, the test message that finally gave me certainty, and every opportunity afterward when I could have told her the truth and chose fear instead.

“That’s bad, Dominic.”

“I know.”

“I’m not going to tell you it isn’t, because you’d see through it in about four seconds and stop trusting anything else I say tonight.”

Her voice softens slightly.

“But I’ve watched you build walls around yourself since Jonah died specifically so you’d never have to risk this exact kind of damage again. The fact that you did it anyway, even badly, even dishonestly at first, that’s not nothing. It’s not enough yet. But it’s not nothing.”

“She left me in a hospital chapel, Ingrid. I don’t think ‘not nothing’ covers the distance between where we are and anything resembling forgiveness.”

“No,” she agrees quietly. “It probably doesn’t. But you’re not calling me tonight to ask whether you deserve forgiveness. You already know the answer to that. I think you’re calling because you need someone to tell you it’s alright to still hope for it anyway, even without deserving it yet.”

I don’t answer that, mostly because she’s right, and there isn’t anything left to say once she’s named it that plainly.

I sit with the silence a long time after we hang up, and understand that hope without deserving it yet is precisely the kind of debt I’m going to have to learn how to carry.

28

PIPER

Three weeks is long enough to build an entirely new life around a wound, and I’ve spent every day of it proving that to myself in exhausting detail.

The suspension is technically temporary, pending an internal review the agency insists on framing as procedural rather than punitive, though everyone involved knows exactly what it actually is.

I work anyway, quietly, from my apartment, feeding Wren research through channels the agency doesn’t monitor, building the counter-narrative to Roman’s manufactured scandal one careful, unofficial thread at a time.

Somewhere in the third week, I stopped thinking of this as a temporary workaround and started thinking of it as a prototype.