Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 212

Chapter 212

They were all in the hallway when she came through the door.

Lucia stopped on the threshold. The evening air was still cold at her back. The hallway was warm and lit and her four children were standing in it looking at her with expressions that said they had been waiting and were relieved and were trying not to show how worried they had been.

Ria moved first, crossing the space between them and pulling Lucia into her arms without saying anything. Lucia held her. Over Ria’s shoulder she could see Lucas and Monica and Lena standing close together the way they had been standing since coming home, always within reach of each other, always within reach of something solid.

“Come in.” Alexander’s voice came from behind the children, warm and steady. “The maids have been cooking. I asked them to make everyone’s favorites tonight.”

Monica looked up at that. The smallest thing, the faintest shift in her face. But it was something.

They ate in the dining room with all the lights on. The table had been set properly, good dishes, the candles lit, as if the normality of it could hold the walls up. The food smelled like the specific meals that belonged to each of them individually and the combination of it was strange and good and exactly right.

Nobody talked very much at first. Ria pushed her food around more than she ate it. Lucas ate steadily and said almost nothing, which was how he processed things that were too large for words. Lena sat close to Alexander with her shoulder touching his. Monica ate half of what was in front of her, which was more than she had eaten since coming home, and that felt like a small victory.

Then Lucas asked, quietly, about the funeral.

The table went still.

“Tomorrow morning,” Lucia said. Her voice was even. She had prepared for this question, had known it was coming, had rehearsed the practical information so it could come out without anything else attached to it. “Ten o’clock. The arrangements have been handled by the funeral home. It will be small. Just us and some of his old colleagues if they choose to come.”

“Are we going?” Ria asked.

“If

f you want to go,” Lucia said. “Nobody has to. But if you want to be there, we go together.”

Ria nodded slowly, her eyes on her plate.

Monica said nothing for a moment. Then she said yes. Just the one word, and it sat on the table with the kind of weight that one-word answers carried when they had been considered.

Lucas looked at Monica when she said it and something passed between them that Lucia felt without being able to name it. The specific communication of children who had grown up in the same difficult house and learned each other’s language for hard things.

“We’ll go together,” Lucas said.

They finished dinner slowly. After, the children drifted toward their rooms in ones and twos, Ria walking with her arm around Monica, Lucas and Lena following, and the house settled into its night sounds. Footsteps on the stairs. Doors. Quiet.

Lucía stood at the dining room table and looked at the remains of the meal.

Alexander began clearing plates, working beside her in the comfortable way they had built together over months, the easy rhythm of two people who knew which jobs they each took and did not need to assign them.

“She said it was my fault.” Lucia’s voice came out from somewhere she had not planned to speak from. She had not decided to say it. It came out anyway.

Alexander set down what he was holding.

“Margaret.” Lucia looked at the tablecloth. “She said I drove Marco to the point where he pushed her and caused the miscarriage. She said I stripped everything from him so systematically that she had no choice. She said my children would not have been kidnapped and Marco would not be dead if I had just walked away instead of going after everything he had.”

“Lucia.”

“And the thing is.” Her voice cracked. “The thing I cannot stop thinking about since I got in the car to come home is that she is not entirely wrong.” She pressed her hand flat on the table. “I took back the company. I took his chairmanship. I dismantled his reputation in front of the business community. I did all of that deliberately and I told myself it was justice and I told myself he deserved every piece of it.” Her throat was working. “And I stand by that. I stand by it. He did deserve it.

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Chapter 212 But.”

She stopped.

“Monica was in that basement,” she said. “Monica was tied to a chair in a cold room for six days because someone hated me. And Marco is in the ground because he followed a woman I drove to the edge.” The tears came finally, not dramatically, just steadily, running down her face. “Maybe if I had just taken the children and walked away. Maybe if I had let him keep the company and the title and his dignity and just gotten myself and my kids out. Maybe none of this happens Alexander crossed to her. He did not immediately say anything. He put his arms around her and she pressed her face into his shoulder and cried the way she had been holding back since the visiting room.

“You are not responsible for what Margaret did,” he said quietly, when she had been crying for a while. “You are not responsible for the choices of a woman who planned a kidnapping over months. Who bought equipment. Who hired people. Who put your children in a basement.”

“But I gave her the rage to do it with,” Lucia said against his shirt.

“Marco gave her the rage to do it with,” Alexander said. “He chose her. He brought her into your children’s lives. He lost control of himself and pushed a pregnant woman down. And when she came apart from all of that, she chose to aim it at you. You did not make that choice for her.”

“Margaret said I was vindictive,” Lucia said. “That I could not let go. That I kept going past justice into something else.” “Were you?” Alexander asked. Not to challenge her. Genuinely.

Lucia was quiet for a long moment.

“Sometimes,” she said finally. “Sometimes it stopped being about protecting my children and started being about making sure he felt it. Making sure he understood what he had cost us.” Her voice went very small. “And I don’t know where the line was between those two things or whether I crossed it.”

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