Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 242

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Chapter 242

Chapter 242

THEO

The folder was a green one with a plastic cover

I had chosen it specifically because it was the least interesting folder in my school bag, the one that held worksheets I had already finished and handouts that didn’t need to be looked at again, the kind of folder that adults flipped past when they were helping with homework because there was nothing current in it. Mrs. Adebayo had never opened it. Dad had never opened it. It lived at the back of my bag behind the more important things and nobody paid attention to it.

That was where I kept the drawings.

There were six of them now.

The first one was the accident, the one where my hand had moved before I decided to let it move, the stone room with the rough

walls and the crack in the ceiling and the caged light. That one was the least detailed because I had stopped partway through and turned it over and then turned it back and written the numbers in the corner before I had fully decided to.

The ones after it were more deliberate.

Not deliberate in the way of sitting down and deciding I was going to draw the room. More deliberate in the way of my hand knowing where it was going before I did, which was slightly different. I would have a pencil for a different reason and the room would come out instead.

The second one was the ceiling. Just the ceiling, the specific crack in detail, because the crack was the thing I saw first every time the dream came and I was trying to understand why it was the first thing. The crack started thin at the left corner and I had drawn it in the careful way I drew things when I was trying to get them right, with the line-weight changing as it widened and the two smaller lines at the end before the light fixture.

The third one was the table.

This was the hardest one to draw and the hardest one to look at after. The metal table slightly tilted, not flat, the angle of it, and the straps at the sides

added the shape of hat held the person on it in place. I had drawn the table without the person first and looked at it and then

decide not to.

which I did quickly and with the pencil moving in the way it moved when I was not giving myself time to

She was small in the drawing.

That was the thing that surprised me when I looked at it after. In the dream she was present in the full way of people who are present, size and voice and the specific weight of being looked at by her. In the drawing she was small, which was something about the table being larger than I expected, or about my hands not yet having the skill to make a person the right size relative to the space around them.

The numbers were in the margin.

I had written them the way I wrote all numbers, which Mrs. Adebayo had said was very neat for my age, the specific formation of each digit that I had learned from the workbooks and had practiced because I liked things to be legible. They were in the top right corner of every drawing now. Not because I thought I would forget them. I had checked them each morning for two weeks and they were still in the careful part, still in her voice, still in the right order.

I wrote them anyway.

Because they were part of it.

The dreams kept coming.

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Not every night. Some nights were ordinary nights, the kind where sleep was just sleep and the morning was just the morning and the only thing in my head when I woke up was the leftover warmth of having been unconscious for eight hours. Those nights I was relieved and disappointed at the same time, which was a confusing combination that I had not found a way to explain to myself yet.

The dream nights were different.

Same room every time. The crack, the light, the table, her face. The sound always the water-sound, words shaped but edges dissolved, and out of the dissolving the clear things arriving. My name, which came through every time without blurring. Help, which came through sometimes and not others. The numbers, which came through clearly every time she said them, and she said them every time, twice, with the pause.

I had started to understand the water-sound better.

Not to hear the blurred words clearly. But to understand that the blur was consistent, that the same words were blurred every time, and that the clear words were always the same clear words. This was not the pattern of a regular dream. Regular dreams shifted every time, changed their logic, replaced details with different details. This dream was exact in its repetition in the way that real places were exact.

I knew this and I held it and I also held the other thing.

The thing that arrived in the middle of the night on the third dream when I was lying in the space between sleep and waking and my brain was not yet organized enough to manage what it let through.

She was angry at me.

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