Page 87 of Secret Baby Daddy

I made a devastating mistake.

That much has never changed, and I don’t think it ever will.

I trusted Roman’s judgment over my own instincts, I moved a man who told me, in his own words, that something dangerous was happening, and I didn’t listen closely enough to the fear underneath his warning.

That failure is mine.

But I am not the sole architect of what happened to him.

Roman didn’t simply exploit a mistake I was always going to make.

He built the conditions for it, engineered my trust in his judgment over years of patient manipulation, and then handed the men who killed Jonah the exact address I’d chosen to keep him safe.

I have believed for twelve years that I murdered a man through negligence.

Tonight I understand, for the first time, that I made a mistake a manipulator specifically engineered me to make, which does not absolve me of the mistake, but does, finally, correct the scale of what I’ve been carrying.

Both truths sit side by side, uneasy, refusing to cancel each other out the way I keep wanting them to.

I am responsible for my choice.

Roman is responsible for building the trap that made the choice inevitable.

Neither fact makes the other one smaller.

I call Hayes back, tell him to secure the file through three separate channels before Roman’s people can find a way to scrub it, and then I sit alone in the quiet of my own diminished practice, feeling something I haven’t felt in twelve years and don’t entirely trust yet.

Something almost like room to breathe.

I think of Ingrid’s sentence, the one she said to Piper instead of me, the first person he did not know how to survive losing, and I understand that it was never really about excusing anything.

It was about giving Piper one true fact to weigh against everything Roman handed her, before she decided, permanently, what to do with the rest.

Whether it’s enough, I still don’t know.

I only know that for the first time since the chapel, I have something in my hands worth bringing to her that isn’t another apology.

I call Ingrid back before I do anything else with the file, because some part of me needs to say the next part out loud to someone before I let myself believe it.

“I found proof Roman gave the killers Jonah’s address,” I tell her. “He didn’t just steer me toward a bad decision. He made sure the decision I made was lethal, regardless of what I chose.”

My voice shakes slightly delivering the sentence, twelve years of careful composure finally cracking under the weight of saying it plainly to someone who actually loves me.

Ingrid is quiet for a long moment.

“How does that feel to know?”

“Complicated. I keep waiting for it to feel like relief, and it mostly just feels like grief wearing a different shape. I spent twelve years believing I was the reason he died. Now I know someone else built the trap. It doesn’t undo the mistake. It just means I wasn’t the only architect of it.”

“That’s not nothing, Dominic.”

“No,” I agree, quietly. “It’s not nothing. It’s just not everything either. I still made the call. I still trusted the wrong man’s judgment over my own instincts, and Jonah still paid for that with his life, whatever Roman added on top of it.”

“You’re allowed to hold both of those at once. You don’t have to choose between being responsible and being manipulated. Most real tragedies are built out of exactly that combination.”

Her voice softens, the gentleness she reserves only for me.

“Go finish building your case against him. And when this is over, however it’s over, go find out if she’ll let you say any of this to her directly. Not through me. Through you.”