Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 190

Chapter 190

Chapter 190

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FAKE BIANCA

The bedroo being a sp someth

beene

he specific quality of a space that two people had inhabited together and that had not yet fully adjusted to ee of them

the wardrobe had her clothes on one side and his on the other, with a precision that looked like developed over time rather than been imposed. There was a book on the nightstand on her side that had down to mark a page, which I had not touched because moving it would change the page and the real have lost her place.

nt of the wardrobe and moved aside what needed to be moved.

where I’d put it. Small, canvas, the kind of thing that could be a cosmetics bag or a medical kit or any number of ngs. Inside it, among the other materials I’d been given, was a small glass vial with a stopper, containing a that looked like nothing colourless, odourless, leaving no residue in liquid.

the vial and straightened up.

od for a moment in the bedroom.

a car, a distant

he room was very quiet. Outside the window, the street had the ordinary sounds of a residential afternoon voice, the particular texture of a neighbourhood that was going about its business. Normal sounds. The sounds of a life that belonged to someone else.

I went back downstairs.

In the kitchen, I moved with the efficiency of someone completing a task that needed to be completed correctly and without hesitation. I made a drink the kind Louis had in the afternoons, a warm thing with honey that the memory transfer had flagged as a regular comfort item, something he asked for and the woman made without thinking. I had made it twice already in two days and he had taken it both times without comment, which confirmed I had the recipe right.

I opened the vial.

The amount Voss had specified was small. I measured it the way she had shown me, the specific quantity that would sit below any threshold he might consciously register and above the level that would be ineffective. It went into the drink and dissolved in the same moment, leaving nothing visible on the surface.

I replaced the stopper. Put the vial in my pocket to return to the bag later.

Stood at the kitchen counter for a moment with the drink in my hand.

The gap was there, the one I always set aside, and I set it aside again and picked up the drink and went toward the stairs.

Louis’s room was the second door on the left. I had been in it enough times in two days to know its specific geography dinosaurs on the shelt

formation on the

task. The dra

abstract e

I knoc

the

ed in a system I had not fully decoded but knew I should not disturb, the night watch

evening with the focused attention of someone completing an important

If, which was apparently the family at the park, though the figures were

his pocket for several days and had now returned to the tiem, full formation. He looked up when I came in

WII.

said, in the register that the memory transfer indicated was her afternoon register with han

Choper 100

the slightly softer version, the one that went with comfort items and the end of the day

He looked at the drink.

Then he looked at me.

“Thanks,” he said, and took it.

I watched him hold it. Watched him look at it the way be sometimes looked at things, the extra beat of attention that was probably nothing and that I was going to continue assuming was nothing because the alternative was a problem I could not manage.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, because she asked him this, regularly, and not asking would be its own kind of signal.

“Okay,” he said. He looked at the drink again.

Then he looked up at me, and the frown was there, and this time it didn’t go away immediately. It stayed for a beat longer than it had before, and his eyes did the thing they sometimes did, the older-than-five thing, and I held the performance steady and waited.

“Mummy,” he said.

“Yeah?”

He looked at the drink in his hands. Then back at me. The frown resolved into something else, something I couldn’t read in the same way I’d been reading his expressions for two days, and for a moment I was not certain what was happening

“Can I have biscuits with it?” he asked. “The ones in the blue tin.”

The relief was something I did not show. “I’ll get them,” I said.

I went back to the kitchen.

The blue tin was on the third shelf, which I knew because I had catalogued every shelf in this kitchen on the first day. I took it down and opened it and put three biscuits on a small plate because that was the quantity the memory transfer said she gave him.

I went back upstairs.

He took the plate and set it beside him on the bed, and he picked up the drink, and he took a sip.

I watched him take the sip and I set aside the gap and I kept my face in the register of Bianca Morrison watching her son have his afternoon drink, which was warm and comfortable and ordinary.

“Good?” I asked.

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