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publish date:
2026-08-30 01:52:10
Latest chapter
Oops! I Signed A Baby Contract 63
Mateo had never liked Lisbon. He’d come once, at nineteen, on a school trip, and spent three days sunburned and looking for a mother he hadn’t told anyone he was looking for.It was a good city for it, he thought now. All stairs and corners. A place you could get lost without anyone noticing you’d gone.The bank was on a narrow street off a square, the kind of building with brass numbers and a doorman who wore white gloves. The Polícia Judiciária had two plainclothes officers inside and four in the street. His mother walked through the lobby with her bag held in front of her like a shield and signed the register in a hand that didn’t shake.The vault clerk took them down in a lift that smelled of old pennies. The box was small and dull and had a layer of dust that someone had wiped, recently, with a thumb.“Somebody’s been here,” Mateo said.“Just the clerk,” his mother said quietly. “Probably.”She opened it. Inside was a cloth-bound ledger the color of old moss, soft at the corners,
Oops! I Signed A Baby Contract 62
They argued for most of the night, quietly, in the guest room with the door shut. Alvarez had joined by video at midnight. By two in the morning there was a plan, and no part of it was good.The ledger had to be physically retrieved. Only Everly Cruz could open the box, in person, with her own identification. Portuguese police could escort her, but not without a family member named on the account, and the only family member named on the account was Rafael, who couldn’t board a plane with a hole in his side.“Mateo goes,” Alvarez said from the laptop. “With Rafael’s consent and a doctor’s note. The Polícia Judiciária will meet them at the airport. In and out in six hours.”“Six hours,” Mia repeated. “And I stay here, with the baby, and a man who’s been dead twice this year.”“Mia,” said the Chairman, from his chair by the window. “I’m sitting right here.”“I know. I’m being fond.”Mateo didn’t argue with her about staying. That was how she knew he’d already lost the argument with himse
Oops! I Signed A Baby Contract 61
By the third day Rafael had started complaining, which Mia took as the best medical news they’d had all week.“They gave me pudding,” he said, holding the plastic cup up to the light like evidence. “I took a knife for your wife and the hospital’s thank you is pudding.”“Eat the pudding,” Mateo said.“It’s beige. Who makes beige pudding?”“Eat it or I tell the nurse you’ve been walking to the window when she’s not looking.”Rafael glared at him, then ate the pudding. Mia, standing by the bed with Everly asleep in the crook of her arm, had to look at the ceiling to keep from laughing out loud. It felt strange to laugh in this room, a little like stepping on a stair that wasn’t there, and she hadn’t realized how long it had been.Kessia had smuggled in actual food, pasta in a foil tray, which she’d hidden under Everly’s diaper bag past two guards and a metal detector. Priya had brought books Rafael pretended not to want. The Chairman had come on the second afternoon, wheeled in by a nurs
Oops! I Signed A Baby Contract 60
The courtroom filled slowly the morning of the hearing, reporters packed into the gallery despite the court’s attempts to limit coverage given the custody component, and Mia sat beside Mateo at the defense table with her hands folded tightly in her lap, Whitmore arranging his notes with the same careful precision he brought to every crisis this family had survived.Kessler arrived with a legal team large enough to fill three rows, composed and unbothered as always, though Mia caught, just once, a flicker of something uncertain crossing his expression when Sinclair walked in and took a seat, quiet and resolved, on the family’s side of the room instead of his.“Mr. Kessler didn’t expect that,” Mia murmured to Mateo.“No. I don’t think he did.”The hearing opened with Kessler’s team presenting their case first, a carefully constructed narrative of financial instability and questionable history, painting Mia’s past and the family’s recent turmoil as evidence of an unsuitable environment f
Oops! I Signed A Baby Contract 59
The wait outside the warehouse stretched into the longest hour of Mia’s life, security lights sweeping the perimeter, Alvarez’s team moving in careful, coordinated silence while she and Mateo sat frozen in the car, hands locked together so tight it ached.The radio crackled finally, Alvarez’s voice cutting through the tense silence. “We have him. He’s alive. Banged up, dehydrated, but alive.”Mateo was out of the car before the sentence finished, and Mia followed close behind, both of them ignoring the officers’ careful instructions to wait as they crossed the warehouse threshold and found Rafael slumped against a support beam, wrists still raw from restraints that had only just been cut away, face pale and bruised but unmistakably, gratefully conscious.“Rafael.” Mateo dropped to his knees beside him, hands hovering uncertainly over injuries he clearly didn’t know how to address. “Are you, what did they,”“I’m alright.” Rafael’s voice came out rough, cracked from thirst and exhaustio
Oops! I Signed A Baby Contract 58
Rafael arrived in person four days later, stepping off a private flight Mateo had arranged the moment the danger to his half brother’s safety became clear, and the meeting that followed carried a weight neither of them had fully prepared for.They stood facing each other in the entryway for a long, silent moment, two men who shared a mother and nothing else, searching each other’s faces for whatever answers three years of secondhand knowledge hadn’t provided.“You look like her,” Mateo said finally, voice rough. “Around the eyes.”“So do you. I noticed it the first time I saw a photograph of you online, years before I ever wrote that letter.” Rafael’s voice carried a nervous, hopeful uncertainty. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to meet me at all, given everything.”“I spent most of my life angry at a mother who left and never looked back. Finding out she built an entire second life, with a son who didn’t even know I existed, that’s not exactly easy to sit with.” Mateo’s jaw worked silently
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