Page 86 of Secret Baby Daddy

I imagine, too, a different version, one where he simply reaches for my hand and says nothing at all for a long moment, too overwhelmed to manage anything.

I don’t know which version is true.

That, more than anything else, is the reason I’m still not ready to find out.

29

DOMINIC

Ingrid doesn’t ask my permission before she visits Piper.

She simply tells me, afterward, the way she tells me most things I wouldn’t have agreed to in advance.

“I went to see her,” she says over the phone, and my whole body goes tense before she’s finished the sentence. “Don’t panic. I didn’t go to defend you. I went because I wanted to see the woman my brother nearly destroyed his own life over, and because I thought she deserved to hear a few things from someone who isn’t you.”

“Ingrid—”

“I told her you didn’t lie because she meant nothing to you.”

Her voice is steady, clinical almost, the tone she uses to deliver hard news to frightened families in a trauma bay.

“I told her you lied because she was the first person in twelve years you didn’t know how to survive losing. That’s not an excuse, Dominic. I made sure she understood that distinction clearly. It’s an explanation.”

I don’t have anything to say to that, mostly because it’s true, and my sister has an infuriating habit of being most right exactly when I have the least capacity to argue with her.

“How did she seem?”

“Tired. Furious in the way people get when the fury’s the only thing keeping them upright.”

A pause.

“She didn’t ask about you, if that’s what you’re really asking. But she didn’t tell me to leave either. I think that’s worth something, even if I can’t tell you how much.”

Something loosens slightly in my chest at that detail, small and probably meaningless, and I hold onto it anyway, because I don’t currently have very much else worth holding onto.

I thank her, quietly, and end the call, and then I go back to the file Hayes flagged an hour before Ingrid called, the reason, if I’m honest, I hadn’t answered her call the moment it came in.

The archive search finally turned up something I’ve been afraid to find for twelve years and desperate to find for the last six weeks: a secondary set of records from the firm Roman used to monitor the Merrick family, cross-referenced against the exact week Jonah died.

Wire transfers.

Communications logs.

And buried three folders deep, a single address: the safe house I personally selected for Jonah’s relocation, the one location I never shared with anyone outside a two-person chain of trust that included, at the time, exactly one other person.

Roman had it.

Roman had the address four days before the men who killed Jonah arrived at that exact location.

I read the file three times, testing it, refusing to believe something this large without absolute confirmation.

There’s no ambiguity left once I cross-reference the timestamps.

Roman didn’t simply tell me Jonah was unreliable and let me make a bad decision based on flawed information.

Roman knew where I was moving him, and he gave that address to the exact people who needed it to finish what they’d started.

I sit with that for a long time, feeling something enormous and complicated settle into the space where twelve years of guilt used to live uncontested.