Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 205

Chapter 205

Marco was up before sunrise.

He stood in the kitchen for a long time after that, just standing there with his hands on the counter, looking at nothing. The house was quiet in the way houses were quiet when something was wrong in them. Not peaceful quiet. The kind that pressed down on a person’s shoulders.

He had not slept. Not properly. He had sat on the couch where Margaret had left her wine glass until sometime around four in the morning, turning over everything he knew and everything he had refused to know and what it meant that she had not said Monica’s name once.

By six he had made a decision.

He went upstairs and changed into clean clothes and came back down to the kitchen. He pulled out the good pan, the one Margaret had bought from some kitchen store in Milan that she only took out when she was trying to impress someone. He found eggs in the refrigerator and bread and the expensive coffee beans she kept in the cupboard above the machine. He found the tray they had used exactly once, on a morning years ago when things between them had been different.

He made breakfast.

Eggs the way she liked them, soft and not quite set, with toast cut in triangles because she said that was the only correct way. He poured coffee into the good cups, not the ones they used every morning, and put a small glass of orange juice beside it. He found the last of the flowers in the vase on the windowsill, slightly past their best but still holding color, and laid two of them across the corner of the tray.

He carried it upstairs.

Margaret was awake when he pushed the door open, sitting up against the pillows with her phone in her hand and her reading glasses on, the ones she pretended she didn’t need. She looked up and saw the tray and her expression went very still.

“What is this?” Her voice came out careful.

“Breakfast.” Marco set the tray across her lap and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I made eggs the way you like them.”

Margaret looked at the tray. At the flowers on the corner. At the good cups. She took her reading glasses off slowly and set them on the nightstand.

“Marco.” She said his name like it was a question.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. He put his hands on his knees and looked at the window, the early light coming through the curtains thin and pale. “About us. About what we’ve become. About everything that’s happened in the past few months.” He stopped. “I brought you into a war that had nothing to do with you. I made you a target for everything Lucia was angry about. I made promises I had no business making when my life was already burning down around me.” He turned to look at her face. “And I am sorry. I am genuinely sorry. For the baby. For the fighting. For standing in this house and calling you names and making you feel like everything that went wrong was your fault.”

Margaret was very still. Her eyes had gone slightly bright.

“I was a terrible husband to Lucia,” Marco continued. “And I brought all of those patterns here. The lying. The controlling. The way I went cold when things got hard instead of facing them.” His voice went quiet. “You

deserved better than what I gave you.”

“Marco.” Her voice was barely sound.

“I want to leave.” He said it plainly, without preamble. “I want us to leave. All of this. This house, this city, this war with Lucia and Alexander and everything it has cost us both. I want to sell the company stocks, liquidate the properties, take whatever is left and go somewhere neither of us has been before.” He looked at her . Without any of this following us.” steadily. “London. Paris. Anywhere you choose

Successfully unlocked!

didn’t touch it.

“You mean that,” she said finally. Not a question. She was reading him the way she always did, looking for the performance underneath the words, looking for the angle.

“I mean every word,” Marco said.

Something shifted in her face. Slowly, like ice taking time to change state. The hardness she’d worn for months softened slightly at the edges and underneath it was something that looked like the woman he had first known, before everything had ground them both into what they were now. Her throat moved.

“I chose you,” she said quietly. “When I could have walked away, when it was clear how complicated everything was going to be, I chose to stay.”

“I know.” Marco reached out and covered her hand with his. “I know you did.”

Margaret looked down at his hand over hers.

And there it was. The thing Marco had been waiting for, the crack he had been trying to open since he came through the bedroom door. Not cruelty. Not pressure. Just this. The possibility of something different. The way a person looked when they remembered what it was they had originally wanted before wanting it had cost them so much.

Margaret picked up the coffee cup with her free hand and held it with both palms wrapped around it, the warmth seeping into her fingers. She looked at the window. At the pale morning light.

Monica, she thought.

Lena.

The thought arrived before she could stop it. Monica’s face in that basement chair. The bruise Margaret herself had put on her cheek. Lena planting her feet on the concrete floor and refusing to move. Two girls who had done nothing except be born into a complicated family, now sitting in a cold room because Margaret had decided they were the right place to put her pain.

She pressed the coffee cup harder against her palms.

Let them go. The thought came quiet and direct. Call your people. Give them the address. Let them go home.

It would be so simple. Two phone calls. Then she and Marco could pack what they needed and be on a plane by tonight.

Then the other thought arrived.

They had seen her face. Both of them. They had spoken to her. They knew her voice, her coat, the bracelet on her wrist. Monica knew things from before. Lena was sharp and observant and had looked at Margaret in that basement the way people looked at faces they were memorising.

If she let them go, they would tell everything immediately. Every word she had said in that room. The baby.

The plan. The bag she had brought and what she had implied was inside it.

There would be nowhere to run that Alexander Kane’s resources would not find them within a week.

Margaret set the coffee cup down on the tray.

She smiled at Marco. The smile came easily because she had been practising it her whole life, the particular

kind that said everything was alright when everything was not.

“London,” she said softly. “I’ve always wanted to live in London.”

Marco’s shoulders dropped slightly with something that looked like relief.

Margaret watched his face and said nothing about the decision that had quietly finished forming itself in the back of her mind while he looked at her with hope in his eyes.

The girls could not go home.

She would make sure of it before the week was out.

Chapter 205

And then she and Marco would leave, and Lucia Kane could spend the rest of her life wonderin

Subscribed

5 Likes

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify