Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 179

Chapter 179

RIVERA

He was awake.

Not upset–not sitting up or distressed or reaching for me. Just lying on his back with his eyes open, looking at the ceiling in the particular way he had when he was thinking about something and had decided that the ceiling was the appropriate surface to think at.

I came into the room and sat on the edge of his bed, the way I’d done hundreds of times across five years of nights. The mattress dipped slightly with my weight and he turned his head toward me.

“Hey “I said quietly.

“Hey.” His voice was awake enough that I wondered how long he’d been lying there.

“Thought you were asleep.”

“I was thinking,” he said.

“What about?”

He was quiet for a moment. The particular quiet he used when he was choosing how to say something–finding the words that were closest to the thing he actually meant. He was careful about this. Had been since he was very small, had always seemed to understand that the gap between what you meant and what you said mattered.

“Daddy,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Something is wrong with Mummy.”

I sat very still.

Not the stillness of shock exactly. More the stillness of someone whose body had registered something before their mind had finished processing it. A kind of crystallizing stillness, like water going cold all at once.

“Tell me what you mean,” I said. I kept my voice even. Gentle. The voice I used when I needed Louis to keep talking rather than deciding the conversation was too heavy and pulling back from it.

He took his time. I let him take it.

He’d known in Silver Moon.

“You didn’t say anything,” I said.

“I thought maybe Mummy was just sad,” he said, and his voice was very careful now, the careful of someone being honest about something they’d been hoping would resolve itself without having to be said. “Sometimes sad people feel different. Like they’re a little bit away from themselves even when they’re right there.” He turned his head toward me. “I thought if she was sad about Matthew or Theo or all of it, maybe she’d feel more like herself when we got home. Because home is where she’s most like herself.”

“But she didn’t,” I said.

“She’s the same,” he said. “Still the same slight different. The smell is right. The face is right. The words are almost right.” He paused. “But Daddy, the sound isn’t there. And it’s always there. I’ve never hugged Mummy and not heard it.” He looked at me directly now, and even in the dark I could see the steadiness in his eyes, the particular quality of a child who’d been holding something difficult and was now handing it to an adult because he’d done what he could with it and needed help. “I don’t think it’s Mummy.”

I sat on the edge of his bed.

Outside the room, the house was quiet. The particular quiet of a house at night, when the sounds that filled the day had stopped and the only sounds left were the ones that belonged to the dark–the heating system, the faint settling of old wood, the distant sound of the street outside.

And somewhere downstairs, in the kitchen I’d sat in ten minutes ago feeling like something was wrong without being able to name it, a woman who smelled like Bianca and held Louis the right way and said the right things and didn’t make the sound.