Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 225

Chapter 225

The reception moved inside as the sun went down, the garden lights coming on one by one until the whole lawn glowed amber and the guests drifted through the open doors into the ballroom that Riverside Manor had not used in years but which had been opened up and filled with round tables and flowers and the particular warm noise of two hundred people who were genuinely happy to be somewhere.

The band started and the floor filled quickly.

Lucia danced with Alexander first, the way these things went, and she had forgotten she liked dancing. She had not danced in years. Not since before everything. And here it was again, the specific pleasure of moving to music with someone whose body she knew, whose hand on her back felt like the right weight in the right place.

She pressed her face against his shoulder and he said nothing and they danced.

Monica danced with Lena and then with Ria and then somehow ended up dancing with one of Alexander’s old colleagues, a man in his sixties who danced with tremendous seriousness and formal footwork that made Monica work very hard not to laugh.

Lucas danced exactly once, with Lucia, and then returned to the edge of the room where he was more comfortable and watched everything from there with the expression of a person who was content not to be in the center of it.

The toasts started after the first hour.

Various people spoke. Short, warm, polite. Alexander’s oldest friend from university. A colleague of Lucia’s from Hart Industries who told a story about watching Lucia walk into the chairman’s meeting and understood in that moment that something had permanently changed. All of it good. All of it true in the general way that toasts were true.

Then Lucas stood up.

He had a glass in his hand and a piece of paper in the other and the piece of paper was folded three times which suggested it was longer than any toast needed to be. Ria, sitting beside Monica, looked at the paper and then looked at Monica and they exchanged a look that said they both knew what was coming and had decided not to intervene. Lucas cleared his throat. He looked at the paper and then decided not to use it, setting it on the table in front of him.

“I had notes,” he said. “I’m not using them because they were better in my head than they are on paper, which is a problem I have generally.”

A few people laughed. Lucas waited for it to settle.

“My mother married for the first time when she was twenty-one years old,” he said. “I was not there for that. Neither were my sisters. She was twenty-one and she was in love and she made a choice and I think most people in this room know how that story went.”

The room was quiet. This was not the direction people had expected.

“What I want to talk about,” Lucas continued, “is the part that came after. Because that is the part I was there for. I watched my mother spend seventeen years giving everything she had to a marriage and a family and a life that was not giving back what it should have been. I watched her absorb things that should not have been absorbed. I watched her make herself smaller so other people could fit.” He stopped. “And then I watched her decide to stop doing that.”

He looked at Lucia directly.

“I watched you take everything back,” he said. “Not just the company. Yourself. I watched you remember who you were before you had spent seventeen years being told a smaller version of that was enough.” His voice was getting slightly unsteady and he was aware of it and keeping going anyway. “And I watched Alexander look at that woman, the real one, the whole one, and I watched him not flinch. Not once.” Lucas turned to Alexander. “You looked at my mother and you saw exactly who she was and you didn’t ask her to be less of it.”

He picked up his glass.

“I have spent a lot of my life trying to protect people,” he said. “It is a habit I am still working on. But today, for the first time, I do not feel like I need to protect my mother from anything. Because she is standing in her own garden on her own terms next to someone who is genuinely on her side.” He paused. “That is everything I wanted for her. That is everything.” He raised his glass.

“To my mother,” he said. “And to the man who finally deserves her.”

Two hundred people raised their glasses.

Lucia pressed her fingers under her eyes. Alexander put his arm around her and kept it there.

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Chapter 225

Monica waited until the applause had settled. Then she appeared at the edge of the room near the door that led to the all, and she was holding something large and wrapped in brown paper, and Ria and Lena were with her and the three of them were carrying it between them with the careful attention of people transporting something that mattered.

They set it on the easel that had appeared near the door, which Monica had arranged beforehand without telling anyone, and Monica unwrapped it herself, her hands steady.

The family portrait. The one she had painted and repainted and finally finished. All six of them in the late afternoon gold she always associated with safety, arranged near the oak tree in the garden, caught mid-moment rather than posed, each person exactly as they were.

Lucia was in the center. Alexander’s hand on her shoulder. Ria on the right with her chin up and something half-said on her face. Lucas on the left looking like he was about to speak. Lena at the edge with her book and her particular stillness. And Monica herself, painted from the outside as she imagined she looked to the others, smaller than the rest, fucked close exactly where she chose to be.

Lucia stood in front of it for a long time.

She could not speak. She tried once and gave it up and just stood there looking at the six of them captured in warm light on a canvas her fourteen-year-old daughter had made.

Monica stood beside her.

“I wanted to get it right,” Monica said. Her voice was quiet and matter-of-fact in the way she spoke about her art. “I started it a long time ago. I kept changing things. I didn’t know what I was waiting for until I understood I was waiting until I felt safe enough to paint it the way it actually was.” She looked at the painting. “I feel safe now.”

Lucia put her arm around her daughter and held on.

Later, much later, when the last guests had gone and the children had drifted inside, tired and full and still faintly sparkling with the residue of an evening that had been exactly right, Lucia and Alexander stepped out onto the terrace.

The garden was quiet and lit and the chairs were still arranged from the ceremony, the flowers slightly bent now from the night air, the fairy lights strung between the trees giving everything a warm unreal quality.

Alexander stood beside her and she leaned into him and his arm came around her waist.

They did not speak for a long time. There was nothing that needed saying that had not already been said today in front of everyone they loved.

The garden sat around them in the dark.

Two hundred people had stood up in this garden today and raised their glasses and witnessed them choose each other, and now it was just the two of them and the flowers and the night air and the quiet house behind them where their children were sleeping.

Lucia looked at the oak tree. At the spot where Monica had painted them in the portrait, all six of them, in the gold light.

She thought about the woman she had been at twenty-one standing in a different garden on the first night of a different marriage, hoping it would be everything she needed it to be.

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