Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 243

Chapter 243

Chapter 243

THEO

Thursday was my appointment.

I sat in the soft chair with my legs folded under me the way I always sat in it, and I looked at the fish tank. The orange fish with the white stripe was still there. It had been there for a month now and I had decided it was permanent rather than a visitor, which made me feel better about it in a way I couldn’t fully explain.

Dr. Fisher sat across from me in her chair with her hands in her lap and the specific quality of attention that was her most consistent thing, which was complete without being heavy. She did not look at me like I was something that needed to be fixed. She looked at me like I was something worth being patient with.

“You’ve been quiet today,” she said.

I looked at the orange fis

“What kind of dream

I thought about the

water-sound an

“About my

“What ha

“She’s

Dr.

yo

‘ve been having dreams.”

about the room and the crack and the light and the table and the numbers and her face and the clear through it.

ms?”

d I can see her.”

ra moment in the way she was quiet when she was giving something space. “How does that feel? When eams?”

‘Different from regular dreams.”

he words for the quality of it, the sharpness that was not the soft blur of ordinary sleep. “More real,” I said. “Like ot like a dream place.”

dreams feel that way,” she said. “Very vivid, very specific. It’s common, especially in the first year. The mind is still

the person.”

mind,” I said, “or is it actually them.”

not answer immediately. This was one of the things I valued about Dr. Fisher, that she did not fill silences with quick

rs when the quick answer was not the right one.

at’s a question people have been asking for a very long time,” she said. “I don’t think anyone knows the answer with

inty. What I know is that the dreams feel real, and the feelings in them are real, even if we can’t say for certain what’s coducing them.”

nodded.

“What does your mum do in the dreams?” she said.

“She looks at me,” I said.

This was true. It was the part of the truth I was willing to say in the daytime with the fish tank and the complete attention. She looked at me in the dreams. I was not saying the rest of it, I was not saying that she was tied to a metal table or that there was a

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crack in the ceiling that I had drawn six times or that she said help through water-sound or that there were numbers I had written in the margins of drawings I kept in a green folder at the back of my school bag

“Is the look frightening?” Dr, Fisher said.

I thought about the look. The specific one, the one that said I need you to pay attention. “No,” I said.

“What does it feel like?”

“Like she has something to tell me,” I said. Which was trus

“And does she tell you?”

I looked at the orange fish. It was near the ceramic arch, the place it seemed to prefer in the afternoons. “Sort of,” I said.

Dr. Fisher waited.

“But I can’t always hear,” I said. “It’s like sound through water. I can hear the shape of it but not all the words.”

She nodded. “The mind does that sometimes in dreams. Produces the sense of communication without the full content.” She paused. “How do you feel when you wake up from them?”

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