Page 88 of Secret Baby Daddy

“I don’t know if she will.”

“No,” Ingrid agrees. “But you won’t know until you try, and I think you’ve spent quite enough of this year deciding things on her behalf without asking first.”

I sit with the observation a long moment after we hang up, and understand that my sister has just handed me, in one sentence, the entire blueprint for everything I’ve been doing wrong since this began.

30

PIPER

I have spent a career learning to spot a manufactured story from three sentences away, and it takes me exactly one sleepless night with Roman’s leaked excerpts to recognize my own fingerprints on the method he used to destroy me.

I lay the released Blackline messages out across my apartment floor, printed, annotated, the same way I’d deconstruct any piece of manipulated footage, and the pattern reveals itself almost immediately once I stop reading for content and start reading for structure.

Altered timestamps, sequences reordered just enough to imply a causality that never existed.

Missing segments, the same clean, surgical gaps I found in the fire footage weeks ago, not clumsy edits but the work of someone who understands exactly how much truth you can remove before a story stops making sense on its own.

This isn’t a leak.

It’s an edit.

The same signature, the same discipline, the same patient hand that spliced eleven seconds out of a burning building now spliced context out of a year of private conversation, and I recognize the craftsmanship because it’s the same craftsmanship I’ve spent my entire career defending against, just aimed, for once, directly at me.

I call Wren before I’ve even finished the analysis.

She already knows how Roman captured the Blackline sessions. What I need from her now is the connection I still can’t prove.

“There’s more,” Wren says, voice tight with the excitement she gets when a trace finally resolves. “The amplification accounts. The ones pushing the Sloane narrative before the footage even went public. I finally traced the payment trail behind them.”

“Northbridge.”

“A shell agency, three layers removed, but yes. Northbridge paid for coordinated amplification of a story they hadn’t even leaked yet, which means they knew the footage was coming before it arrived anywhere legitimate.”

She lets that sit.

“Piper, this isn’t just an extortion attempt anymore. This is a structured, multi-year information operation, and the fire footage and the Blackline leak are two applications of the exact same technique.”

I sit back on my heels, feeling the full scope of it assemble itself, far larger and older than the single scandal I thought I was fighting.

Roman doesn’t fabricate anything.

That’s the piece I kept missing, the piece that made every previous defense feel inadequate.

He doesn’t need to invent a single false fact, because manufactured falsehood is fragile, disprovable, the kind of lie that collapses the moment someone checks the original source.

Instead he takes true pieces, a real girl locking a real door, real messages two real people actually wrote, and he arranges them, strips them of context, times their release, until the true pieces assemble into something false by omission rather than by fabrication.

That is what he did with the fire footage.

That is precisely what he did with Blackline.

Roman built his empire on exactly the discipline I’ve spent a decade mastering.

He understood, long before I ever articulated it to Calder in a sealed suite during a power outage, that truth without context is its own kind of weapon.

Which means I am, by pure accident of expertise, exactly the person equipped to dismantle him.

“I want the full editing signature,” I tell Wren, already building the shape of something in my head. “Every splice point, cross-referenced against the fire footage and the Blackline release both. If I can show a journalist, cleanly and irrefutably, that both leaks share the same technical fingerprint, I don’t just clear my name. I expose the entire operation as a pattern, not an isolated scandal.”