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.

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