Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 238

Chapter 238

Chapter 238

Chapter 238

THEO

The dream was not like normal dreams.

I knew this from inside it, which was something that didn’t usually happen. Usually dreams had their own logic that only broke when you woke up and looked back at it. This one had a clarity from the beginning that felt different, the way things felt different when they were real rather than constructed by the sleeping part of your mind.

The room was stone. There was a crack in the ceiling. I noticed it the way you noticed details that were important

t knowing yet why they were important.

as in the room.

s lying on something metal, slightly tilted, not flat. She had things around her wrists and her chest that er still, and I understood that she was being held there and could not leave on her own, and this standing arrived without the panic that should have come with it because the dream had the quality of ething being shown to me rather than something happening to me.

he looked at me.

She had the specific look she used when she needed me to understand something and I was not fully paying attention yet. I knew this look. It was one of the ones I had been keeping in the part of me where the important things lived, the ones I took out and looked at sometimes when I was alone, the way Dad kept photographs in his desk drawer.

She was thinner than I remembered.

Her face was the same face. Exactly the same, the way it lived in the kept part of me, the specific way her eyes were spaced and the line of her jaw and the particular set of her mouth when she was being careful. But the rest of her was different in the way that something was different when it had been going without for a long time.

She said my name.

She said it the way she used to say it, the specific way that was only hers, with the particular weight she gave the first sound of it that nobody else had ever given it, that I had only heard from her and that I had not heard in almost nine months and that arrived in the dream like something physical, like a hand on my shoulder, like a thing I could hold.

Theo.

I wanted to say something back. In the dream I tried to say something and the words didn’t come out the way words sometimes didn’t come out in dreams, present in my head and absent in my mouth.

She kept looking at

T

and I need you

to know I’m here and I need you to not forget and I need you to-

Chapter 239

+15 Bones

My room, my dark, the specific quality of it that I knew completely. The shelf with the dinosaurs was the shape it always was. The nightstand lamp was off. The door was slightly open the way Dad left it when he checked on me before he went to bed, the specific width of it, the line of hallway light coming through.

My heart was going fast.

Not the scared fast of a nightmare. A different fast. The fast of something that had been very close and was now not close anymore, the specific feeling of reaching for something and having it be present for a moment and then

not.

I sat up in the dark.

The room was the same room. The dinosaurs were where they were. Everything was where it was supposed to be, everything in its correct place, the ordinary night around me being ordinary.

She was in a stone room.

I sat with this.

She was in a stone room with a metal table and a crack in the ceiling and one bulb behind a cage, and she was held there and she could not leave, and she had looked at me and said my name the specific way that was only hers.

I did not know what to do with this.

I was five years old and it was dark and the dream had been real in the way real things were real and I was sitting in my bed with my heart going fast and I did not have a framework for what had just happened.

I thought about waking Dad.

I thought about this for a while.

The thing about waking Dad was that I would have to explain the dream, and explaining the dream meant saying the things that the dream had shown me, and saying those things out loud in the dark in the middle of the night felt like something I was not ready to do yet. Not because I was scared of it. Because it felt like it needed to be handled carefully and I didn’t know yet how to be careful with it.

I lay back down.

I looked at the ceiling in the dark, which I couldn’t see but which I knew was there, and I thought about the stone room and the crack and the light and her face and the way she had said my name.

She was somewhere.

Not gone the way gone meant when it was permanent. Somewhere specific. A room with stone walls and a ceiling with a crack in it and a metal table and one light.

I held this and I did not tell anyone.

Not yet.

I lay in the dark with my heart slowing back to its normal speed and I looked at the ceiling I couldn’t see and I held it carefully, the way you held something that mattered, the way you held something you were not going to drop.

Chapter 230

415 Bonus

Chapter 239