Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 237

Chapter 237

Chapter 237

THEO

Cal made the small sound he made when something was acceptable. We went to the car, which was parked in the correct spot in the pickup area, and I got in the back because I always got in the back now, not the front, which had been a brief moment of negotiation two weeks ago when I had tried the front seat and Cal had said I wasn’t heavy enough for the airbag to be safe and I had looked this up later and it was true so I had stopped arguing about it.

He started the car.

We drove for a while.

I was looking out the window at the streets going past. The city in the afternoon had a specific quality that was different from the morning, less sharp, more settled, like it had done most of what it was going to do and was now just continuing. I knew this route completely now. I knew which turn came after which turn and which building meant we were seven minutes away and which traffic light was always longer than it should be.

I was watching Cal in the mirror.

Not in an obvious way. In the way you watched things when you didn’t want the thing to know it was being watched. I had learned this was possible because of the specific angle of the rearview mirror and the way it caught the front seats if you positioned yourself right.

He was quiet.

This was not unusual. Cal was often quiet in the car, and the silence was usually the comfortable kind, the kind that didn’t need filling. But this silence was a different texture from that one. This was the silence of someone who was thinking about something specific and the thinking was taking up the space where other things usually went.

I filed this and looked back out the window.

We turned onto the long road that meant twelve minutes from home.

“Cal,” I said.

“Mm.”

“Is something wrong?”

The car continued at the same speed. He didn’t look in the mirror, which meant he was deciding something about his answer

rather than not having one.

“No,” he said.

I looked at the back of his head.

“Okay,” I said.

I looked back out the window.

The thing about Cal’s no was that it had the specific quality of a true answer that wasn’t the whole answer, which was different from a lie and different from the full truth and which I had learned was a thing adults did when they were managing something they didn’t think you needed to know yet. Dad did this sometimes. Dr. Fisher had explained that it was usually people trying to protect you from something while they figured it out, and that it didn’t mean they were lying to you, and that the right response was usually to wait because the thing they were managing would either resolve or they would decide to tell you.

1 filed the no in the category of things I was waiting off.

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The rest of the drive was quictau his texture of quiet, and I looked out the window and thought about Spinosaurus and their reach advantage, which was genuinely decisive if you thought about it correctly.

Dinner was pasta.

Cal made it the way he had shown me, with the right amount of salt in the water, and Dad was home early enough to eat with us, which had been happening more lately than it used to. The three of us at the table was its own kind of thing that I didn’t have exact words for but which sat in my chest in the warm way that things sat when they were good

Dad asked about school. I told him about the dinosaur debate. He asked which side I had taken and I told him and he said Spinosaurus was a good call, which I had already known but which was still satisfying to hear confirmed.

Cal was quieter at dinner than he usually was too.

Dad noticed. I could tell because Dad had gotten better at noticing things, and he looked at Cal twice during dinner in the way he looked at things he was filing for later. He didn’t say anything about it, which was its own kind of noticing.

After dinner I had a bath and did the part of homework I hadn’t finished at school and put my pajamas on and got into bed with the dinosaur book, which I had been working through in a specific order since Louis had given me a reading recommendation by text message, which was still a surprising thing that had happened – Louis texting me but which had become a regular thing now and which I thought was probably good for both of us even though I had no real framework for the friendship yet except that it existed and seemed to be continuing.

Dad came and read to me.

He was getting better at the reading. He had always done it but there had been a long time when the reading had the quality of someone going through the correct motions, the right words in the right order but with something absent underneath. The reading now was different. He was actually there while he did it, which was the difference that mattered.

I fell asleep before the chapter was finished.

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