Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 188

Chapter 188

MATTHEW

Theo watched me with the assessment he’d gotten better at over the past months – reading whether I was actually going to tell him something or was going to produce an adult-shaped deflection.

I looked at Callahan briefly. He was watching the ceiling with the patience of someone who had decided this was not his conversation to lead but was available to support it.

“Some people are trying to do something bad,” I said. “And to do it, they need something from our family specifically. Something that you have, because of who your mother was and who I am.” I paused, finding the shape of it that was true without being more than he could carry. “We don’t know exactly when they’re going to try again. But they’ve tried already, and that’s why Callahan got hurt. He stopped them from getting to you.”

Theo looked at Callahan.

Callahan met his eyes without drama. “That’s the job,” he said. Exactly what he’d said to me.

Theo processed this. I watched him do it – the particular internal work visible in the stillness of his face, the slight movements at the corners of his eyes. He was building the picture from what he’d been given, fitting it against what he’d observed, testing the shape of it.

“Is that why the sleepover got cancelled,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s why.”

Another silence.

I had expected something to shift in his expression. Some release of the five days of minor friction, the tight quiet that had been his response to the disappointment. Instead he looked at the Triceratops in his hands for a long moment.

“Why didn’t you just tell me,” he said.

His voice was not angry. It was something quieter than that, which was somehow harder to hear.

“Because I wasn’t sure how to explain it,” I said honestly. “Without worrying you more than you need tobe worried.”

He looked up at me. “I already knew something was wrong,” he said. “I could tell. I’ve been able to tell for days.” He paused. “Not knowing what it was was worse.”

I looked at my son.

He was right. He had been telling me this, in his own way, for months – through Dr. Fisher’s work, through his own careful honesty about what he felt and when he felt it. He was a child who operatedbetter with the true thing than with the managed version of it. I knew this. I had known this and had still reached for the managed version because my instinct to protect him from worry was older than my understanding of who he actually was.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the two of them – my son in the chair and the injured man who’d bled in my kitchen and was getting better slowly, and I thought about what Theo had said.

Not knowing what it was was worse.

I thought about all the things I hadn’t said because I was trying to protect him, and all the ways he had felt the shape of those things anyway and been left to fill in the outline with his own imagination. I thought about what it had cost him to be difficult for five days instead of just asking, and why he’d found asking hard.

Because he’d expected deflection. Had expected the managed version. Had expected me to be the father I’d been rather than the one I was trying to become.

That was mine to sit with.

Outside the window, the afternoon was moving toward early evening, the light going the particular gold of late autumn. Theo watched it with the self-contained quiet of a child who had gotten what he neededand was satisfied, for now, with where things stood.

Callahan’s breathing steadied toward sleep beside me.

I stayed in the room.