Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 209

Chapter 209

Chapter 209

The hospital waiting room smelled of disinfectant and bad coffee and the specific kind of quiet that came from people who had stopped talking because there was nothing left to say.

Ria sat perfectly still in a plastic chair with her hands folded in her lap, staring at the floor tiles between her feet. She had not moved since Lucia walked in and sat beside her and told her. She had not cried. She had not spoken. She was just sitting there doing the thing she used to do as a child when something was too large to process, going very still and very small and waiting for the world to tell her what to do next.

Lucas stood at the window with his back to the room. His shoulders were locked, his arms crossed over his chest, his jaw working the way it did when he was trying not to break in front of people. He had been standing there since he heard. He had not turned around once.

Lena sat beside Ria with her arm around her, saying nothing, just present. Six days of surviving the worst thing had left her without many words, but she knew how to be still with someone who needed stillness. Monica was in a hospital bed down the hall, being assessed, being warmed and rehydrated and checked for the things six days without proper food and water did to a thirteen-year-old body. Lucia had not left her for more than five minutes and had only come to this room because Monica had asked her to tell the others herself.

A doctor appeared in the doorway. Gray-haired, tired-eyed, the face of someone who had delivered this kind of news in this kind of room too many times.

“The medical examiner has finished,” he said, his voice pitched low. “If the family wants to see Mr. Hart, now would be the time.”

Ria’s hands tightened in her lap.

Lucas turned from the window. His eyes were red but dry and his expression was the expression of someone who had decided to hold himself together through this by sheer will and was going to make that decision hold.

“Yes,” he said.

They followed the doctor down a corridor where the lights buzzed faintly overhead and the floor was polished to a shine that reflected their faces back at them in pale, elongated versions of themselves. Lucia walked beside Ria. Alexander stayed close to Lena. Lucas walked slightly ahead, the way he always had when he was trying to protect his family from something he couldn’t protect them from.

The morgue was colder than the rest of the building. The air carried a chemical smell underneath everything, cold and sharp in the back of the throat. Lena pressed closer to Alexander without meaning to.

Marco Hart lay on a metal table under a white sheet pulled to his chest. The blood had been cleaned away. His face looked quiet. Younger, somehow, than he had in life, without the tension that had lived in it for years.

Ria stopped in the doorway.

She looked at her father’s face from across the room and whatever she had been holding tightly since Lucia sat down beside her in the waiting room came loose all at once. A sound tore out of her throat, short and sharp, like something being pulled out by the root. She pressed her hand over her mouth and stood there shaking.

Lucia put her arm around her.

“I was so angry at him,” Ria said against her hand. Her voice came out in pieces. “For so long. I said so many things. In that speech at my fashion show I talked about forgiving him and I meant it but I was still angry underneath.” She stopped. “And now I can’t tell him any of it. I can’t tell him that I was angry and I forgave him anyway.”

“He knew,” Lucia said quietly.

“How can you know that?”

Lucia did not answer, because there was ne

ford the weight of what Ria was asking. She

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Chapter 209

just kept her arm around her daughter and let her stand in the doorway for as long as she needed.

Lucas had walked to the table. He was standing beside his father looking down at his face with an expression that was very hard to look at. Not anger anymore. Something past anger. Something that looked like the particular grief of a person who had spent months preparing to feel one thing about someone and arrived at the end to find they felt something else entirely.

“I kept thinking if he ever really changed I’d know what to say,” Lucas said. His voice was very quiet. “I had it all planned out. What I’d tell him. What I’d want to hear.” He stopped. Swallowed. “He changed at the end. He came to that basement and he stood in front of Monica and he changed. And now I’m standing here and I don’ t have any of the words I planned.”

He reached out and put his hand on his father’s arm, through the sheet.

“I wanted more time,” he said simply. “That’s what I didn’t plan for. That I’d still want more time.”

Ria had come into the room. She moved to the other side of the table and stood across from Lucas, looking at the same face, arriving at it from a different direction. She reached out and touched her father’s hand where it lay at his side.

“I’m sorry for the hard things I said,” she said. Her voice was steady now, rough but steady. “I meant them, but m sorry for how they landed. I’m sorry we ran out of time for them to become something else.”

She looked at his face for a long moment.

“You were my hero when I was thirteen,” she said. “I stood on a stage and called you my hero and I meant it. And then you stopped being that. But at the end you were trying to be it again.” She pressed her lips together.” That matters. I need you to know that matters.”

Lena had moved to stand at the foot of the table. She had not known Marco Hart as a father. She had known him as Lucia’s ex-husband, as the man at the gates, as the name attached to months of legal threats and confrontations. She had known him as the father of her siblings and the man who had hurt her siblings, she had known him as the man who had put a tracker on his wife’s car and followed her to a basement. “You saved my sister,” she said. Her voice was very direct. “You came and you saved Monica. That is what I know about you. That is what I’ll keep. Thank you for your sacrifice.”

The doctor cleared his throat softly from the doorway. “Take all the time you need.”

Monica was wheeled in.

She had insisted. The nurse had tried to explain that she should rest, that she needed fluids and warmth and time, and Monica had looked at the nurse with the expression of a thirteen-year-old who had survived six days in a basement and said she was going to say goodbye to her father.

They had brought her.

She sat in the wheelchair beside the table and looked at his face. The bruise on her cheek was still dark. Her wrists were bandaged. She had a blanket around her shoulders and she was still too pale and her hands were not entirely steady.

She reached out and put her hand over her father’s.

“I told you I forgave you,” she said. “Down in that basement I told you. I need you to know I meant it. Not because you died. Because it was true.”

Her voice cracked open.

“I forgive you for the months you were gone when you were still in the house. For letting things happen that you should have stopped. For choosing the wrong things over and over.” She pressed her hand harder over his. “I forgive you, Dad. And you saved me. You came and you saved me. Those two things are both true at once and I’m going to carry both of them.”

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