Secret Baby Daddy (The Chester Street Billionaires #7)

Prologue

CASSANDRA & ATLAS

Blackline Secure Session – 11:47 PM

Cassandra: Hypothetical.

Atlas: You always say hypothetical like it’s a safe word.

Cassandra: It is. Now behave. A public figure, let’s call him a philanthropist, the kind who funds hospital wings and gets a wall plaque for it, is partially responsible for a tragedy.

Not completely. Partially. Some of what people are saying about him is true.

Some of it has been edited into something else.

He comes to me the night before it breaks.

Atlas: And you bury the true part with the false part, because untangling them takes longer than the news cycle allows.

Cassandra: I control the disclosure. There’s a difference.

Atlas: There isn’t, from where the dead are standing.

Cassandra doesn’t answer right away.

She’s curled into the corner of a sofa that costs more than most people’s cars, laptop balanced on her knees, and she can feel the old argument settling into her chest like a hand pressing down.

She wonders, not for the first time, whether Atlas would like her at all if he ever saw her face, saw the woman who says these things in boardrooms with her spine straight and her voice sanded smooth, who has never once, in a professional room, admitted the sentence she is about to type.

Cassandra: Truth without context can be a weapon too. You talk about the dead like the living don’t also get destroyed by a fact dropped on them without warning.

Atlas: I talk about the dead because someone has to. Nobody dies of an uncomfortable press release, Cassandra. People die because the version of events that reached them in time was the sanitized one, and it told them the exit was clear when it wasn’t.

Cassandra: That’s oddly specific for a hypothetical.

Atlas: Everything’s hypothetical here. That’s the rule.

Cassandra: Is it a rule you’ve broken? Withheld the true version. Watched it cost somebody something they couldn’t get back.

There’s a pause long enough that Cassandra glances at the little indicator that tells her he’s typing, watches it start and stop three times.

She has learned, over a year of these nights, what his silences mean almost as well as she knows her own.

This one means she has found something.

Atlas: Why do you have to control every conversation? Even this one. Even a hypothetical about a stranger who doesn’t exist.

Cassandra: I asked you a direct question.

Atlas: And I’m allowed to have a silence that’s just mine.

Cassandra: No one is entitled to a silence that costs someone else something. You said so yourself, four sentences ago.

Atlas: That’s a low blow.

Cassandra: It’s an accurate one. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. You’d know, you’re the one who’s obsessed with accuracy.

Another pause.

Cassandra pulls her knees up under her and lets herself feel the ache that only shows up at this hour, with this person, when the rest of the day’s armor has come off.

She thinks about the man she despises in daylight, the one who looked at a spreadsheet for four minutes and found in it what had cost her an entire sleepless night, and said nothing about it except a flat, infuriating there it is, as though her exhaustion were a rounding error, and she thinks,

absurdly, that she would like Atlas to be nothing like him.

She has built an entire private mythology on that distinction.

It is one of the only clean things left in her life.

Atlas: You want to know if I’ve lost someone to the version of events I thought was true.

Cassandra: I want to know if that’s why you sound like this. Like the world owes somebody a confession and you’ve appointed yourself the collector.

Atlas: Careful. That’s the most honest sentence you’ve written to me all year.

Cassandra: I contain multitudes. Answer the question.

Atlas: Yes.

Just that.

One word, sitting alone on the screen, and Cassandra feels something in her chest go soft and unguarded in a way she does not permit in any other part of her life.

She has spent a year building a sense of self out of never being caught unprepared, and here is a stranger, faceless, nameless, breaking that architecture with a single syllable typed at midnight.

Cassandra: I’m sorry.

Atlas: Don’t be sorry. Be honest instead. Tell me the thing you’ve never told anyone in a room with your actual name in it.

Cassandra: That’s not how this works.

Atlas: It’s exactly how this works. That’s the whole reason we’re both still awake.

Cassandra sets the laptop down, presses the heels of her hands against her eyes, and thinks how strange it is that the only place she has ever been fully, catastrophically honest is a platform with no last names, built for people who lie for a living.

Cassandra: I told the truth once.

Early.

It mattered, and I said it clearly, and I was ignored, and then when the true version came out anyway, later, ugly, undeniable, I was the one they blamed for not having stopped it.

As if the problem had been my telling and not their not listening.

Atlas: That’s not a hypothetical.

Cassandra: No.

Atlas: Cassandra. The seer nobody believed.

Cassandra: Don’t. Don’t do the thing where you say my name back to me like it explains something.

Atlas: It does explain something. It explains why you’d rather manage the story than trust the world to hear it straight. You’re not protecting your clients. You’re protecting the twenty-four-year-old who watched grown men decide her honesty was the liability.

Cassandra goes very still.

On the other side of an anonymous, encrypted, rule-bound platform designed expressly to prevent this kind of intimacy, a man she has never seen has just reached into the oldest room in her chest and turned on the light.

She should be furious.

She finds, instead, that her eyes have gone hot, and that some clenched, permanently braced part of her has simply stopped bracing.

Cassandra: And what does Atlas explain, then? Since we’re doing this.

Atlas: Atlas is the one who thinks the whole sky falls if he sets it down for even a second.

He’s not carrying the world because he’s strong.

He’s carrying it because once, a long time ago, he put something down that he should have kept holding, and it broke, and he has never once since then trusted himself to let go of anything again.

Cassandra: That sounds exhausting.

Atlas: It is. You’re the only person who’s ever made it feel like it might not have to be.

Neither of them types anything for almost a full minute.

Cassandra watches the ellipsis appear and vanish on his side, watches her own cursor blink uselessly on hers, and understands that something has just shifted between them that cannot be shifted back.

A year of hypothetical clients and imaginary crises and careful, rule-abiding intimacy has just cracked open into something with nothing hypothetical left in it at all.

Atlas: Tell me something true. Not a case. Not a client. You.

Cassandra: I’m tired of being the only version of myself that has to be perfect. In every room with my real name in it, I have to be certain, controlled, unbothered. Here I get to be uncertain. I don’t know why that feels like the only place I can breathe.

Atlas: Because it’s the only place no one’s keeping score of whether you deserve to be believed. I already believe you. I have for a year. You’ve never had to earn it here.

Cassandra: Say that again.

Atlas: I believe you.

Cassandra reads it three times.

Then she does something she has never once done in a year of these nights. She lets the conversation go where she has always, deliberately, steered it away from.

Cassandra: If you were here. Not hypothetically. If the rules didn’t exist and this wasn’t a screen. What would you do, the first thing, if I told you I was tired of being believed only by a stranger.

Atlas: I’d tell you that you’re not tired of being believed by a stranger. You’re tired of the stranger being the only one who counts. And then I’d stop talking, because I’d rather show you than argue about it.

Cassandra: Show me, then. Since we’re breaking every rule already.

What follows breaks Blackline’s most sacred convention twice over, no case, no client, and now no distance, and neither of them stops to note the violation.

Atlas tells her, with a precision that feels less like flattery than confession, the exact things he has noticed about her over a year of these nights, the way her sentences get shorter right before she says something true, the way she apologizes for feelings she has no reason to apologize for,

the way she has never once asked him to be impressed by her.

Cassandra tells him, in return, what she has spent a year not admitting she wanted to hear, that someone had noticed her at all, closely, on purpose, without an agenda attached to the noticing.

Their sentences grow shorter, warmer, punctuated by the small confessions that only ever surface at 1 a.m. between two people who have never seen each other’s faces.

He tells her, half-joking and entirely serious, that he has started listening for the sound her typing makes when she’s about to disagree with him.

She tells him that she has caught herself smiling at her own laptop screen in restaurants, in cabs, in rooms full of people who would find that smile very hard to explain.

When she finally admits, laughing at herself even as she types it, that she has wondered more than once what his actual voice sounds like, there is a pause on his end long enough that she worries she has gone too far, and then he answers, quiet and unguarded even through text,

that he has wondered the same thing about hers, more nights than he’d ever intended to admit.

Atlas: That’s never happened. Not like that. Not with anyone.

Cassandra: No. Me neither.

Atlas: I should feel like I gave something away.

Cassandra: You should. So should I. I don’t. That’s the part that scares me.

Cassandra: I have to be in Manhattan tomorrow morning. New assignment. Ugly one, from the sound of it, old money, older secrets.

Atlas: I have a meeting in Manhattan tomorrow morning.

Cassandra: Small city.

Atlas: Enormous city. Small world, apparently.

Neither of them asks the question sitting directly beneath that exchange.

Neither of them asks what firm, what client, what building, what name.

The rules exist for a reason.

They have already broken enough of them tonight.

Atlas: Good luck tomorrow. Whatever it is.

Cassandra: You too.

Atlas: Goodnight, Cassandra.

Cassandra: Goodnight, Atlas.

She closes the laptop before she can watch his status change to offline.

Somewhere across the same sleepless city, a man closes his own laptop, presses the heel of his hand hard against one eye, and tells himself that tomorrow is just another meeting, in just another building, for just another impossible client.