Semua Bab Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore: Bab 191 - Bab 200

Chapter 191RIVERAThe study felt smaller than usual with three people in it.Klaus had arrived at noon with Elijah, which was not unusual in itself—they came to the house regularly enough that Louis had stopped treating their presence as an event and started treating it as ordinary, which I had taken as a sign of something good settling in all of us. What was unusual was the specific quality of purposefulness they'd brought with them today, the sense of people who had come with an agenda they hadn't announced yet and were deciding how to raise it.I had made coffee. We had talked about the intelligence work for twenty minutes, the ongoing effort to locate Voss's preparation site, the communication failures with Thorne's office, the tactical profile of the attackers who had gone after Theo Morrison four days ago in Silver Moon territory. All of it real, all of it necessary, and underneath all of it the thing none of us had said yet.Klaus said it."How is she?" he asked, setting down

Chapter 193LOUISThe dinosaurs needed reorganizing.That was what I told myself when I heard Dad's footsteps on the stairs, because I needed something to be doing when he came in. Something that looked normal. I had learned, over the past few weeks of watching adults be careful around each other, that looking normal was important. If you looked normal, people believed you were normal, and if people believed you were normal, they didn't ask the hard questions that you didn't have answers for yet.I arranged the Stegosaurus next to the Brachiosaurus and moved the Pteranodon to the left side of the shelf, which wasn't technically where it belonged in the formation but looked busy, which was the point.Dad knocked and came in.He did the thing he always did when he was coming to talk about something serious — he sat on the edge of my bed rather than in the doorway, which meant he was planning to stay for a proper conversation rather than a quick check-in. I had catalogued this difference

Chapter 195LOUISI had lain in the dark afterward and thought about the photograph.I understood what it meant that she looked at it. She had lost him, and looking at photographs of people you had lost was what you did when you missed them, and she missed him. That was not a complicated thing to understand.What was more complicated was the feeling it had produced in me, sitting in my chest in the dark, which I had turned over for a while trying to identify it correctly.It wasn't jealousy. I didn't think it was jealousy. Jealousy felt like wanting something someone else had, and I didn't want to be Theo. I already was who I was.It was something more like guilt.Like I was sitting in a room that belonged to someone else, using a chair that had his name on it, and the person who owned the room had found out and was looking at photographs of what should have been there instead of me.Replacement, I had said to Roy.He had told me that wasn't true. Dad had told me that wasn't true. I b

Chapter 197 FAKE BIANCA Thread three was Rivera himself. This was the most delicate thread, and I handled it with the most care, because Rivera was not a simple man and he knew the woman he thought I was in a way that most people did not know their partners. He had been watching her for months. He had catalogued her habits and her responses and the specific texture of how she moved through the world, and while the memory transfer had given me access to that texture from the inside, living it convincingly from the outside was a different kind of challenge. He had come to talk to me on the third evening. I had known it was coming. Had read the signs during the day — the specific quality of his attention when he looked at me, the way Klaus and Elijah had been in the study for two hours and then left with the careful demeanor of people who had said something significant and were now leaving it to land. Rivera had been moving through the house afterward with the

Chapter 199MATTHEWI heard them before I saw them.Theo's voice first, coming from the hallway, talking at the speed he talked when he had a lot to say and not enough patience for the normal pace of conversation. Then Marcus's voice, lower, making the sounds of someone responding at intervals without necessarily being given room to actually speak.I was in the kitchen going through the week's meal plan, which had become a more complicated exercise since Callahan had taken up residence in my bedroom. Not because he was demanding — he wasn't — but because he had opinions, and the opinions had a way of emerging at relevant moments. He had mentioned, once, that he found heavy meals in the evenings made the healing process slower. He had mentioned this in the way he mentioned most things, which was as a factual observation rather than a request, and I had adjusted the evening meals accordingly, and now apparently this was just how we ate.The front door opened."—and then Mrs. Patterson s