Page 89 of Secret Baby Daddy

“That’s going to take real technical evidence. Not just forensic theory.”

“Then get me the evidence. I’ll build the narrative around it once you do.”

I’m already sketching the framework, a piece that doesn’t defend Calder or me directly, doesn’t ask anyone to trust our account of events, but instead simply shows, mechanically, undeniably, the exact editing signature repeated across two supposedly unrelated leaks, weeks apart, both traceable back to the same paid amplification network.

It’s not vindication I’m building.

It’s proof, the kind that survives scrutiny because it never once asks anyone to take my word for anything.

I think, briefly, of Calder, weeks into a silence I haven’t broken, and of the last thing I said to him in that hospital chapel.

Intent does not change what you did.

I still believe that.

I’m not building this plan to forgive him.

I’m building it because Roman Vasseur used the exact same tool against both of us, and dismantling him is, for the moment, the only kind of justice either of us is equipped to deliver.

I keep working long after midnight, printouts spread across my floor, one hand occasionally drifting, without my permission, to rest against a stomach that still doesn’t show anything at all, carrying a secret larger than any story I’ve ever had to manage professionally.

Around two in the morning, exhausted, I allow myself one small indulgence, pulling up the original fire footage one more time, side by side with the Blackline excerpts, just to be certain the pattern holds under the kind of scrutiny a hostile lawyer would bring to it.

It does.

Every splice point aligns with the same signature, the same unhurried, patient hand, the same complete absence of fabricated content.

Roman never once needed to lie outright.

He only ever needed to choose which true things to show me and which true things to hide, and somehow that restraint makes the whole operation more chilling, not less.

A man doesn’t build something this disciplined out of opportunism.

He builds it out of a philosophy, the mirror image of the one I’ve spent my whole career developing, and something about facing my own methodology reflected back at me, weaponized, makes the exhaustion in my body feel suddenly, sharply useful instead of merely draining.

I save the file and back it up in three separate places the way Calder taught me without either of us noticing the lesson happening.

Then, somewhere near three in the morning, I finally close the laptop.

For the first time in this entire case, I am no longer simply defending against Roman Vasseur.

I am hunting him.

31

DOMINIC

Roman requests the meeting himself, which should have told me everything about what he actually wanted from it before he said a single word.

He picks a restaurant too public for violence and too private for witnesses, the kind of venue a man chooses when he wants plausible deniability more than he wants an actual conversation.

I arrive early, positioned facing the door out of twelve years of habit, and Roman arrives precisely on time, unbothered, ordering wine before he’s fully settled into his chair.

“Dominic. Thank you for coming.”

He says it like I had a genuine choice in the matter, like six weeks of watching my practice dismantle itself wasn’t specifically engineered to bring me to this exact table.

“I imagine things have been difficult.”