Marrying My Secret Baby Daddy - Chapter #3 - by Tessa Kelwyn

POV Shane

The clock strikes midnight, and I'm desperate enough to call Paul Hoffman.

He answers on the second ring, because Paul always answers—it's what makes him both an exceptional lawyer and an exhausting friend. "This better be an emergency. I'm billing you my hourly rate for interrupting my Netflix."

"I need your brain." I pour three fingers of whiskey, Hilmond Academy's yearbook open on my desk to page forty-seven. "Something doesn't add up."

"Is this about the Lennox arrangement? I heard you had dinner tonight." Paul's voice sharpens with interest. "My paralegal's cousin works at Canlis. Apparently your date asked about chicken tenders and proposed registering at Costco."

"Word travels fast."

"Word travels instantly when a Reed makes a scene. So what doesn't add up?"

I stare at Audrey Lennox's senior portrait. The cystic acne, two thick braids and the hunched shoulders. The bright blue eyes aimed somewhere off-camera like she was trying to disappear into the frame.

"I'm looking at her yearbook photo. She was invisible, Paul. Chess club secretary, literary magazine contributor, debate alternate. The kind of activities that keep you busy without requiring anyone to actually see you."

"Strategic invisibility perhaps?" Paul says slowly. "Classic survival mechanism. Hilmond was brutal to anyone who couldn't compete socially."

"Exactly. So how does that girl become the woman who grabbed my face tonight and left lipstick on my cheeks like she was marking territory? Who wore fur in May and asked the sommelier about wines with cartoon labels?"

I take a long drink before finishing my thought.

"That's not growth. That's a completely different operating system."

Paul is quiet for a moment. "You remember Jenny Ortega? Quiet as a church mouse junior year, then showed up senior fall like she'd downloaded an entirely new personality. Turned out she'd spent the summer with some aunt in Milan who taught her that confidence was just performance until it became real."

"But this felt different. More... calculated."

"Calculated how?"

I search for the right words. How could I possibly explain this?

"Like she was trying to repel me. Every outrageous thing she did, she'd watch for my reaction. When I didn't flinch, she'd escalate. It wasn't chaos—it was a test."

"Interesting…" Paul's voice takes on that particular tone he uses when cross-examining witnesses.

I trace Audrey's yearbook photo with my thumb, looking for answers in pixels that refuse to give them up. "Her grandfather initiated this match," I say. "She clearly doesn't want it. Maybe she's just trying to escape the arrangement."

"Then why not simply refuse? She's not some Victorian heiress with no options. Audrey Lennox runs half of her grandfather's Pacific operations. She has power."

"Unless he has leverage over her."

"Now we're getting somewhere." Paul's approval carries through the phone. "What leverage could big and scary William Lennox possibly have over a woman that competent?"

My phone buzzes with a new message.

Mother: I trust dinner went well. When can I meet her? I need to assess whether she's suitable for continuing the Reed bloodline.

"Speaking of leverage…" I mutter.

"Romy?"

"Wanting to inspect the breeding stock."

Paul sighs with the weariness of someone who's watched this dynamic long ago. "The Stellan countdown continues, I take it. How long now?"

"Twenty-four months to produce an heir or my cousin inherits everything I've built."

"And Audrey Lennox solves your timeline problem. Wife acquired, mother satisfied, Stellan neutralized." Paul pauses. "Which means you have leverage over her, and she has leverage over you. Mutually assured destruction. Very romantic foundation for a marriage."

"I'm not looking for romance."

"No, you're looking for your mystery prom girl. Still." His voice softens with something dangerously close to sympathy. "Shane, it's been almost nine years. She's not coming back."

These words touched me, because Paul is the only person who knows the full story.

The masked girl, the confession, the constellation tattoo I've been searching for ever since. He's watched me check the lower backs of women at pool parties, study beach photographs for stars that never appear.

"This isn't about her…" I say, but even I can hear the lie.

"Everything's about her. Every woman you've dated has been measured against a ghost, and every one has failed the comparison."

Paul's tone turns gentle, which is somehow worse than his cross-examination voice.

"What happened that night, Shane? Really? You've told me the facts, but you've never told me why she mattered so much."

I close my eyes, and the memory surfaces with unwanted clarity.

Mother had called during the opening dance. Reminded how her curator had to retrieve me from the Walsh disaster while Stellan closed the Harrison acquisition that day. Told that my uncle called to congratulate her on having such a brilliant nephew.

And she told him she wished some of that brilliance would rub off on her own son.

Then the line went dead. Just like that.

"I was drowning," I tell Paul quietly. "Drinking alone because I couldn't admit to anyone that my mother found me perpetually lacking. And then this girl appeared… Masked, gentle, without any of the pity I'd learned to despise. She listened while I confessed everything.”

And I mean everything. The expectations. The comparisons to Stellan. The fear that I'd never be enough.

"Then she said that I was already enough. Just as I was." The words still echo after all these years. "And when she kissed me, I thought… For one night, I thought someone actually saw me. Not the Reed heir, not the golden prince, just... me."

And in the morning? Gone. No note, no name. Just an image of her lower back tattoo behind my eyelids that I can't stop searching for and a hole she left that nothing else fits into.

Paul is quiet for a long moment, as if gathering the right words. But I wasn’t prepared for what came out of his mouth.

"You know what I think? That you're looking for permission to want Audrey Lennox. Because if you admit you're intrigued by her—not the arrangement, not the solution she represents, but her—then you're betraying the ghost."

"That's ridiculous…"

"Is it? You called me at midnight to analyze a yearbook photo. You're not trying to understand her transformation—you're trying to find a reason to keep pursuing her that doesn't require you to let go of a girl who vanished years ago."

I stare at Audrey's senior portrait. Those downcast eyes, hiding from a world that would have devoured her. Tonight, those same eyes held mine with fierce confidence while she performed chaos designed to drive me away.

Masks recognize masks.

I've been wearing mine long enough to spot another performer.

"Send her flowers tomorrow," Paul says. "Something expensive and tasteless to match her act. Call her bluff."

A pause. I wait because I know the rest is coming.

"And Shane? Maybe consider that the universe has a sense of humor. You've spent nine years searching for a girl who disappeared. Now you're arranged to marry a woman who spent her entire adolescence perfecting the art of being invisible."

The connection ends while the yearbook still stares up at me.

Tomorrow, I'll send flowers. I'll continue this farce because Stellan won't inherit my empire. And because somewhere beneath Audrey Lennox's carnival act might be something worth excavating.

The prom girl remains a phantom. Audrey is aggressively, exhaustingly real.

But Paul was right about one thing—I've never been more curious about what's underneath hers.