Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 214

A Chapter 214

Lucia sat in the study with the door closed.

The house was quiet. The children had gone to their rooms after the lawyer left, each of them carrying the weight of the afternoon in their own way. Alexander was somewhere down the hall giving her the space she had not asked for but that he understood she needed.

The envelope was on the desk in front of her.

Her name in Marco’s handwriting. The same handwriting she had watched fill out mortgage documents and birthday cards and the children’s school forms for seventeen years. Familiar in a way that hurt, the way old things always hurt when they came back.

She picked it up and opened it.

The paper was standard white, folded in thirds. His writing was careful. More careful than she remembered, each word deliberate, the letters formed like he had been thinking about each one before committing it to the page.

She read.

~~~

*Lucia,*

*If you are reading this, I am no longer alive.*

*I have been sitting at this desk for two hours trying to find the right way to begin. I don’t think there is a right way. So I will just start.*

*I want to tell you about the first time I saw you.*

*I was nineteen years old and three boys had cornered me outside the library. You don’t know this, but I had been avoiding that part of campus for weeks because of them. That afternoon I didn’t see them in time. They had my bag and I was doing what I always did, which was nothing, waiting for it to be over.*

*And then you appeared.*

*You were wearing a blue coat. I don’t know why I remember the coat. You walked straight toward them and told them to put my bag down and your voice didn’t shake at all. When they didn’t move you said it again, louder, and people turned to look, and they left.*

*You handed me my bag. You asked if I was alright. You didn’t wait for me to thank you. You just walked away like what you had done was nothing.*

*I stood there watching you go and I thought: that is the kind of person I want to become.*

*My grandmother was the only person who had ever defended me before that day. She died when I was fourteen and after she was gone I believed for a long time that people like her didn’t exist. People who helped simply because something was wrong and needed fixing. And then there you were in a blue coat proving me wrong.*

*I watched you for two months before I found the nerve to speak to you. I used to sit on the other side of the library and pretend to read while you did your actual work. I watched you laugh with your friends and argue with your professors and once I watched you give your lunch to a girl who had forgotten hers, without being asked, without making anything of it.*

*I thought you were so far above me that even wanting you was presumptuous.*

*But you said yes to dinner.*

*And then you said yes to everything else.*

*I want you to know that I knew what I had. From the beginning, I knew. That is the part I can never fully explain to anyone, the part that makes everything I did afterward so unforgivable. I was not a man who didn’t understand what he was losing. I was a man who understood and did it anyway. I don’t know how to account for that. I have spent a long time trying.*

*I remember our wedding. I remember the way you looked walking toward me and how my hands were shaking and how I told myself: this is it. This is the rest of my life and I am going to be worth it.*

*I wasn’t.*

*I wasn’t worth it and I knew that too, and instead of trying harder I went looking for something that felt easier. Margaret was easier. Not better. Not more. Just easier. And I told myself a story about why that was acceptable and I kept telling it until I had made it real.*

*When you started fighting back I hated you for it. I told myself you were vindictive. I told myself you had always been cold, always been too ambitious, always been more interested in winning than in us. I needed that story because the alternative

Chapter 214

was looking at what I had actually done.*

*The alternative was standing in the truth of it.*

*It took me a long time to get there. But I got there.*

*You were not vindictive. You were injured. You fought the way injured people fight, with everything they had and perhaps further than strictly necessary, but you were not wrong about the cause. The cause was me. Everything that followed from that cause was mine.*

*I never stopped loving you. I want you to know that. Not in the way that helps you or means anything useful/now. But in the plain factual sense that I carried you with me through everything and I never fully put it down. The version of you in the library that day, in the blue coat, saying put the bag down and meaning it. That person never left me.*

*I’m sorry I didn’t keep my vows to you. I’m sorry I took what you gave and spent it on things that didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry for the years and for the children and for everything my choices cost all of you.*

*If there is something after this, I hope I find you in it. And I hope I am better in that version. I hope I am the husband and father I should have been here.*

*I think I would be. I finally understand enough to be.*

*Marco*

Lucia set the letter down on the desk.

She sat with her hands flat on either side of it and looked at it without seeing the words anymore.

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