Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 113

Chapter 113

Chapter 113

RIVERA

The nurse looked at me for a moment, then nodded once and spoke quietly into her radio as we moved through the bay doors.

The trauma unit was in its mid–afternoon configuration–busy but not overwhelmed, the shift that I knew from Bianca’s schedule descriptions as her most common working hours. I’d memorized her schedule without meaning to. It was the kind of thing you did when someone became essential to your daily existence.

They moved Louis into a bay–not the main trauma bay but the secondary assessment area, which meant they weren’t treating this as immediately life–threatening, which was something.

I stayed out of the way. This was the discipline I’d learned over five years of watching Louis be treated by doctors who knew more than I did: the best thing you could do was stay out of the way and be present when they needed family information, and resist every instinct to insert yourself into the medical process because you were terrified and felt powerless.

The bay had a window that looked out into the main trauma unit corridor.

Through that window, at the nurses‘ station perhaps thirty feet away, I saw Bianca.

She was standing with her back to me, in conversation with a colleague, her dark hair pulled back in the way she wore it on shift. She had a chart in her hand and was pointing at something on it, making some kind of professional point. Even from here, through the glass, I could read the particular set of her shoulders that meant she was focused and confident and fully in her

element.

She didn’t know yet.

In the next thirty seconds or so, she was going to find out her patient–the child she’d been treating for months, the child who called her Mummy–had been brought in as an emergency admission.

And she was going to come through that door, and she was going to see Louis, and everything that had been complicated and tender and suspended between us since this morning was going to have to wait.

Watching her, I felt a complex and difficult thing move through me.

I had wanted, so many times, to be the person who protected Bianca from hard things. Had convinced myself I was doing that, when really I’d been protecting myself from the fear of what she’d do if she had full information.

But right now, in this moment, there was no protection I could offer her from this.

The nurse who’d met us at the bay doors appeared in the corridor. I watched her approach Bianca from behind, touch her arm. I watched Bianca turn, take in whatever the nurse was saying, her face shifting into focused attention.

She turned toward the bay.

Through the window, our eyes met.

Confusion first–processing why I was here, on this side of the hospital, in the middle of her working day. Then she looked past me to the stretcher, to the small figure on it, and I watched the moment she understood.

Her face changed. Not crumpling, not breaking–Bianca’s professional composure was genuine, not performance, and it didn’t shatter easily.

But something underneath it did.

She pushed through the door.

“What happened?” Her voice was physician–flat, asking for clinical information, but her eyes were already on Louis, already

Chunter–113

+25 Bonus

running the rapid visual assessment that was as automatic to her as breathing.

“He collapsed at school approximately twenty minutes ago.” I stayed out of her way, moved to the side of the bay so she had the access she needed. “The discoloration started-”

“I can see it.” She was already at his side, her hand on his wrist, her other reaching for the chart the paramedic had handed off. Her eyes moved over him in that particular way, the way that meant she was seeing everything at once. “Louis. Louis, look at me.

His eyes found her face.

“MUMMY.”

The word came out of him with everything he had–sudden, desperate, too loud for the small body producing it. He reached for her, both hands, and she caught them both in hers without hesitation.

“I’m here,” she said. “I’ve got you. I’m right here.”

“It hurts,” he said, the same thing he’d said to me, but this time it cracked something open in my chest because he was saying it to her differently. Saying it to someone he believed, fundamentally and without question, would know what to do with that information.

“I know.” She was already working–one hand holding both of his, the other moving to feel the magical signature at his forearms, her eyes distant with focus. “Tell me exactly where. Is it everywhere or somewhere specific?”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify