Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 216

Chapter 216

Dinner had been quiet that evening.

Not uncomfortable quiet. The children had drifted to their rooms one by one after they ate, Monica falling asleep early because she still tired quickly, Lucas taking a call from a friend, Ria sketching in bed, Lena reading. The house had settled into its night sounds, the particular creaks and silences that Lucia had learned over the months of living here until she could tell the difference between the building cooling and someone moving upstairs.

Alexander had poured two glasses of wine and nodded toward the garden door.

They had taken their glasses outside and sat on the stone bench near the oak tree, the same bench Monica had put in the family portrait, and the evening air was cool but not cold and the garden lamps cast their familiar amber light across the lawn.

They had been sitting for a while, not talking much, comfortable in the way two people became comfortable when they had been through enough together that silence no longer needed filling.

Lucia was looking at the house. At the lit windows. At the shapes of her children moving or still behind the glass.

“I keep thinking about the hospital corridor,” she said. “Those days waiting. I keep thinking about how the only thing I wanted was to get them home. And now they’re home. And I still can’t believe it most mornings.”

Alexander looked at the same windows. “I know.”

“I used to be afraid of wanting too much,” Lucia said. “After Marco. After everything. I kept thinking if I wanted too much something would take it.”

“And now?”

She turned to look at him. “Now I think that’s the wrong way to live.”

Alexander set his wine glass down on the stone beside him. He turned to face her properly and the look on his face was something she had not seen in exactly this configuration before. Certain and unguarded and slightly nervous, which was not a combination she associated with him.

He reached into his jacket pocket.

The ring was not ostentatious. It was a single stone in a plain setting, clean and considered, the kind of thing chosen by someone who had paid attention for a long time to what the person actually wanted rather than what would impress them. He held it in his palm and looked at her.

“I proposed on the yacht,” he said. “And you said yes and I have been wearing that yes like something private ever since. But I have been thinking for weeks that it deserves more than a secret.” His voice was steady but not entirely. “You deserve more than a secret.”

Lucia looked at the ring in his palm.

She thought about the yacht. The night on the water and the way he had asked and the way she had felt the yes arrive before he finished asking. She had been wearing it privately too, turning it over in her mind in quiet moments, taking it out to look at it and putting it away again.

“I want to ask you properly,” Alexander said. “With the house behind us. With your children upstairs. With everything we have built here around us.” He paused. “Lucia. Will you marry me again?”

She looked at his face. At this man who had sat on warehouse floors with her and held her in hospital corridors. Who had stood in a basement doorway and let her be the one who crossed the room to their daughters. Who had never once tried to be everything and had simply kept being present when presence was the only thing that mattered.

“Yes,” she said.

The same word as the yacht. Arrived the same way, before any deliberation, just the plain truth of what she felt. But this time the garden was around them and the house was lit and her children were inside and she did not have to put it away. He slid the ring onto her finger. His hands were not entirely steady. She noticed that and it meant something.

She looked at it on her hand for a moment. Then she looked up at him and he was looking at her with an expression that she wanted to keep somewhere she could find it again.

She reached up and put her hand against his face and he pressed into it slightly the way he always did, this man who ran companies and managed crises and held things together, leaning into her hand in the garden like someone who had been waiting a long time to stop holding everything by himself.

They stayed like that for a while. The garden around them. The house warm and lit behind them.

$12

Chapter 216

Then Lucia lowered her hand and looked at the ring again and looked at the house.

“The children,” she said.

“Yes.”

“We need to tell them.”

“I know.” Alexander picked up his wine glass. “How?”

Lucia thought about it. About Monica falling asleep early and Ria sketching and Lucas on a call and Lena reading. About four children who had been through more than any children should carry and who had come out the other side of it still intact, still here, still capable of laughing in kitchens and painting family portraits and asking hard questions at dinner. “Tomorrow morning,” she said. “Breakfast. All of them at the table at the same time.”

“And if they’re not all up at the same time?”

“Then we wait until they are.” She turned to look at him. “This news should land when everyone is there to hear it together.”

Alexander nodded.

“Are you nervous?” Lucia asked.

He was quiet for a moment. “A little.”

“About what?”

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