Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 228

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Chapter 228

Chapter 228

The boardroom on the thirty-second floor had not changed since the last time Lucia sat in it.

Same long table. Same twelve leather chairs. Same view of the city through the floor-to-ceiling windows that Marco had installed when he redesigned the executive floor. She had been in this room when it belonged to him. She had sat across from him in this room while lawyers argued about the company’s future. She had sat at the head of this table for several months now and the room still carried him in it, in the quality of the light and the choice of furniture and the particular way the city sat framed in the windows.

She opened her folder and did not let herself think about that.

Fourteen board members this time. She had expected twelve. Two additional members had requested to join the meeting, which her assistant had flagged yesterday without comment but which Lucia understood immediately. The number meant something. Marco had been popular with this board, not universally, but genuinely, built over seventeen years of working beside them.

She had been here months.

Gerald Whitmore sat at the far end. Thomas Reid sat two chairs from him, a man who had been on the board for eight years and who had not spoken directly to Lucia since the chairmanship vote. Beside Thomas, a woman named Catherine Park who had invested personally in Hart Industries when Marco was building it, who had been at his wedding to Lucia years ago and who had sent flowers to Marco’s funeral without sending anything to Lucia.

These people had known Marco Hart when he was young. When the company was small and the future was uncertain and everything depended on the belief of a handful of people willing to bet on him.

Lucia had not been there for that.

She opened the meeting and they moved through the quarterly figures and the operational reports and the forensic audit findings and she was in the middle of the Phoenix Foundation restructure proposal when Thomas Reid set his pen down.

“Before we continue,” he said. His voice was even and deliberate. “I want to raise something.”

Lucia looked at him. “Go ahead.”

“Marco Hart spent seventeen years building this company.” Thomas looked around the table, not at Lucia. “He built it from a small consultancy into a major corporation. The people in this room invested in that vision. We trusted his leadership. We believed in what he was creating.” He stopped. Looked at Lucia directly. “And then his marriage ended and he lost everything. His company. His position. His children. And then his life.” A pause. “I want to ask directly, Mrs. Kane. How do you bring yourself to sit in his chair knowing what your actions cost him?”

The room went very still.

Lucia felt it hit her. She had prepared for resistance. She had prepared for the independent review request, for pointed questions about the acquisition structure, for financial challenges she could answer with numbers. She had not fully prepared for the rawness of that question asked that plainly in that room.

Her hand on the folder tightened. Just once. Just for a second.

She breathed in through her nose.

“Let me answer that,” she said. But her voice came out slightly lower than she intended, stripped of the smooth professional register she had been using all morning, and she felt the board notice.

Gerald Whitmore spoke before she could continue. “The question deserves a real answer. Not a managed one. Lucia looked at him. Then she looked at Thomas. Then she looked at Catherine Park who was watching her with an expression that held no malice and no warmth, just the cool attention of someone who had known Marco Hart before Lucia was in the picture and was waiting to see what she would do with the question.

Che got hor non down

Chapter 228

“Marco Hart was the father of my three children,

said He W05]

what he built here better than anyone in this room because I watched him tud and ran our home and stopped my own career to support has Her voice was not stopped fighting it. I also know what happened inside our marriage. The years of indust children. What it did to me” She looked at Thomas Reid “You are asking me ho

chair. I am asking myself the same question sometimes. The answer is that I fought for this because it was built with my inheritance money and my seventeen years and my children. because I wanted to punish him.”

The room was silent.

“His death was not something I wanted,” Lucia continued. Her voice had steadied but it was not the boardroom voice anymore. It was something more honest than that. “His death happened becau made by a woman who is now in prison for life. I have to live with the part I played in the circumstanc led to those choices. I think about it. I will think about it for the rest of my life: She looked around the But I am sitting in this chair. And I am going to keep sitting in it. And I am going to run this company well Not to prove something to anyone in this room. Because I am genuinely capable of it and three thousand people depend on that.”

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Then Catherine Park, who had not said a single word to Lucía since the chairmanship vote, picked up her pen.

“Continue with the Foundation proposal,” she said.

It was not support. It was not warmth. It was the specific instruction of a woman who had heard enough to decide that the meeting should go on, which in that room from that person was the only thing it needed to be. Gerald Whitmore said nothing. But he opened his folder to the Foundation page.

Lucia looked at the proposal in front of her.

She continued.

The press conference was three days later. The Phoenix Foundation formally linked to Hart Industries, permanent funding from annual profits, the company’s charitable arm now carrying the name of what Lucia’s family had survived.

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