21. PIPER
I tell Atlas the truth at one in the morning because I’ve run out of ways to keep it from being true just by not saying it out loud.
Cassandra: I think I’m developing feelings for him. Not just the physical thing. Actual feelings. It terrifies me more than the fire, more than the extortion, more than any of it.
Atlas: Tell me.
Cassandra: With you, I’ve never had to hide anything. You know my mind better than anyone alive, the parts I don’t show clients, the parts I don’t even show my own grandmother. It’s the safest I’ve ever felt being honest with another person.
Atlas: And him?
Cassandra: With him, I feel alive. Not safe, exactly.
Something more dangerous and more necessary than safe.
He sees the parts of me I’ve spent my whole career trying to make disappear, and instead of flinching, he just stays.
Watches. Doesn’t ask me to perform any version of myself except the real one.
I stop typing, staring at what I’ve just admitted to a stranger I’ve never met, and something hot and uncomfortable settles under my ribs.
Cassandra: I’m ashamed of how much I want both of you. I know that’s not how any of this is supposed to work. I know I’m supposed to choose. I just don’t know how to give either of you up, and I hate what that says about me.
The reply doesn’t come immediately.
I watch the indicator, typing, stopping, typing again, the rhythm of someone drafting something he isn’t sure he has the right to say.
Atlas: You’re not a bad person for wanting both. But I don’t think that’s actually what’s happening here.
Cassandra: Then what is?
Atlas: Maybe you do not want two men. Maybe you finally want one man in front of whom you do not have to hide.
I read it three times, and something about the phrasing lands strangely, too precise, too close to a sentence I might have built myself if I were the one saying it instead of receiving it.
Cassandra: That’s a nice thought. I’m not sure it’s true. They’re very different men, Atlas. He doesn’t even know you exist.
Atlas: Are you certain of that?
I type out three different follow-ups and delete each one, unsettled by how much the sentence seems to want an answer I don’t have.
Before I can settle on a fourth, Cordelia’s assistant knocks, apologetic, informing me Sloane’s attorney needs a signature on a filing due at nine and would I review it tonight, and by the time I’ve handled it and come back to my laptop, the moment for asking has passed,
and Atlas has gone quiet again, the way he’s been quiet for days.
I file the strangeness of it away with all the other small, inexplicable coincidences I haven’t yet found the courage to add up, and with the test result I have decided to trust because it is comfortable.
I close the laptop and sit with the shame Livia predicted weeks ago, the ache of wanting two different kinds of intimacy and not knowing whether that makes me greedy or simply, finally, honest about what I actually need.
Are you sure you want two men? Or do you want two different things no single man has ever given you before?
I told her, at the time, that it wasn’t the same thing.
Sitting here now, replaying Atlas’s sentence, I’m no longer sure I built that argument in good faith.
I think about the version of myself that walks into a room and fills it before anyone else gets the chance; the woman Calder tackled to a marble floor, the woman who forced Roman Vasseur out of a mansion with nothing but a bluff and a raised chin.
That woman doesn’t need saving.
She built herself specifically so she’d never need it.
And then I think about the other version, the one who exists only in the dark, typing confessions to a man whose face I’ve never seen, the one who told a stranger about my grandmother’s crossword habit before I ever told the man standing three feet away from me in the flesh.
That version doesn’t perform.
She just says the true thing and trusts, somehow, that it will be received with care instead of leverage.
I have spent my entire adult life keeping those two women very carefully apart, convinced that letting them occupy the same room would mean losing whatever protection the separation provided.
Tonight, for the first time, I let myself wonder what it would actually cost to let them meet.
It occurs to me, distantly, that Calder has never once asked me to choose between the two versions of myself.
He’s simply started, somehow, addressing both of them at once, the armored woman across the conference table and the unguarded one who talked about her grandmother in the dark, without ever seeming to notice he was doing it.
I don’t let myself follow that thought all the way to its conclusion.
Down the hall, I hear Calder’s door open.
I don’t go to him.
I fall asleep with Atlas’s sentence still circling, unresolved, and some small, stubborn part of me already suspects the answer is simpler and far more frightening than anything I’ve let myself consider so far.