Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 225

Chapter 225

Chapter 225

FAKE BIANCA

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His office light was on at six twenty.

I had waited in the corridor, in the small alcove near the supply room, which had a sight line to his office door without being visible from it. I had stood in the alcove and watched the light come on and watched the movement through the frosted glass panel beside his door, the specific shape of him settling into his morning.

I had used the time to build what I needed.

The structure of it was straightforward. Bianca and James had a history of early morning conversations, the habit of two colleagues who arrived before most others and used the quiet to say things they didn’t have time for during the day. She came to his office or he came to the trauma floor and they talked for twenty minutes over bad coffee while the frospital organized itself around them.

I was going to use this.

I was going to be completely Bianca.

Not the version from yesterday, where the lag had shown and the greeting had been missing. The full version. The one that had all of it, the greeting included, retrieved properly and deployed without hesitation.

I had spent forty minutes walking to the hospital pulling every component of the memory architecture that related tc James Wright and loading it into the foreground of what I was. Eight months of mornings. The specific warmth of how she spoke to him. The joke between them that she used as a greeting, the one about the vomiting incident, the slang term she had constructed from it and repeated every morning until it was a ritual

I had not used it yesterday because the retrieval had been slow.

It was not going to be slow today.

I straightened Bianca’s coat and walked to his door and knocked.

He looked up when I pushed the door open.

The assessment in his eyes was fast and practiced and I was faster. Before his expression could resolve into anything I gave him the greeting. The specific words in the specific cadence, the tone of someone who had said this every morning for months and found it reliably amusing, the small upward movement at the corner of the mouth that Bianca made when she deployed it.

I watched something in his face change.

Not relax, exactly. Adjust. The reassessment of someone who had been holding a suspicion and had just received information that complicated it.

“You’re in early,” he said.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I said. “The situation at home.” I came into the office and sat in the chair across from his desk, the chair I knew was Bianca’s chair because she had sat in it enough times that it had become hers by habit. “I wanted to talk to you. Without Rivera around.”

He looked at me steadily. “About?”

“About Louis,” I said. “About the blood results.” I kept my voice low, the register of someone sharing something they were uncertain about. “You told Rivera the panel came back clean.”

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“It did,” Jätties said.

“But you know sofnething is wrong with trim,” said. “I know you know. You’ve seen him.” I pressed my hands together in my lap, a gesture from the architecture that Bianca made when she was worried about a patient. “I’m scared, James. I’ve been managing his care and something is happening that I can’t fully account for, and I need to talk through it with someone who isn’t Rivera, because Rivera is going to “I stopped. “He’s going to panic. You know how he is about Louis.”

James said nothing.

He was listening. His expression had the quality I had been prepared for, the careful attention of a man who was intelligent and who cared about the person he believed he was looking at. I had built this approach for exacely this face.

“Can we go somewhere?” I said. “Somewhere we can talk without being interrupted. I don’t want arryone overhearing this. If the staff thinks there’s something seriously wrong with Louis-”

“The roof terrace,” he said.

I had not suggested it. He had suggested it himself. I noted this and accepted it without showing that I had noted it. “Yes,” I said. “Perfect.”

The roof terrace was accessed through a door at the end of the sixth floor corridor. It was a functional space rather than a pleasant one – the hospital’s heating and ventilation infrastructure occupied most of it, large units spaced at intervals across the concrete floor, with a railed walkway between them that allowed maintenance access. At the far end there was a section of open railing that faced the city, and staff used it occasionally for exactly the purpose I had described. A place to talk without being heard.

The door closed behind us.

The morning was cold up here. The city was visible in the early light, still in the process of waking, the specific quality of a place that hadn’t yet committed to the day.

James walked ahead of me toward the open section at the far end.

I followed.

The ventilation units on either side blocked sight lines from the door. The railing at the far end was the only boundary between the terrace and the six-floor drop to the service road below.

I kept my face in the configuration of someone who was worried and had come here to talk.

James stopped at the railing and turned around.

He looked at me.

And the thing I saw in his face was not what I expected.

He was not looking at me the way he had looked at me in his office. The adjustment I had seen when I gave him the greeting the reassessment – it had not resolved in the direction I had calculated. He was looking at me with the specific expression of someone who had made a decision before they left the room.

“You used the greeting,” he said.

I kept iny expression steady. “James-”

“You used it today,” he said. “You didn’t use it yesterday. And today you used it perfectly, every component, and it was the most wrong it has ever sounded because Bianca doesn’t perform it. She just says it.” He took one step to the side, away from the railing, a movement that looked casual and was not. “Where is she?”

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The calculation happened very fast.

The greeting had been too precise. I had loaded it into the foreground with too much attention, deployed it with too much accuracy, and he had heard the difference between & thing done from memory and a thing done from habit.

I looked at James Wright across the roof terrace in the early morning cold.

And I stopped being Bianca.

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Chapter 276