Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 240

Chapter 240

Chapter 240

THEO

I thought about what Dr. Fisher had said.

Not on purpose. I was not trying to think about it, but in the early morning grey before I got up the thought arrived anyway and I let it be there because I was too tired to direct my thinking anywhere specific.

Grief changes shape, she had said. It doesn’t go away. It becomes quieter not because it’s less real but because your life is growing around it.

I had believed her when she said it. I had understood it in the way you understood something that someone explained clearly and which made sense when you held it up and looked at it. The grief was there and the grief was changing and that was allowed.

But the dream had a different quality than grief.

Grief was the feeling of something missing. The space where something had been. The dream was not that. The dream was the feeling of something present, something trying to reach me from somewhere, something that knew my name and had numbers to tell me and said help through water-sound with the specific urgency of someone who meant it.

I thought about what it would mean if she was not at peac

This thought arrived and I looked at it.

me not because she was settled somewhere and okay, but because she was not What it would mean if her spirit was visiting

angry. okay, because she was somewhere she didn’t want to be and couldn’t leave, because she was-

Angry at me.

I turned this over in the dark.

She had seen me in the market on Saturday. Or her spirit had I did not know exactly how this worked, whether spirits could see things or whether they only knew what they knew from when they were alive, and this was not a question I had anyone to ask who would answer it properly. But if she had seen the market, if she had seen me in the cart and Cal with the thing from the shelf and Dad exasperated about the item we’d argued him into, if she had seen me laughing-

The real laugh.

The one from the middle of me.

If she had seen that and she was somewhere being not okay and I was in a cart laughing while she was in a stone room with her hands held down-

I pressed my face into my pillow for a moment.

The stone room.

I sat up.

She was in a stone room. Not in the way of somewhere spirits went after they were gone, not the way I imagined that place, which was somewhere without walls, open and not cold. She was in a room with specific walls and a specific ceiling and a specific light. She had specific numbers.

Spirits did not have numbers.

I sat in the early morning grey with this thought.

Spirits did not say help through water-sound. Spirits did not say numbers twice with a pause between, the way you said things to

someone small who needed ro keep ien

I was five years old.

I was five years old and I was sitting in my bed in the early morning grey and I was thinking about what it meant that astone roon with a cracked ceiling and specific tuumbers and she had said help

I did not know what to do with this.

I was five years old and this was too large for me to hold by myself and I didn’t know who to give it to and I didn’t know how to explain it and I didn’t know if it was real or if I was a child who missed his mother and was building an elaborate structure around that missing to make it feel like something other than what it was.

Dr. Fisher had said that was a thing people did sometimes.

She had not said it to me specifically. She had said it in the context of explaining why some feelings were harder to identify dun others, because people were good at finding shapes for feelings that were easier to look at than the actual feeling

Was that what this was

I did not know.

I got up and went to the bathroom and washed my face with cold water the way Cal had showed me when I told him that waking up early was hard, and I looked at myself in the mirror for a moment, and then I went downstairs because it was morning even if it was the early part of it.

Dad was already up.

He was at the kitchen table with his coffee and his glasses and the early morning version of himself, which was quieter than the daytime version and which I had come to understand was not unfriendly, just the specific state of someone who was still becoming fully present.

He looked up when I came in.

“Early,” he said.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I said. Which was true.

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