Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 219

Chapter 219

Chapter 219

Alexander hired three professional designers to work alongside Ria.

He had made the call quietly, without announcing it, and when the three of them arrived at Riverside Manor with their portfolios and fabric swatches and the particular professional energy of people who were good at their work, Ria had looked at them and then looked at Alexander and said nothing for a moment.

Then she said: “I’m lead designer. They assist me. That is not negotiable.”

Alexander had said: “Obviously.”

That had been three weeks ago.

Since then the studio Ria used at the back of the house had become something else entirely. Bolts of fabric stacked against the walls, ivory and cream and the particular warm white that photographed differently from the others. Sketches pinned in rows above the worktable. Fabric samples hanging from a rail that Alexander had installed without being asked when he saw the rail she had been using was not long enough.

Twelve sketches before Lucia saw a single one.

Ria had been firm about this from the beginning. Nobody came into the studio while she was working through it. Not Lucia. Not Monica who was curious about everything. The door stayed closed and the work stayed private and Ria moved through version after version, pinning and tearing and starting again, the three designers offering technical guidance and sewing construction she did not always know and deferring to her vision on everything that mattered.

On a Tuesday afternoon three weeks in, Ria knocked on the door of the room Lucia used as a home office.

“I’m ready for you to see them,” she said.

Lucia followed her down the hall.

The twelve sketches were laid out on the worktable in sequence, each one numbered in the corner in Ria’s handwriting. Lucia stood at the table and looked at them from the first to the twelfth without speaking, moving slowly down the row, taking her time with each one.

The twelfth sketch was different from the others. Cleaner. Quieter. A structure that held without being rigid, with a movement in the skirt that suggested lightness without being fragile, and a detail at the back that Ria pointed to with one finger without explaining it.

“That detail,” Lucia said.

“It was Dad’s idea,” Ria said. Her voice came out slightly lower than usual. “Not directly. But I was thinking about the coat you were wearing the day you came to the school performance when I was eleven and you weren’t supposed to be there because things were difficult, but you came anyway. There was something in the way the back of that coat moved when you walked.” She stopped. “I wanted to put that into this.”

Lucia looked at the sketch for a long time.

“This one,” she said.

Ria exhaled. Something released in her shoulders that had been held up for three weeks.

The first fitting was two weeks later.

The studio had been rearranged, the worktable pushed back, a full-length mirror positioned near the window where the afternoon light came in at the right angle. The three designers were present, two of them with pins and one with a measuring tape, and Ria stood at the center of it all with her sleeves/rolled up and her eyes moving between the dress form and Lucia with an expression of complete focused attention.

The dress was pinned and not yet finished, more architecture than clothing at this stage, held together in ways that would eventually become seams and structure. Lucia stood in the middle of it all while Ria’s hands worked, adjusting, pinning, stepping back to look, stepping forward to correct.

They had been working for about twenty minutes when Lucia said quietly: “I keep thinking about the dress I wore when I married Marco.”

Ria’s hands paused for a moment. Then continued.

“Tell me,” she said.

wenty-one. I thought the weight of the dress was

“It was heavy,” Lucia said. “Beautiful but heavy. Successfully unlocked! to sit down and not being able to because of the structure of it.” She looked at her own reflection in the minor. i was part of what a wedding was supposed to feel like.”

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Chapter 219

“And now?”

Lucia was quiet for a moment. “Now I want to feel like I can move. Like I can reach someone if I need to.”

Ria pressed a pin into the fabric carefully and did not respond immediately. When she did her voice was measured and private, the voice she used for the things that cost her something to say.

“I used to blame you,” she said. “After the divorce. When everything was still raw. I used to think that if you had just tried harder, found a different way, maybe things would have been different.” She moved around to the other side. “I know that was wrong. I knew it even then, mostly. But knowing something and feeling it are not the same thing.”

“I know,” Lucia said.

“He loved you,” Ria said. “Dad. In the letter, the way he described you on campus, the blue coat.” Her voice thinned slightly, He loved you from the beginning and he spent seventeen years making a mess of it.” She pressed another pin. “I think have been grieving that version of him, the one from the letter, for longer than I have been grieving the one from the end.” Lucia’s eyes in the mirror were bright but she did not move.

“Both versions were real,” Lucia said.

“I know,” Ria said. “That’s what makes it hard.”

They stayed in that for a moment, the room quiet around them, the afternoon light coming through the window, the dress taking shape between them.

“This wedding,” Lucia said. “I want it to be light. I want to feel it differently from the last one.”

“That’s what I’m building,” Ria said simply.

Across the house the other preparations were happening in their own way.

Monica had claimed the dining room table for three days running, spread with fabric swatches and paint chips she was comparing against the light at different times of day, deciding on the colors for the ceremony piece she was creating. Lucas had taken over the music, which had not been formally assigned to him but which he had quietly begun researching until a playlist existed that nobody had asked for and everyone agreed was exactly right. Lena was handling the flowers, working with a florist she had found herself, sending photographs of arrangements at all hours and asking for opinions from anyone in range.

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