Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 221

Chapter 221

The decision came to her on a Thursday morning.

She was sitting on her bed with Marco’s letter in her hands, the paper worn soft at the folds from being handled every day since Mr. Harrison delivered it. She had read it so many times she could say it without looking. She read it anyway.

She thought about the fifty million. About her own personal assets, the apartment she no longer lived in, the investments she had built during the marriage, everything still technically hers. Sixty-four million dollars between all of it, sitting in accounts she could not reach from a cell that was eight feet by ten feet.

She thought about Monica.

Margaret had hurt a lot of people.

She had hurt Monica the most.

The connection between what she had and who she had harmed most was simple. It sat in the Thursday morning light as the most obvious thing she had understood in months.

She asked for Mr. Harrison.

He came the following week. He sat across from her with his notepad and his careful face and listened while she told him what she wanted.

All of it. The fifty million from Marco and every personal asset she owned. The Manhattan apartment. The investment portfolio. Everything, totalling sixty-four million dollars, to be transferred to Monica Hart alone.

Mr. Harrison wrote it down without asking why. She appreciated that.

“I also need a letter delivered with the documents,” she said. “I need her to receive both at the same time.”

He told her he would arrange it.

She wrote the letter that evening. It took a long time.

*Monica,*

*I am not writing this to ask for anything from you. I want to say that before anything else. I am not asking for forgiveness and I am not asking for a response. I am writing because there are things I need to say and this letter is the only thing I have left.*

*You were hurt the most by what I did. I know that. Not the most visibly, not always in ways easy to see from the outside, but the most deeply. You were thirteen years old. You had spent a year working to get better. And I took six days of that and put you in a cold room with rope around your wrists and said things to you that no child should ever hear from an adult.

*I put a bruise on your face with my own hand.*

*I stood in that room with a gun and your father came down the stairs and threw himself between you and me and died on the floor beside you.*

*I know I did all of that. Saying it does not undo a single second of it. But I need you to know that I know.* *Lena.*

*You were not supposed to be in any of this. The anger I carried was never directed at you. You were taken because you were beside Monica, and Monica was there because of me, which means you were there because of me. You spent six days keeping your sister alive with nothing except your presence and your body and your refusal to stop. I am sorry I put you in a position where that was what you had to do. You were fifteen years old and you should not have had to be that strong.*

*Ria and Lucas.*

*I took your father from you. He made his own choices and so did I and the collision of every one of those choices ended with him gone. I know you had already lost him once when he chose to leave, and I am responsible for the second loss, the permanent one. He was trying to come back toward you when he died. He was in that basement because he followed me there to stop me. That matters and I know it matters and I am sorry that his trying cost him everything.*

*Lucia.*

*I spent months telling myself that everything Successfully unlocked! your doing. That you had taken Marco from me, destroyed our marriage, turned his children into weapons. i bunt a whole story around your being the cause of everything I had lost. I know now that I built that story because it was easier than looking at what I had actually done and

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Chapter 221

who I had actually become. You were a woman fighting for her children. I was a woman who could not accept that a man had chosen his family over her. Those are not the same thing and I made them the same thing for long enough that people got hurt.*

*I am sorry for destroying your family. For the months of fear and legal battles and everything that came before the basement. For what I put your children through. For taking their father from them in the worst possible way. You did not deserve any of it and neither did they.*

*The money is not payment. There is no payment for what happened. It is simply everything I have, and Monica is the person I harmed most directly, and so it belongs with her.*

*I will carry the guilt of what I did for the rest of my life. I am not asking any of you to share that weight. It is mine. I just needed to say once, to the people who were there, that I know what I did.*

*I know.*

*Margaret*

She sealed the letter and passed it to the guard to give to Mr. Harrison.

Then she sat on her bed with nothing in her hands.

Sixty-four million dollars. All of it gone now, redirected, given away without the hesitation she had expected and which

never came.

She lay back and let herself do what she had been avoiding for weeks. She let herself remember Marco.

Not the Marco from the warehouse stairs. The earlier one.

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