Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 214

Chapter 214

Chapter 314

RIVERA

Tuesday was a good day for it because Bianca had told me that morning she was going to the archives at the council building following a thread of the investigation that Roy had flagged the week before. She had said she would be gone most of the morning, possibly into the afternoon.

She had kissed Louis on the forehead before she left.

Louis had leaned into it in the automatic way of someone whose body had decided that this was a thing that happened and had stopped requiring conscious acknowledgment. I had watched it from the kitchen doorway and felt the familiar complicated thing that I felt whenever I watched them together, which was love and gratitude and underneath both of those, for the past two weeks, something smaller and quieter that I had been telling myself was nothing.

She had left at eight–thirty.

James arrived at ten exactly, which was one of his consistent qualities. He had a bag with him that looked like a casual carry bag and not at all like a medical kit, which I appreciated.

Louis was in the living room with Daniel and Sophie, who had been coming over more frequently since Louis’s movement had been restricted. Sophie had appointed herself chief of a project involving the classification of Louis’s dinosaur collection by geological era rather than species, which Louis had initially resisted and then been drawn into with the specific inevitability of someone who encountered a genuinely interesting system for the first time. Daniel was building something with blocks in the corner and contributing opinions periodically.

I brought James to the doorway and let him take in the scene.

“Which one,” James said quietly.

“The one not arguing about the Cretaceous,” I said.

Louis was sitting cross–legged on the floor with Sophie’s classification chart spread between them, making the face he made when he was being precise about something. He was pale. Even from the doorway, in the good morning light that came through the living room windows, the pallor was visible in the way it had been visible for two weeks — not dramatic, not alarming in isolation, but wrong in the specific way that things were wrong when you knew someone’s baseline.

James saw it too. I could tell by the small shift in his expression, the professional registration of something noted.

“Louis,” I said. “This is my friend James. He works at the hospital.”

Louis looked up. His eyes went from me to James with the assessment that was his most consistent quality in new situations. ” The hospital where Bianca works?”

“The same one,” James said, from the doorway. He had an easy manner with children, not performed, the kind that came from a decade of pediatric work. “I’ve heard a lot about the dinosaur situation. Sophie, right? The classification project?”

Sophie looked up with the expression of someone whose work had been acknowledged. “The old system was chaos,” she said. “I can see that,” James said, looking at the chart. “This is good. You’ve got the temporal boundaries right.”

Sophie’s expression upgraded from acknowledged to respected. Louis watched this exchange with a slight softening around his eyes that meant he had decided James was acceptable.

“I’m going to need to borrow Louis for a few minutes,” James said. “Is that okay?”

Louis looked at me.

“James is going to check a few things,” I said “Nothing complicated.”

Louis considered this for a moment with the specific consideration of someone deciding whether to say what they were actu thinking. Then he uncrossed his legs and stood up, and he went with James without further argument, which told me he had already understood more than I had said.

I took them to the study because it was the room with the most light after the living room and the most privacy after the basement, and the basement was not where I wanted to take my son for a medical assessment he didn’t know he was there for.

James set his bag on the desk and opened it with efficient movements. Louis sat in the chair across from the desk and watched James the way he watched things he was trying to understand.

“Can you tell me how you’ve been feeling?” James asked. He kept his voice conversational, not clinical. It was a good instinct. Louis responded better to conversations than to examinations.

“Tired,” Louis said.

“What kind of tired?”

Louis thought about this. “The kind where you’ve done a lot of work even when you haven’t.”

James nodded. “Have you been eating?”

“Some.”

“More or less than usual?”

“Less.”

James picked up something from his bag a small instrument I recognized as the kind used to assess magical channel function in children with compromised systems. He held it loosely, not pointing it at anything, just present.

“Has the healing been helping?” he asked.

Louis was quiet for a moment. The quiet was the specific one where he was deciding something.

“Bianca said I need to rest before more healing,” he said. “She said healing when I’m depleted can make things worse.”

“Right,” James said. “That’s a reasonable approach in a lot of cases. Do you feel like you’re getting better?”

Another pause. Longer.

“I feel the same,” Louis said.

James made a small sound that was not a word. He moved the instrument slowly, keeping his movements visible and unhurried, the specific technique of someone who had assessed frightened children enough times to know that surprise was the enemy of cooperation. He ran it along the air beside Louis’s left arm without touching.

He looked at the reading.

Then he looked at it again.

he had trained it over years

His expression did not change. James Wright had one of the best medical faces I had ever seen into the specific neutrality that gave nothing away to patients while his mind was working. But I had known him long enough to see past the neutrality to the thing underneath it, and what I saw underneath it now was not nothing. “Louis,” he said, “can you describe where you feel the tired? Is it all over or somewhere specific?“.

Chapter 215

Chapter 215