My Boss, My Babydaddy

Chapter 32

Zayden’s POV

I knew this day would come eventually.

Natasha Reeves sits across from my desk like a ghost made flesh, and maybe that's exactly what she is. A phantom from nine years ago when I was different—younger, more reckless, convinced that consequences were things that happened to other people.

We'd met at a gallery opening in SoHo. She was consulting on acquisitions, and I was there because my mother insisted the Wolfe name needed visibility in the arts.

Four months of something that felt like love but was really just compatible damage. She wanted permanence. I wanted an exit strategy.

The ending was ugly—slammed doors and accusations I refused to answer.

Then, eight years ago, the phone call. Pregnant. Ten weeks along. My name on her lips like a curse I'd earned.

I handled it the way I handled everything back then—lawyers, NDAs, monthly deposits into accounts I never looked at. She signed, took the money and disappeared.

Problem solved, I'd told myself. Past buried.

Except nothing stays buried. It just waits underground, growing teeth.

The boy—Eli—sits beside her, examining my office with the kind of focused intensity that makes my chest constrict. He has my hands, long fingers that drum nervously against the chair arms in a rhythm I recognize from my own anxious habits.

Christ. How did I ever convince myself this could stay hidden forever?

"You shouldn't have come here," I say, keeping my voice level. "We had an agreement."

"Agreements change when you're dying." Natasha's hands tremble slightly as she pulls an envelope from her bag. "Pancreatic cancer, stage four. They're giving me six months if I'm lucky."

The words should hit harder. Should make me feel something beyond the cold dread already spreading through my veins.

"I'm sorry." I mean it, even if she won't believe me. "But that doesn't change the fact that you signed—"

"He needs to know his father." She cuts me off, jaw tight. "I won't leave him orphaned without giving him that truth."

"You agreed to specific terms."

"I agreed to a lot of things when I was twenty-six and terrified and convinced I could raise him alone on your guilt money."

Her eyes flash with something sharp. Angry.

"But I'm not scared anymore. I'm dying. And I'll be damned if I leave my son without family because you're too much of a coward to face what you created."

I glance at Eli again. He's staring out the window now, watching the city skyline with an expression that's too careful, too controlled. Like he's learned not to show what he's feeling.

Like I taught myself at exactly his age.

"The DNA test." Not a question. I can see it in the prepared set of her shoulders. "You've already had it done."

She slides the envelope across my desk. "99.97% match. I had it done three months ago, after the diagnosis. Wanted to be certain before disrupting everyone's lives."

The results feel obscene in my hands. Clinical proof of a truth I've been paying to ignore. I don't open the envelope, don't need to.

"How much?" The question tastes like ash. "Triple the monthly payments, set up a trust fund, college, medical expenses. Whatever he needs…"

"I don't want your fucking money." Her voice breaks, just slightly. "I want you to be his father. I want him to have someone when I'm gone."

"I can't." The words come out harder than I intended. "My wife doesn't know. My daughter…"

"Doesn't know she has a brother." Natasha's expression shifts to something almost like pity. "I figured. That's why I came to the office instead of your home. Thought maybe you'd want to control how this imploded."

But control slipped through my fingers the moment she walked into this building.

That's when I see her—Jocelyn is standing in the doorway.

The lunch bag lies at her feet like abandoned evidence. Her face is chalk white, eyes wide with a devastation so complete it makes everything inside me seize and stop.

Time fractures into before and after. Before she knew. After everything ends.

"Jocelyn…" Her name dies in my throat.

She doesn't move, doesn't blink—just stares at me with those eyes I've looked into every morning for three years, eyes that used to hold trust and love and everything I've just destroyed in a single moment of carelessness.

Natasha follows my gaze, her sharp intake of breath the only sound in the suddenly airless room. "Oh God. I didn't think she'd… I'm sorry, I didn't mean for her to find out like this."

"How long?" Jocelyn's voice is barely a whisper, rough. "How long have you known?"

I could lie. Could say I just found out, that this is as much a shock to me as it is to her, could try to salvage something from the wreckage.

But I'm so goddamn tired of lying.

"Eight years."

Jocelyn's face doesn't change. She just stands there, frozen, while my confession hangs in the air between us like a blade.

Eight years—the number echoes in the silence. Eight years of knowing. Eight years of monthly payments and buried secrets. Eight years of looking into her eyes and pretending I was the man she thought I was.

Mia is six years old.

I watch the math click into place behind Jocelyn's eyes, watch her realize that I knew about Eli before our daughter was even born. I'd known while writing checks to hide another child.

"Jocelyn, please…" I move toward her.

"Don't." The single word stops me cold. "Don't you dare touch me right now."

Her voice is eerily calm, controlled. The kind of quiet that comes before something breaks beyond repair.

She looks past me to Natasha and Eli, studies them with the clinical detachment of someone cataloging evidence. Then her gaze returns to me, and what I see there is worse than anger.

It's recognition, the terrible understanding that she never really knew me at all.

"I need to leave," she says, still that unnatural calm. "I need to leave before I say something I can't take back."

"We need to talk about this."

"Talk?" A laugh escapes her throat. Sharp and broken. "You've had eight years to talk, Zayden. Eight years to tell me the truth. Eight years while I thought we were building something real."

She turns toward the door.

"Jocelyn, wait—"

"I said don't." She doesn't look back. "I can't look at you right now without wanting to burn everything we've built to the ground. So I'm leaving. And you're going to let me, because you owe me that much."

The door closes behind her with a soft click that sounds like a guillotine falling.

I'm left standing in my office with the woman I paid to disappear and the son I've denied for eight years, watching my wife walk away with the careful control of someone who knows if they break now, they'll shatter completely.

Natasha clears her throat softly. "I really am sorry. I thought—"

"Get out." My voice is raw, unfamiliar. "Just... get out."

She stands, gathering Eli with gentle hands. The boy looks confused, scared. He doesn't understand what just happened, only that it was bad.

"We'll be at the Mandarin Oriental," Natasha says quietly. "Room 412. When you're ready to do the right thing, you know where to find us."

The door closes again, silence floods the space like water filling a sinking ship.

I sink into my chair and stare at the envelope still sitting on my desk. DNA results I don't need to read, proof of a truth that just cost me everything.

My phone buzzes. A text from Jocelyn.

‘Don't come home tonight. I need time to think without you in the same room.’