Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 178

Chapter 178

RIVERA

We came home to a house that smelled like itself.

That was the first thing I noticed when I unlocked the front door and pushed it open–the particular smell of our home, which was a combination of Louis’s things and Bianca’s things and the specific quality of a space that had been lived in by specific people long enough that it held their presence even when they weren’t in it. Coffee and the particular soap Bianca used and Louis’s inexplicable preference for leaving his shoes directly in the path of anyone entering the house.

Louis walked in past me and went immediately to check on the night watch, which he’d left in formation on his windowsill before we’d departed for Silver Moon and had apparently been thinking about at intervals throughout our time away. I heard him on the stairs, his footsteps quick with purpose.

I set down the bags.

The house was quiet in the way houses were quiet when you returned to them after time away–not empty, but waiting. The specific hush of rooms that had been holding their breath.

I stood in the hallway for a moment and let myself be home.

We’d stopped at the market on the way from the highway, a practical decision about having food in the house, and Bianca had been the one to suggest it, which was like her the forward–thinking practicality of someone who was always considering the next step. She’d walked through the market beside me with Louis on her other side, and Louis had been given the task of choosing what fruit they’d have for the week, which he took seriously enough that we’d spent six minutes in front of the apple display while he made his assessment.

It had been normal. Entirely normal.

I kept thinking about that while I unpacked what we’d brought in, while I started something for dinner that didn’t require too much attention, while Louis came back downstairs satisfied that the night watch had maintained their positions in his absence.

Entirely normal.

I set the table and called Louis to eat, and we ate together the way we always did, with Louis reporting on the night watch’s status and pivoting without noticeable transition into a series of questions about golden retrievers that I answered as accurately as I could from limited knowledge, and Bianca eating with one leg tucked under her on the chair the way she always did at home, listening to Louis with the patient attention she always gave him.

I watched her listen to him.

She asked the right questions at the right moments. Not just any questions–the specific questions that Bianca asked, the ones that deepened whatever Louis was telling her rather than deflecting into something else. When he explained about golden retriever jaw strength and the reason the Brachiosaurus was in the sacrifice position, she’d followed the logic and asked whether the sacrifice position was always the largest dinosaur or whether it was determined by attachment level.

Louis had been delighted by this question. Had explained at length the formula he’d been developing.

It was Bianca’s question. The kind of question she asked. I’d watched her ask questions like that to Louis a hundred times.

I couldn’t find it. That was the thing that was most unsettling the wrongness was present without being locatable, the way sometimes a room would have a smell that you couldn’t trace to any single source, that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. I sat across the kitchen table from a woman who was saying the right things and holding her tea the right way and looking at me with familiar eyes, and something was wrong.

I thought I was tired.

I was tired. The past five days had been high–alert, low–sleep, high–stakes in ways that had accumulated without fully releasing even when the assembly had passed without incident. The drive home had been a few hours of low–grade tension dressed as normalcy. I was tired and probably still wound up and my nervous system hadn’t yet registered that the immediate crisis phase had apparently ended.

That was what I told myself.

That was the explanation that made sense.

I finished my tea and said I was going to check on Louis before I turned in, and Bianca said she’d be up soon, and I went upstairs. Louis’s door was not fully closed. I’d left it slightly open the way he preferred–he’d gone through a period of wanting it shut and then reversed the preference, had explained with great seriousness that slightly open was better because then he could hear if something was happening without the door blocking it. I’d respected this without comment.

I pushed the door open a few more inches and looked in.