Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 220

Chapter 220

Chapter 220

The lawyer’s name was Mr. Harrison and he was not the same lawyer who had handled Marco’s will.

He arrived at the prison on a Wednesday morning with a briefcase and a visitor’s pass and the careful face of someone carrying information he had not been sure how to carry since it was given to him.

Margaret sat across from him in the visiting room. She had not been expecting anyone. She had stopped expecting things the way people stopped expecting things when the days became identical and the walls stayed the same.

Mr. Harrison opened his briefcase.

“I represent a separate matter connected to Mr. Hart,” he said. “Outside the formal will. Mr. Hart came to me privately, separate from his main estate lawyer, some days before his death. He made an arrangement for you and asked that it be/ delivered directly.” He set an envelope on the table, then slid a financial document across beside it. “Fifty million dollars has been placed in an account in your name. It is yours, freely, with no conditions.”

Margaret looked at the document.

Fifty million. Marco had gone to a separate lawyer, quietly, away from the will that named his children and Lucia, and made a private arrangement for her. He had done it days before his death. Before the warehouse. Before everything.

!

Her hands were completely still on the table. She did not trust them to move.

“The envelope is personal,” Mr. Harrison said. “He asked me to give it to you alongside the financial document. I have not read it.”

He closed his briefcase, stood, and left her alone with both.

The visiting room noise continued at the other tables. Margaret did not hear any of it. She sat and looked at the envelope with her name on the front in Marco’s handwriting and did not open it for a long time.

Then she did.

Two pages. His writing was different from how she had imagined it when she thought about him writing to Lucia. Less constructed. More like him talking across a table than composing something for posterity. More like the Marco from the beginning, the one she had first known before everything became complicated and heavy.

*Margaret,*

*If you are reading this then I am gone. I don’t know how it will happen. I hope it happens a long time from now on a quiet morning with nothing dramatic attached to it. But I have been thinking lately that I do not want to leave things unsaid, so here I am.*

*I want to tell you the truth about something I have never said out loud to anyone.*

*When I met you, I was bored. I know that sounds like a cruel thing to put in a letter and I don’t mean it as cruelty. My life was functioning by every measure that was supposed to count. The company was successful. I had money and standing and a house that was too large for what it held. And I was bored, not with Lucia exactly, but with myself. With the person I had become. Safe and comfortable and going through motions that stopped surprising me years before.*

*You walked into a conference room and you were different from everything that had become routine. You were sharp and funny and you wanted things openly without apologizing for wanting them, and I had forgotten how to do that. So I chose to pursue what you made me feel instead of asking myself why I needed it.*

*That is not your fault. I want to say that clearly. What started between us began because of something unresolved inside me, not because you manufactured it. You were real. My feelings were real. But I used you as an answer to a question should have asked myself instead, and that put you inside a war you did not fully understand you were walking into.*

*I am sorry for that.*

1

*I am sorry for what my choices cost you. For the baby. For every month I spent inside our marriage still carrying grief for the family I had broken with my own hands, bringing that weight into a home that deserved better. For the nights you must have felt it without me saying it.*

*You deserved a man who chose you completely and without reservation. I don’t think I ever fully managed that and I think somewhere you always knew it and I am sorry I made you carry that knowledge.*

*The money is not an exchange for anything. Th Successfully unlocked! as exchange. It is just what I have that I can

still give.*

*Marco*

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Chapter 220

Margaret set the letter on the table.

She sat with both hands pressed flat over her face, her elbows on the table, and the sounds of the visiting room went far away and she breathed in long uneven pulls that were not quite crying and not quite anything else. Something older than crying. Something that had been waiting to come out since the night in the warehouse when she stood at the bottom of the stairs and understood what she had done and could not undo it.

“I’m sorry,” she said into her palms. The words barely made sound. “I’m sorry for all of it. Every single piece of it. I’m sorry.” She stayed like that for a long time:

That night in her cell she asked the guard for paper and a pen.

She sat on the edge of her bed with the paper flat on the cover of her book and she wrote to Monica.

*First attempt:*

*Monica, I know you don’t want to hear from me and you have every reason not to. I just need you to know that I am sorry I am sorry for the basement and the ropes and the bruise I put on your face and for every terrible thing I said to you in that room and for what happened to your father. I am sorry for-*

She stopped reading it back and tore it up.

It ran into itself. Her own guilt filling the page before Monica had space in it. She was writing about herself again, her own remorse, her own need to be heard, the same need that had driven every wrong choice she had ever made.

She started again.

*Second attempt:*

*Monica. You were thirteen years old. I was aware of that every moment in that basement and I chose to treat you the way I did regardless. I have no explanation that makes that acceptable and I am not going to offer one. I only want you to know that I knew what you were.*

She read it back.

It was cold. Accurate but cold. It read like something written to satisfy a legal requirement rather than something that came from a human being sitting on a prison bed in the dark trying to reach a child she had harmed.

She tore it up.

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