Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 195

Chapter 195

Chapter 195

LOUIS

I had lain in the dark afterward and thought about the photograph.

I understood what it meant that she looked at it. She had lost him, and looking at photographs of people you had lost was what you did when you missed them, and she missed him. That was not a complicated thing to understand.

What was more complicated was the feeling it had produced in me, sitting in my chest in the dark, which I had turned over for a while trying to identify it correctly.

It wasn’t jealousy. I didn’t think it was jealousy. Jealousy felt like wanting something someone else had, and I didn’t want to be Theo. I already was who I was.

It was something more like guilt.

Like I was sitting in a room that belonged to someone else, using a chair that had his name on it, and the person who owned the room had found out and was looking at photographs of what should have been there instead of me.

Replacement, I had said to Roy.

He had told me that wasn’t true. Dad had told me that wasn’t true. I believed them because they were telling me what they actually thought was true and they were not people who said things they didn’t believe.

But believing something and feeling something were two different operations, and my heart and my head were not in the same place about this particular thing.

The drink that evening had made me tired enough that I had slept without lying awake for very long, which was the one good thing about the heavier tired.

Dad had come to talk to me, and I had said the right things, and he had believed me.

I was not sure how I felt about that.

him not worrying meant the house stayed at the level of worried it was already at, rather than On one level it was a relief becoming more worried, which would have made everything heavier. He had enough to carry. The Callahan situation, the pack things, whatever the Alpha King’s people were doing about the bad people who had tried to take me.

On another level it was the loneliest I had felt since we had come home from Silver Moon.

Because Dad was the person I told things to, when I told things. He was the fixed point that had been there through all of it through the years before Bianca when it was just the two of us, through the sickness, through all the times I had needed someone to be there and he had been there. He was the person I said the true things to

And I had just sat next to him on my bed and said the managed version of the true things, which technically contained true things but arranged them to produce a different impression than the actual situation, and he had believed me, and now he was downstairs thinking things were better than they were.

I put the Pteranodon back in its correct position on the shelf

The tiredness was sitting in my legs and my chest in the way it had been sitting for four days. Heavier today than ves

which was probably because I had been up more than I should have been. I would rest this evening The medication was managing the parts that needed managing. It was fine.

I went to the window and looked out at the garden.

Chapter 195

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The afternoon light was doing the thing it did in autumn where it came in at an angle that made everything look slightly gold and slightly sad at the same time. There were leaves on the garden path that nobody had swept yet. Dad would get to them eventually. He always got to things eventually, even when it took a while.

I thought about Bianca looking at the photograph of Theo.

I thought about asking Roy if she hated me, and Roy’s face when I had asked it and I thought about what I had actually meant by the question, which was not exactly whether she hated me but something the surprise and then the careful kindness harder to put into words. Whether I was the reason she was sad. Whether my being here was making things worse by making things confusing. Whether her life would be simpler without a child who needed healing and had a broken magical system and was a constant reminder that she was here rather than somewhere else.

She didn’t hate me. I was certain of that.

But certainty about one thing didn’t make everything else simpler.

I lay down on my bed.

The bone-tired settled over me the way it had been settling in the evenings, a familiar weight now, something I had started organizing my days around without fully deciding to. Rest in the afternoon. Careful with the mornings. Don’t run when walking was sufficient.

I would ask her for the healing soon. When she was less sad. When things had settled into whatever shape they were going to settle into. When asking didn’t feel like taking something from someone who was already giving more than they had.

ow, the medication was sufficient.

now, I would manage.

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