Alle Kapitel von Oops! I Had the CEO’s Quadruplets : Kapitel 21 – Kapitel 30

There were nine firms in the room, and eight of them had done this longer than Meridian had been alive. I counted them from a folding chair at the back of the city annex while a woman from the housing office read the rules. One grant. One dead block on Cortez Street, four buildings the city had written off. Whoever won the money got to decide what happened next. The firms ahead of us had glossy display boards and teams in matching lanyards. We had me, Noah, a laptop with a cracked corner, and a scale model Grace and I had cut out of foam board at two in the morning while a baby monitor hissed on the counter. "We're the smallest name on that list by a factor of ten," Noah murmured. "I know." "I'm telling you so that when they call someone else, you don't take it as a verdict on you." The firm before us was good. Slick. A regional outfit with a man named Pell who wore a watch worth more than our reserve. He pitched the panel exactly what men like him always pitch. Clear the four bu

Aurora’s POV I caught myself doing it on a Tuesday morning, the same way you catch yourself biting a nail, already three clicks in before the conscious part of your brain arrives. Blackwood Group. Stock price. Up a quarter point. I had been doing it every morning for months. Before the kids, before coffee, before a single thing that belonged to my actual life. I opened the ticker and checked whether the man who threw me away was still suffering yet. He was not suffering. He was up a quarter point. I looked at my own hand on the phone and finally saw what I was doing. I was still his. Not on paper. Paper had freed me. But every morning, before my children woke up, I gave the first clean minute of the day to a man who did not know I was alive. I had left his house, his city, his name. I had built a whole world he couldn't touch. And I had kept one small window open so I could stand in it every dawn and watch. That is not freedom. That is a longer leash, and I was holding both ends

The crash was still echoing when Dana Foss looked at me. Not at the ceiling anymore. At me. The way a reporter looks at a woman whose carefully controlled interview has just been blown open by the sound of four children and a panicking uncle directly above her head. "Sounds lively up there," she said. Warm. Casual. The knife still in its sheath. "My brother. He's watching the kids." I was already standing. "Excuse me one second." I took the stairs two at a time. The scene upstairs was exactly what it sounded like. Elijah had pulled a shelf off the wall, books everywhere, a lamp on its side, and Oliver holding him at arm's length like a small grenade that might go off again. Ethan sat in the middle of the wreckage watching everything with those dark, calm eyes, as if taking notes for a future memoir. Evan was handing Oliver a book, as medicine, because that is what Evan does when anyone is distressed. Ella stood with her arms crossed, surveying the damage with the expression of a wo

A little update before we continue! I just finished revising Chapters 11–27. I cut out a lot of unnecessary scenes, tightened the story, and made the pacing much faster and more interesting.If you’ve read these chapters before, I’d really recommend going back and reading the revised version before continuing with Chapter 28. Trust me, it’s much better now!SOOOO SORRY FOR THE DELAYCHAPTER 28They turned one on a Saturday, and I threw the party in the room above Grace's shop, because that room had carried all of us through everything, and celebrating anywhere else would have felt like lying.Grace made paper lanterns out of dress-pattern tissue. Clara baked one enormous cake and four tiny ones for the guests of honor to personally destroy. Noah arrived in what he clearly believed was a casual shirt and stood against the wall clutching a wrapped gift like it might detonate. Oliver drove down from LA with a trunk full of presents that were all, every single one, wildly age-inappropria

Damien’s POVFour hundred people in a cathedral, and not one of them was there for me.They were there for the photograph. Blackwood weds Sinclair. Two names the business pages had been fusing for years, made official under a ceiling of imported stone, with a string quartet and forty thousand dollars of white flowers and a guest list that read like a subpoena of everyone who mattered on the coast.I stood at the altar in a suit that cost more than the first car I'd ever owned, and I watched Vanessa come down the aisle on the arm of a senator, and I thought, with the flat satisfaction of a man reviewing a completed balance sheet, there it is. Done.Because that was the word for my life now. Complete. Every column filled, every box checked, every person in this room satisfied that the Blackwood name had been properly cemented to its future.My mother wept three rows back, the precise tears of a woman watching a plan she'd waited decades for close on schedule. My father sat beside her wi