Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 187

Chapter 187

MATTHEW

And then I came home and there was Callahan, who was getting worse rather than better and was managing this with a dry equanimity that I found both admirable and concerning, and there was Theo, who had been told the sleepover was postponed and had received this information with a quiet that I’d known immediately was not acceptance.

The quiet had lasted approximately six hours.

After that, Theo had begun being difficult in the specific and targeted way that Theo was difficult when he was upset about something and didn’t know how to say so directly. He was not defiant in the obvious way – he didn’t refuse instructions or have dramatic confrontations. He was difficult in the more precise way of a child who had decided that the people responsible for his disappointment should be made aware of it through a sustained campaign of minor friction. He took longer than necessary with everything. He responded to questions with technical compliance – answering exactly what was asked and nothing more. He sat at the dinner table with the expression of someone enduring an obligation rather than sharing a meal.

Dr. Fisher had told me, months ago, that Theo’s emotional processing often came out sideways when he didn’t have the words for the direct version. That what looked like stubbornness was usually hurt looking for an exit.

I knew this. It didn’t make the fourth day of it significantly easier.

On the fifth day, I came home from the pack house in the early afternoon to find Marcus in the kitchen with the look that meant something had happened that needed reporting.

“He’s been in there for an hour,” Marcus said, tilting his head toward the bedroom. “I’ve checked twice.

He’s fine. He’s talking to Callahan.”

I stood in the hallway for a moment.

Theo talking to Callahan was not, on its face, alarming. Callahan had a particular quality with him – the same unhurried attention he brought to everything, the same lack of performance. Theo had identified this, as he identified most things, and had extended toward it the way he extended toward people whose consistency he trusted. In the days since Callahan had been in the house, there had been several interactions that I’d observed from a distance – Theo asking about things, Callahan answering in the direct way he answered things, the particular ease of two people who had found a conversational register that worked for both of them.

But an hour was a long time, and the current version of Theo was operating on a low level of cooperative energy, and I wanted to know what was happening in that room.

I went upstairs.

The bedroom door was open. I stopped before I reached it, because the voices were audible and I wanted to understand the shape of what was happening before I changed it.

Theo was sitting on the floor near the bed, cross–legged, the Triceratops in his hands. He was in the posture he used for serious conversations – upright, attentive, the particular engaged stillness that meant he was taking something in carefully.

Callahan was propped against the headboard in the configuration we’d worked out that put the least pressure on the wound. He looked tired in the specific way he’d been looking tired – managed tiredness, present underneath the management, real.

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