Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 217

Chapter 217

Getting all four of them to the breakfast table at the same time on a Saturday took until half past nine.

Lucas came down first, already dressed, his phone in his hand. Lena arrived shortly after carrying the book she had been reading the night before, setting it face-down beside her plate. Monica appeared in her pajamas with her hair pressed flat on one side from sleep. Ría came last, slightly breathless, pulling her chair out and reaching for the coffee before she had fully sat down.

The kitchen smelled of toast and the expensive coffee beans Lena had started buying. Morning light sat warm through the window. An ordinary Saturday.

Lucia and Alexander were standing at the counter, and something in the way they were standing had a quality that Monic noticed before anyone else. She had been reaching for the juice and she looked up and then looked again, the second ook slower and more deliberate, moving from their faces to Lucia’s left hand resting on the counter.

She put the juice down without pouring it.

Alexander moved to stand at the end of the table where he could see all four of them properly.

“We want to talk to you about something,” he said.

Lucas set his phone face-down. Ria wrapped both hands around her coffee cup. Lena closed her book.

Lucia held up her left hand.

The ring caught the morning light. Four pairs of eyes found it at the same moment and held it.

Ria sat forward slowly. Her eyes moved from the ring to her mother’s face to Alexander and then back to the ring, and when she spoke her voice was not surprised. It was something much more careful than surprise.

“You’re already married,” she said.”

“Yes,” Lucia said simply. “You guys were not there.. And that is something I have thought about every day since.” Alexander came around to stand at the end of the table fully, not behind the counter, not with distance between them. Facing them directly.

“I have thought about it too,” he said. “Your mother and I got married quietly, privately, while you were still with your father and everything was complicated and painful. We told ourselves the timing wasn’t right.” He stopped. “But I have come to understand that there is no version of what your mother and I are that does not include you. There is no important moment in this family that belongs only to us. You were not there and you should have been.” His voice was steady but the steadiness was deliberate. “So I want to do this again. Properly. With all four of you present. I want you to watch your mother and I make our promises to each other. I want you in the room.”

The kitchen was completely still.

Ria’s face was doing the thing it did when she was working through several feelings at once and hadn’t decided yet which one to land on. Her jaw was tight. Her eyes were very bright. She looked at Alexander with an expression that had grief inside it alongside everything else, that particular grief that had lived in her since Marco died and came to the surface when something touched the place where a father should be.

Then she reached across the table and took the napkin beside Monica’s empty plate and pulled the pen from her pocket. She always had a pen.

She began to draw.

Lucas had been watching Alexander throughout with the weighing look, the deliberate one he had worn since childhood when he was deciding something that mattered. He pushed his chair back slowly. He stood up. He walked to Alexander and put his hand out.

Alexander took it.

They shook hands the way Lucas shook hands when something was serious. Firm and held a second longer than a casual greeting. Then Lucas stepped forward and put his arm around Alexander and held on, his jaw working, his eyes going bright at the edges.

Alexander’s hand came up to the back of his head. That gesture, the one that was entirely his, that he had never announced but had simply always done when one of them came close enough to need it. Lucas let himself be held for a moment before stepping back.

He sat down and picked up his phone and looked at it, which meant he was done saying what he needed to say. Monica had not moved from beside the juice she never poured.

1/2

༈ །།

Chapter 217

“Can I paint something for the ceremony?” Her voice was direct and practical, the voice she used when a decision had already been made internally and she was simply communicating it. “Not just a gift. Something that is part of the day itself. Something people see during the vows.”

“Yes,” Lucia said.

Monica nodded once and sat down and began eating with the focused energy of someone who had a project.

Ria turned the napkin around without looking up. A dress sketch, clean lines, something structured but not stiff, with a detail at the back that none of them could fully make out from where they sat.

“That is where we start,” Ria said, pen still moving. “There will be at least a dozen more before we arrive somewhere real. But that is the beginning.”

“Ria.” Lucia’s voice was soft.

Ria looked up. Her eyes were wet but controlled, bright and held back, and she blinked twice and looked back down at her

sketch.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m working.”

Nobody pushed her.

Lena had been the quietest of all of them. She had not spoken since Alexander started talking. She sat with her hands flat on the table and her book closed and her coffee cooling and something moving in her face that she was not releasing.

She looked up and found Alexander’s eyes across the kitchen.

Her face did something fast and private that was over before it arrived fully. She pressed her lips together hard. Then a single tear ran down her cheek and she reached up and wiped it away immediately with the back of her hand.

“I’m not crying,” she said to the table.

“Of course not,” Alexander said.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify