Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 228

Chapter 228

RIVERA

James was in room four-fourteen.

I knew this because the charge nurse had told Klaus and Klaus had told me, and because I had been sitting in the corridor outside the emergency bay for two hours watching doors and waiting for someone to tell me something useful, and when the something useful finally came it was that James Wright was awake and asking for me specifically.

Not for the medical team lead. Not for the administrator who had been circling the situation since seven in the morning with the specific anxiety of someone whose institution had just had two people fall off its roof. For me.

I told Klaus to stay with Louis and went alone.

The fourth floor was quieter than the floors below. The particular quiet of a ward that had organized itself into its daily rhythm, the controlled movement of people who knew where they were going and why. Room four-fourteen was at the end of the corridor, the kind of placement that meant they had put him somewhere with less traffic, which was either a courtesy or a practical decision about managing who had access to him.

Probably both.

I knocked and pushed the door open.

He looked worse than I expected and better than I had feared, which was the specific range of outcomes available to a man who had gone off a hospital roof and was still able to ask for someone by name. His left shoulder was immobilized, the bandaging visible above the hospital gown. There was a dressing on the left side of his head that covered what I estimated was a significant impact site. He was the color of someone whose body had spent the last several hours deciding whether to continue the project of being alive and had reached a provisional yes.

His eyes were clear.

That was what mattered. The eyes had the specific quality of someone who was present, who was tracking, who had things to say and the capacity to say them.

I pulled the chair to the side of the bed and sat down.

“You look terrible,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. His voice was rougher than usual. “I feel accurately represented.”

r

I waited. James had asked for me, which meant he had something to tell me, and the telling would happen in his own order. I had learned this about him in the months we had been working alongside each other. He was not someone who needed to be prompted toward the point. He would reach it by the route that made sense to him.

“She used the greeting,” he said.

I looked at him.

“The second tirne,” he said. “This morning. When she came to my office.” He shifted slightly against the pillow and the movement cost him something that showed briefly in his face before he managed it away. “Yesterday, at your house, she didn’t use it. There’s a specific thing Bianca says to me in the mornings. Has been saying it for months. She didn’t say it yesterday and I noticed. That was the first thing I noticed.”

“But she used it today,” I said.

“Perfectly,” he said. “Every component. The exact words, the exact tone, the exact timing.” He paused. “And it was the most

Chaping

Wrong I have ever heard it sound.”

I thought about this. “Because Blanca doesn’t perform it.”

+20 Bonus

James looked at me with the eyes that were clear and tired and had seen something this morning that they were still processing. “She just says it. It comes from habit, not from niemory. The difference between those two frings has a sound, Rivera, when you know someone well enough.” He stopped. “This morning it had the sound of something retrieved and deployed. Precise in the way that habits never are, because habits have wear on them.”

I sat with that.

Outside the room the corridor had its steady traffic. Someone with a cart went past. A phone rang somewhere and was answered.

“She came to my office,” he continued. “She said she wanted to talk somewhere private. About Louis. She said she was worried and didn’t want Rivera to hear yet.” He paused. “I suggested the roof terrace.”

“You suggested it,” I said.

“I wanted her away from people,” he said. “I had already decided what I was looking at. I wanted to have the conversation somewhere it couldn’t be overheard and where I could-” He stopped. “I didn’t think clearly enough about the other implications of that choice. That’s on me.”

“James-”

“I’m not looking for absolution,” he said. “I’m giving you the accurate sequence.” He breathed carefully, the deliberate breath of someone managing cracked ribs. “We went up. I walked ahead toward the railing at the far end. I turned around. And I looked at her and said what I said about the greeting.”

“What happened when you said it?”

“She stopped,” he said. “The whole performance stopped. Not gradually. All at once, like something being switched off.” He

it was still Bianca’s face. But the thing behind looked at the ceiling for a moment. “Her face changed. Not into a different face it changed. The thing that had been working to be Bianca stopped working and something else was just there instead.”

I did not say anything.

—

“It looked at me,” he said. “That’s the only way I can describe it. She had been looking at me all morning but this was different. This was something assessing a problem.” He paused. “She was fast. I have worked in trauma medicine for twelve years and have reasonable reflexes and she was significantly faster than I was prepared for.”

“She came at you.”

“She came at me,” he said. “Directly and without any further pretense. She had made a calculation and acted on it in under a second and I was already moving backward when she reached me.” He stopped. His jaw tightened slightly, the specific expression of someone replaying something they would prefer not to replay. “I went over the railing.”

The room was very quiet.

He “I grabbed her,” he said. “On the way. I don’t know if it was instinct or calculation or something between them. I had her coat and then I had her arm and when we hit the maintenance ledge one floor down I used her body between me and the impact. said this plainly, without apology and without satisfaction. The plain statement of a man describing what he had done to survive. “That’s why I’m here with cracked ribs and a head injury instead of not here at all.”

“The ledge caught you both,” I said.

“It caught us both,” he confirmed. “She took the worse impact. The angle, and the fact that she was between me and the surface. “He looked at the ceiling again. “She hit hard. I hit her and the ledge and then we were both on the ledge and there were people below already and I held onto the railing until they came.”

です

Chapter 274