All Chapters of Oops! I Signed A Baby Contract: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

“Two days,” Mia said, reading it twice like the words might rearrange themselves into something less terrifying the second time. “Two days, Mateo.”“Someone leaked the shell company documents before we did.” Mateo scrolled further, jaw tight. “Desmond’s already spinning it, apparently. Framing it as evidence that I’ve been distracted by a personal scandal instead of running the company. Doesn’t matter that half of what he’s distracting from is his own theft.”“Can they even do that? Move the vote this fast?”“Emergency session, majority board request. It’s rare, but it’s legal.” He set the phone down and rubbed both hands over his face, and for the first time since she’d met him, Mia saw something close to exhaustion crack all the way through his composure. “I might actually lose this. After everything. Not because of anything I did wrong, but because my cousin’s better at controlling a narrative than I am.”Mia sat down across from him, quiet for a moment, watching him in a way she h

The Sentinel Foundation dinner was held in a ballroom two floors above the city, all soft gold light and a string quartet playing something Mia didn’t recognize, and from the second she walked in on Mateo’s arm she understood exactly how outmatched she was in a room like this.“Smile,” Mateo murmured against her ear, hand steady at the small of her back. “You’re doing fine.”“You can’t feel my heart rate right now.”“I can, actually.” His mouth twitched, the first real almost-smile she’d seen from him all day. “It’ll be alright.”They made it through nearly forty minutes of handshakes and careful small talk before Mia spotted them across the room. Desmond, sleek in a dark suit, and beside him, unmistakably, the woman from the wedding reception in red, this time in something even sharper, watching Mia and Mateo with the particular patience of people who knew exactly when they intended to move.“They’re waiting for the toasts,” Mateo said quietly, following her gaze. “Public moment, cap

They didn’t sleep. By six in the morning they were in the parking garage of a private clinic Mateo trusted, Mia’s knee bouncing the whole ride over, her hands wrapped so tight around her seatbelt that her knuckles had gone pale.“It’s not real,” Mateo kept saying, more to himself than to her. “It can’t be real. We haven’t even,”“I know.” Mia cut him off before he could finish the sentence, mostly because she didn’t want to hear the rest of it out loud in a moving car. “But somebody got a photo of a test on my bathroom sink that I never took. That’s not nothing, whether or not the result itself is true.”Dr. Achterberg met them in a private consult room instead of the lobby, which told Mia everything about how seriously Mateo’s money and last name could rearrange a Tuesday morning. The test came back in eleven minutes, the longest eleven minutes of Mia’s life, filled with a magazine she didn’t read and a silence Mateo filled by tapping his knuckle against his knee in a rhythm that mea

Mateo had the car keys in his hand before Mia had even finished repeating what Kessia said, and the drive across the city felt longer than it had any right to be, red lights stretching into small eternities while Mia’s whole body buzzed with a fear that had nothing performative left in it.Kessia was sitting on her own front step when they arrived, wrapped in a blanket a neighbor had apparently given her, police lights washing blue and red across her face.“I’m okay,” she said before Mia had even gotten the car door fully open. “He didn’t touch me. He just, he wanted to know things. Your schedule. Where you sleep. Whether you had security at night.”“Did you tell him anything?”“I told him you moved to Denver.” Kessia’s laugh came out thin and shaky. “I don’t know why I said Denver. It just came out.”Mia pulled her into a hug hard enough that Kessia made a small startled sound, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, just held on the way they used to on bad nights back

“That’s not possible,” Danvers said flatly when Mateo called him, though something in his voice had gone tight enough that Mia, listening on speaker, didn’t quite believe the denial. “I have no history with Reyes. Whoever sent that is trying to make you doubt the only evidence you’ve got.”“Convenient timing, though,” Mateo said. “The night before we move.”“I understand why you’d be suspicious. I’d be too.” A pause, longer than comfortable. “Pull the case to another investigator if it helps you sleep. But you’ll lose two days verifying someone else’s work from scratch, and Desmond will have two more days to figure out you’re circling him.”Mia watched Mateo’s face while he weighed it, the particular stillness he got when a decision mattered too much to rush. “We move forward,” he said finally. “But we duplicate everything first. Copies of every file, stored somewhere Danvers doesn’t have access to, in case this is exactly what it looks like.”She spent that night making backups of ba