Page 93 of Secret Baby Daddy

“Whatever happens after, however long it takes, or if it never happens at all, I understand this is only ever about stopping him. Nothing more, unless you decide, entirely on your own terms, that you want it to be.”

“Good.”

I stand, gathering the plan, already moving toward the next phase, the way I always move once a strategy is set.

“Then let’s go set the trap.”

We spend the rest of the week building it together, careful and precise, and if some small, unguarded part of me notices how naturally we still fall into rhythm with each other despite everything, I don’t let myself dwell on it.

Hayes constructs the physical layer of the deception, a genuine, sealed room in a rarely used section of the Merrick archive, real enough to survive scrutiny if Roman sends someone to verify its existence before he commits to acting himself.

Wren builds the digital trail, a controlled leak through a source Roman’s own network has trusted before, planted with just enough specificity that it reads as a mistake rather than a trap.

I handle the narrative itself, the exact phrasing that will make a man like Roman believe his worst fear has finally, quietly, come true.

Cordelia’s attorneys have already opened a channel with federal investigators and provided the existing extortion evidence. The operation itself stays ours, but the moment Roman enters the archive and touches anything connected to the decoy, the complete package begins transferring through their secured evidence channel.

Wren finds me alone in the archive an hour after the trail is finished, her laptop closed for the night, and there’s something settled in her expression that I recognize before she says a word.

“I turned it down,” she says, no preamble, sitting on the edge of the long reading table across from me. “The Ledger. I called them this morning.”

“Wren.”

“Let me finish before you talk me out of it, because I know you well enough to know you’ll try, generously, which is somehow worse.”

She almost smiles.

“I watched you build this counter-strategy against Roman this week. Every piece of it. And I realized somewhere around day three that the reason I built the digital trail so fast, the reason I’m good at any of this, is that you spent three years teaching me to see exactly what I saw in those account creation dates the first week I worked for you. That’s not nothing. That’s not a consolation prize instead of the Ledger. That’s its own kind of career, and I’d been telling myself it was smaller than it actually is.”

“It’s not a consolation prize,” I say, and I mean it entirely. “It’s a different thing. Both things are real. I need you to actually believe that, not just hear me say it.”

“I’m getting there.”

She studies the ceiling for a moment, gathering whatever she came here to say.

“I also want something, if I’m staying. I don’t want to keep being the assist in the story of your name. The platform-manipulation work, the digital trail on Roman, all of it, I want my byline on it. Not buried. Not a research-credit line nobody reads. My name, next to yours, on the record.”

“Done,” I say. “It should have already been done. I built my career on the theory that the story matters more than who tells it, and somewhere along the way I let that theory cover for the fact that I kept every byline for myself. That’s on me, not on you for finally saying something.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d agree that easily.”

“I’ve had a month of finding out exactly how much it costs when people decide, quietly, without telling you, what you deserve to know about your own life.”

I reach for her hand, the gesture landing more naturally than it used to.

“I’m done doing that to the people I actually trust. Starting with you.”

“For what it’s worth,” she says eventually, “I think you’d have been fine without me. You’d have found the trail some other way, slower maybe, but you’d have found it.”

“Probably. I don’t want to find out what slower costs, though. Go home, Wren. Get some actual sleep for once. We finish this together tomorrow, with your name on it where it belongs.”

She pauses at the door, the way she always does, one hand on the frame, and for a moment she looks less like someone who works for me and more like exactly what she’s been for three years without either of us saying it plainly: the person who taught me, as much as I ever taught her, what it looks like to choose the harder, more honest version of a story on purpose.

Calder and I work later most nights than either of us needs to, and there’s an unspoken agreement between us not to name what that means, if anything.

We are careful with each other in a way we never used to be, polite where we used to be sharp, deliberate where we used to simply react.

It isn’t warmth, not exactly.