Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 223

Chapter 223

Chapter 223

Ria had been planning it for two weeks.

Not elaborately. That was deliberately not the point. The point was the specific kind of evening that asked nothing of anyone except to show up and eat good food and stay as long as they wanted.

She had transformed the sitting room at Riverside Manor into something warm and low. Soft lights strung along the curtain rail. Cushions pulled from every room until the floor was covered in them. The coffee table pushed aside, replaced with boards on a low stand loaded with food chosen for each person specifically, the sharp cheese Lucia always feached for first, the little pastries Monica would eat five of before noticing she had started, the sourdough Lena preferred, the olives Ria could finish a bowl of alone.

The guests were larger than expected. Ria had invited women from Lucia’s life before and after the divorce, colleagues from Hart Industries, women from the charity circles Alexander moved in who had become Lucia’s own friends over the past year, the wives of some of Alexander’s oldest business partners who had welcomed Lucia warmly when she entered that world. Thirty women in total, spread across the cushions and the extra chairs Ria had arranged, glasses of wine and juice catching the warm light.

Because Lucia had been twenty-one when she married Marco. Twenty-one years old, which meant the friends she had then were Marco’s world too, connected to him through business and social circles, and when the divorce came they had made their choices and most of those choices had not been Lucia. She had navigated those years largely alone, no close women beside her, just her children and her determination and eventually Alexander.

Tonight Ria had gathered the women who had come after. The ones who knew Lucia as Chairwoman, as Alexander’s partner, as the woman who had rebuilt everything from nothing. They did not carry the old history but they were genuinely here, which was its own kind of loyalty.

The evening started at seven.

By half past seven Monica was sitting cross-legged between Lucia and a woman named Patricia, who ran two of Alexander’ s charitable foundations and had an extraordinarily loud laugh that had startled Monica the first time and delighted her by the third. Monica was on her fifth pastry and nobody had said a word about it.

A woman named Grace, who had worked alongside Lucia at Hart Industries through the most difficult months, was telling a story about the first board meeting after Lucia took the chairmanship. The room was listening because Grace told stories the way people who had actually lived them told stories, with the specific details that made things real.

“She walked in,” Grace was saying, “and three of the senior board members were already talking over each other about a procedural matter, the kind of thing designed to eat the first twenty minutes and establish that she did not have full control of the room. And she sat down, opened her folder, waited for exactly thirty seconds, and then said, in the quietest voice you have ever heard in a boardroom, that she would wait until they were ready to begin.” No paused. “Nobody talked over each other for the rest of that meeting.”

The room laughed. Lucia shook her head but she was smiling.

“You make it sound deliberate,” Lucia said.

“Wasn’t it?” Grace raised an eyebrow.

“I was terrified,” Lucia said. “I just didn’t have the luxury of showing

Monica was looking at her mother with an expression that sat somewhere between awe and recognition. She had not known that version of her mother’s story in that specific detail, the boardroom and the thirty seconds and the voice that stayed quiet on purpose. She stored it away somewhere careful.

The evening moved the way good evenings moved, not toward anything, just forward. Conversation that wove between the serious and the ridiculous without needing to choose. A woman named Harriet who had met Lucia at an Alexander Kane Foundation dinner and appointed herself Lucia’s unofficial champion in every room she entered. Another woman who had worked in Hart Industries legal and had quiet, specific opinions about the forensic audit that made the room go delightedly silent.

Lena sat curled in the corner of the largest cushion pile, quieter than the others, listening more than talking, her face relaxed in the warm light in a way that meant she was genuinely comfortable. She laughed at the right moments, leaned in when something caught her, and did not feel the need to perform ease because she actually had it.

Ria moved between conversations, refilling glasses settling beside her mother for long stretches and then drifting to the other side of the room. She had organized this Successfully unlocked! brought to her collections, knowing what

each element needed to be, knowing when to s

thing had built simply exist.

the thing

At ten-thirty Lucia went to the bathroom and when she came back she stood in the doorway of the sitting room for a

1/2

Chapter 223

rnoment before anyone noticed her return.

She looked at the room. At thirty women she had gathered to herself in the years since everything collapsed. At Lena in her cushion corner. At Monica still awake, still eating, turned toward Harriet now with the focused attention she gave to peopie she found interesting. At Ria across the room with her shoes off and her wine in hand, mid-sentence, gesturing about something.

Lucia stood in the doorway and felt the specific weight of it. She had been twenty-one years old standing in a different room on a different kind of night, surrounded by people who were not really hers. She was forty years old now standing in her own home looking at people who were.

She came back into the room and sat back down and nobody asked where she had gone and that was exactly right.

At midnight Lena kissed her mother’s cheek and went up to bed.

Monica was still there.

Her head had found its way to Lucia’s shoulder at some point in the last hour. She was not asleep but she was close to it, her breathing slow and her body soft and heavy against her mother’s side.

Ria noticed. She looked at Monica and then at Lucia.

“She should probably go to bed,” Ria said.

Lucia looked at the small hand resting on her knee.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify