Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 180

Chapter 180

Rivera POV

And I had sat across a kitchen table from a woman who wasn’t Bianca and told myself I was tired.

My son had known in Silver Moon.

I’d known something was wrong tonight and had explained it away.

The wrongness I’d felt at the kitchen table the absence of the particular gravity that existed between Bianca and me, the thing that was made of time and honesty and the specific history of two people who had seen each other clearly. The absence of the breathing–out sound when she’d held Louis at the end of his bath.

I hadn’t known what I was feeling. Louis had known exactly what he was feeling and had named it with the precision of someone who’d been paying close attention to the right things.

I put my hand on his shoulder. He was tense under it–the tension of a child who’d been carrying something too heavy for several days and was waiting to find out if the adult could take some of the weight.

“You did right,” I said. “Telling me.”

“Is Mummy okay?” he asked.

The question was the question. The one that everything else was in service of. The one I didn’t have an answer to yet.

“I’m going to find out,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment, and I could see him deciding whether that was enough. Deciding whether he could hand this to me and trust that I would take it properly.

“Okay,” he said.

“I need you to do something for me,” I said. “Lock your door. The button on the inside of the handle–push it in and turn it. It’ll lock. Don’t open it for anyone except me. Not until I come back and knock three times and say it’s me.”

He sat up. “Why?”

“Because I want to make sure you’re safe while I figure out what’s going on.”

“Is the lady downstairs dangerous?”

I thought about how to answer that.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I want you safe while I find out. Can you do that for me?”

He nodded. Already swinging his legs off the bed, already moving to the door with the serious efficiency of a child who’d been given a task he understood was important.

“Three knocks,” he said. “And you say it’s you.”

“Exactly that,” I said.

I watched him lock the door. Heard the click of it.

alt

“Daddy?” His voice through the door.

“Still here.”

“Find her,” he said. “Find the real Mummy.”

I stood in the hallway outside his locked door and breathed for a moment.

Bianca was not in this house.

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