28. PIPER
Three weeks is long enough to build an entirely new life around a wound, and I’ve spent every day of it proving that to myself in exhausting detail.
The suspension is technically temporary, pending an internal review the agency insists on framing as procedural rather than punitive, though everyone involved knows exactly what it actually is.
I work anyway, quietly, from my apartment, feeding Wren research through channels the agency doesn’t monitor, building the counter-narrative to Roman’s manufactured scandal one careful, unofficial thread at a time.
Somewhere in the third week, I stopped thinking of this as a temporary workaround and started thinking of it as a prototype.
I’ve registered a name, sketched a client list on the back of an old case file, run the numbers on overhead twice just to make sure the second time wasn’t wishful thinking.
I keep telling myself it’s a contingency, a hedge in case the review goes the way everyone already suspects it will, but contingencies don’t usually come with a logo mockup and a folder labeled Piper Vale Communications sitting open on my desktop at one in the morning.
There’s a grim satisfaction in discovering exactly how much of my value never actually depended on the agency’s letterhead in the first place.
The exhaustion I initially blame on stress.
The nausea I blame on the same thing, plus bad coffee, plus the low-grade dread of checking my phone every morning to see what new distortion Roman’s people have managed to plant overnight.
It takes missing my period entirely before the pieces start assembling themselves into a shape I’ve been actively avoiding.
I buy the test on a Tuesday, alone, at a pharmacy four blocks from my apartment where nobody’s likely to recognize me from the news cycle currently making my face mildly infamous.
I take it standing in my own bathroom, hands steadier than I expect.
It’s positive.
Unambiguously, immediately positive, the second line darker than the first within seconds.
I sit on the edge of the bathtub for a long time afterward, doing math I don’t want to be doing, counting backward through the last few weeks until I land, inevitably, on the one night none of this makes sense without.
The argument that turned into something else entirely, adrenaline and fear and a year of pretending finally burning off into something neither of us fully understood at the time, and afterward, in the dark, the condom that hadn’t held,
a fact he told me plainly and I waved off with a statistic because I wanted the quiet more than the conversation.
Almost six weeks, by the doctor’s dating, once I finally make the appointment I’ve been avoiding for four days.
There is no possibility that it isn’t Calder’s.
I don’t tell him.
I turn the decision over for days, examining it from every angle I know how to examine anything, and I keep arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion.
I don’t trust him yet, not with this, not with something this large and permanent and unfixable by any careful statement or eloquent confession.
I’m afraid, specifically, that he’ll return to me the way he returns to every crisis: managing it, containing it, building a plan around it with the same brisk efficiency he brought to moving Sloane out of a compromised building.
I don’t want to be managed.
I want, if this ever happens at all, to be loved through it instead of handled, and I don’t yet know which version of Dominic Calder I’d be handing this news to.
“I am withholding a life-changing truth,” I say out loud to my empty apartment, “because I am afraid of what he will do with it.”
I hear the irony in my own voice as I say it, sharp enough to almost make me laugh, except there’s nothing funny about it at all.
I have spent three weeks furious at a man for deciding, unilaterally, what truth I was allowed to have.
And now I am doing precisely the same thing to him, for reasons that feel, from inside my own chest, entirely justified.
I do it anyway.
Odette, when I finally tell her, because I have to tell someone, and she is still, after everything, the only person whose reaction I trust completely, doesn’t tell me what to do about Calder at all.
“Your anger is honest,” she says, propped up in her recovery chair, crossword abandoned on her lap, watching me with the same pale, merciless attention she’s given me my whole life.
“I’m not going to tell you it isn’t earned, or that you owe him forgiveness on any particular timeline. But Piper, anger is not a plan. It’s not a permanent decision, and it’s not a substitute for making one. Eventually you’ll need to decide what you actually want,
separate from what he deserves to be punished for.”
“I don’t know how to separate those two things right now.”
“I know.”
She reaches for my hand, papery and steady.
If enemies to lovers or fated mates is calling, there is no need to overthink it.
Look up Lokepub on Google and start browsing.
“You don’t have to know today. Just don’t mistake the anger for an answer. It’s a feeling, darling. Feelings tell you the truth about right now. They’re considerably worse at telling you the truth about forever.”
“What if the anger is right, though? What if it’s not just a feeling, but an accurate read on who he actually is?”
“Then you’ll still know that in a month, or in six, once you’ve had time to see it clearly instead of through the fog of the worst week of your life.”
She pats my hand once, the same dry, light gesture she’s used my whole life to settle me.
“I raised you to trust your own judgment, Piper. I didn’t raise you to trust it most when it’s freshest. Wounds lie about how permanent they are. That’s rather their entire function.”
Wren, when I finally loop her fully into the counter-strategy, offers something closer to strategic clarity than emotional wisdom, which I’m grateful for in its own way.
“Roman didn’t just steal your private conversations,” she says, laying out the timeline of the leak with her usual precision.
“He built a story out of them. Selectively edited, weaponized, timed for maximum damage. That’s not a man who stumbled onto something true and used it badly. That’s a man who’s been constructing this exact moment for weeks, maybe longer.”
“I know.”
“I just don’t want you conflating what Calder did with what Roman did. They’re not the same category of betrayal, even if they both hurt.”
Wren looks at me carefully.
“You get to be furious at both of them. But only one of them built a weapon out of the truth on purpose.”
I don’t have an answer for that yet.
She hesitates before she gathers her things, and I recognize the shape of that hesitation, because I’ve been watching it flicker across her face on and off for three weeks now.
“There’s something else,” Wren says. “Bad timing, probably the worst timing, and I’ve gone back and forth about even bringing it up while you’re dealing with all of this.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“The Ledger called again. Formal offer this time, not just a feeler. Investigative unit, my name on the masthead, the platform-manipulation work as the flagship piece.”
She says it fast, watching me carefully, the way you watch someone you’re afraid you’re about to hurt.
“I told them I needed time. I meant it. But I’d be lying if I said the timing wasn’t eating at me. You’re in the worst month of your professional life, and I’m sitting on the best offer of mine, and I don’t know how to hold both of those at once without feeling like a traitor either way I choose.”
I feel the old, proprietary instinct rise first, quick and unwelcome, and I set it down deliberately, the way I’ve learned to do with almost everything else this month.
“You’re not a traitor for wanting your name on your own work,” I tell her.
“I told you that months ago and I meant it then too. The fact that my life happens to be on fire right now doesn’t change the math on what you’ve earned. I need you right now. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But I need you a great deal less than I need you to still respect yourself in five years, and staying out of guilt is a version of loyalty that curdles eventually. I’ve watched it curdle in other people. I don’t want to watch it curdle in you.”
“That’s an extremely generous thing to say to someone who just told you she’s thinking about leaving in the middle of your worst month.”
“It’s an honest thing to say. I’ve had enough of the other kind lately.”
I reach across and take her hand, the same steady grip my grandmother uses on me, passed down without either of us quite noticing.
“Take whatever time you need. Don’t decide anything based on what’s convenient for me. I mean that.”
“I haven’t decided,” she says finally. “I need you to know that isn’t a no. It’s just not a yes yet either.”
“That’s allowed.”
I mean it, even as some small, unguarded part of me is already grieving the version of my company that doesn’t have her in it.
That night, lying awake in the dark, one hand resting over a secret I’m not ready to hand to anyone else, I let myself imagine, just once, telling him.
The look that would cross his face, the way he’d go very still the way he does before every decision that actually costs him something.
I imagine him trying to build a plan around it within minutes, doctors, security, some careful new architecture designed to keep a child safe the way he’s spent his whole career keeping strangers safe.
I imagine, too, a different version, one where he simply reaches for my hand and says nothing at all for a long moment, too overwhelmed to manage anything.
I don’t know which version is true.
That, more than anything else, is the reason I’m still not ready to find out.