Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 239

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Chapter 239

THEO

The second dream came three nights later.

I knew it was the same dream before it fully arrived, the way you knew a smell before you could name it, something in the quality of the dark that was different from ordinary sleeping dark. And then the room was there

Stone walls. The single bulb behind the metal cage, the light going nowhere. The crack in the ceiling starting thin at the left corner and widening as it moved toward the center and splitting into two before it reached the light. saw the crack and I knew I had seen it before and I knew this was the same place.

She was there.

Same position. The metal table, slightly tilted. The things around her wrists. She was looking at the ceiling when the dream started and then she looked at me, and the look was the same look from before, the one that said I need you to pay attention, the one that meant something important was coming and she was going to make sure I had it before she stopped talking.

I tried to be more present this time.

I didn’t know if you could decide to be more present in a dream. I wasn’t sure it worked that way. But I tried anyway, the way she had taught me to try things that might not work, which was completely and without saving effort for the possibility of failure. You committed to the attempt. If it didn’t work you had still done the attempt correctly.

She said something.

The sound was wrong. That was the part that was different from the first dream, where she had said my name and it had arrived clearly. This time the sound had the quality of something coming through water, present and shaped like words but with the sharpness of them softened, the edges dissolved. I could see her mouth moving and I could hear the sound of it but the specific words kept sliding past the part of me that was trying to hold them.

I moved closer. Or the dream moved me closer. It was difficult

One word arrived.

Help.

tell the difference.

Clear and clean, the way it had been in the first dream when she said my name. One word breaking through the

like water-sound, sharp and specific and completely hers, and I felt it the same way I had felt my name, something physical, like a hand reaching.

Help.

And then numbers.

She said them the way she repeated things when she was making sure I had them. Not once. Twice, the same sequence, with the specific pause between the first time and the second time that she used when she was teaching me something and wanted the gap to be long enough for the first version to settle before the second one reinforced it. She did this with the multiplication tables. She did this when she taught me the address and the phone number to call in an emergency. Two times, same sequence, pause between.

The numbers came through the water-sound.

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Chapter 239

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Not all of them clearly. Some of them arrived clean and some of them were blurred at the edges and I grabbed at all of them the way you grabbed at something falling. Three digits I was certain of. Two more I thought I had. One I wasn’t sure about.

She said them again.

The second time I was more certain.

And then the dream had the quality of something ending not because it was finished but because the sleeping part of me was moving back toward the surface, and I tried to stay, the specific effort of trying to stay in a dream when your body has decided it’s done, which never worked but which I tried anyway because she was still there and looking at me and there was more I didn’t have yet.

I woke up.

The room was dark again.

My room, my dark. The dinosaurs on the shelf. The line of hallway light under the door.

I sat up.

The numbers were in my head.

All of them, or most of them. The ones that had arrived clearly and the ones I had grabbed at and the one I wasn’t sure about. They were in the specific order she had said them, and they were sitting in the part of my head that held things I was trying to keep, and I knew from experience with that part of my head that it held things reliably if I didn’t disturb them too much in the first few minutes.

I sat very still.

I went through the numbers in the order she had said them. Twice, the same way she had said them twice, the same pause between. I did this sitting in my bed in the dark with my eyes open and the dinosaurs their shapes on the shelf and the hallway light its line under the door.

The numbers stayed.

I thought about writing them down.

There was a pencil on my nightstand. I had been doing a drawing before bed, one of the ankylosaurus from the book, working on getting the tail club the right shape, and the pencil was there and the paper was there and writing them down would mean I had them somewhere outside my head, somewhere they couldn’t blur or rearrange while I slept.

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