Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 235

Chapter 235

Chapter 235

MATTHEW

Eight years of history ending in an apartment where the door had been left oper. since the previous evening and a neighbor had knocked and found her. A note on the table. Her handwriting.

I thought about Voss’s people.

I could not stop thinking about Voss’s people. The note was in her handwriting and the apartment showed no sign of intrusion and the detectives were treating it as it appeared. All of that was true and all of it was exactly what a professional operation would produce if they wanted something to look like one thing while being another.

I did not know.

That was what I kept arriving at. I did not know. She had been isolated and frightened and the pack had been cruel to her in the specific collective cruelty of a group that needed someone to blame and had found her convenient, and I had not protected her from that because I had been too occupied with my own guilt and my own transformation to think about what was happening to her. A woman in that condition, alone and frightened and having been used by people who threatened her and having failed the one thing they required of her-

It was possible.

It was also possible that it was not what it appeared to be.

I would not know until the detectives completed their review, and possibly not even then.

I sat with this uncertainty and I did not try to resolve it into something more comfortable.

What I did instead was try to be honest with myself about the specific shape of what I felt, because Dr. Martinez had told me in our last session that the habit of not being honest with myself about feelings was one of the most persistent of my problems and one of the most expensive. I had been practicing it, the honesty. I was still not good at it. But I was better than I had been.

I felt grief.

Not the large grief of someone who had lost a person they loved in the present tense. The specific smaller grief of someone who had lost a person they had once been close to, a person from a part of their life that had been complicated and costly, a person whose end had come before any kind of resolution was possible. The grief of a door that was now permanently closed

I also felt guilt.

I had not made it right with Mia.

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I had not been unkind to her because she deserved it. I had been unkind to her because I was uncomfortable and I had always defaulted to distance when I was uncomfortable, and that default had caused damage over the years to more people than her and I was trying to stop it but I had not stopped it fast enough for it to have mattered in this particular case.

She had been coerced into trying to use my son.

She had failed and I had warned her and she had gone away and I had not thought about what came after, and what came after was a door left open and a neighbor who knocked and a note on a table in her handwriting.

Whether or not Voss’s people had a hand in it, I had a hand in it.

Not in the way that made me responsible for her death. I was trying to be honest, not to reconstruct guilt into something bigger than it was, which Dr. Martinez had also identified as one of my patterns. The guilt I was responsible for was the specific and bounded guilt of someone who had been unkind when he should have been honest, who had used distance as a substitute for integrity, and who had not considered what his choices cost the people around him until the cost had already been paid.

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Theo did not know that she wm dead. He waschool right now dia problem of having an argument with Deen something that mattered

at all in any other register.

He was okay.

For this specific morning, in this specific hour, he was okay,

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1 would sit in my office and carry what I was carrying and he would be at school being, okay, and later I would pick him up and he would come home and tell me about whatever had happened and I would listen the way I had been learning to listen, which was all the way through and without the distraction of my own thoughts runing, underneath.

That was what I had.

The ordinary continuation of things, even when something had ended. The morning going on outside my window. Marcos coordinating with the detective division with his usual precision. Theo at school with his friends.

1 stayed in my chair for a while longer and let the grief be the size it was and the guilt be the shape it was and I did not try to make either of them smaller or larger than they actually were,

Then I reached for the work on my desk.

There was a pack to run.

That had not changed.

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