Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 229

Chapter 229

Lucia told the driver to stop at the gates and walk ahead without her

The cemetery was quiet Mid-afternoon on a Tuesday, the city muffled behind the stone walls, a few figures scattered at distant plots. She walked the path she had memorized from the funeral. Past the older graves Past the section for families. Until she reached the grey stone with his name on it

She stood there for a long time.

Then her legs gave and she sat down hard on the grass and did not care about the cold coming through her

coat

Marco James Hart.

She had known this man at twenty years old. She had watched him build this company from a small office with secondhand furniture and her inheritance money and his belief that he could make something real. She had driven him to early morning meetings when they had one car between them. She had stayed up with him going over contracts. She had learned the business alongside him because he had no one else to talk it through with and she had loved him enough to become someone who understood it.

Thomas Reid voice. Sitting in Marco’s chair knowing what your actions cost him.

Thomas Reid had been on the board for eleven years. He had seen the company after the foundations were already built. He had never seen Marco at twenty-four making dinner from whatever was left in the refrigerator, laughing at himself when it didn’t come together, eating it anyway.

She pressed her hand flat against the grass beside the stone.

She remembered bringing Ria home from the hospital. Marco holding her in the hallway at two in the morning, walking in circles because Ria would not settle for anyone else, this man who had never held an infant, pacing their small hallway in the dark, and Lucia watching from the bedroom doorway and thinking: I chose right. I chose right.

How do you bring yourself to sit in his chair.

She pressed her fist against her mouth.

The tears came all at once, not the careful kind, not the kind she had been managing in front of board members and her children and everyone who needed her to be holding together. These came from the part of her that had not been opened in months, that she had been walking around and past and carefully away from, and now she was sitting in the cold grass with her coat getting damp and nobody watching and they came completely.

She cried until her chest hurt.

Until the sound she was making was not something she recognized as herself.

When it finally slowed she looked at the stone through blurred eyes.

“Was I wrong?” Her voice came out wrecked and she did not try to fix it. “Not for leaving. Not for protecting myself. But for the rest of it. For going further than I needed to.” She pressed the back of her hand against her face. “I wanted you to feel it. All of it. Every piece of what you had thrown away. I wanted you to stand in the rubble of it and understand what you had done.” She stopped. Her throat was closing. “And somewhere in the middle of all that a woman fell apart and took my daughters and you went into a basement and you are here and I am sitting in the grass in front of your name.”

The wind moved across the cemetery.

She looked at his name.

“I don’t regret fighting back,” she said. “I don’t. You took my inheritance and my career and seventeen years and the father you should have been to our children. I don’t regret any of it.” She closed her eyes. “But I let it go too far. I know I let it go too far. And I don’t know what to do with that because you’re not here and I can’t ask you led you with my own hands don’t know and the board members who sit in your c’

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Chapter 229.

anything about what happened inside our life

She sat in the grass for a long time after that

Not crying anymore. Just sitting with him, or with the absence of him, or with here for that she still hadn’t fully found.

Eventually she stood.

The grass had made her coat damp at the knees. She didn’t brush it off

She walked back to the car.

Alexander was in the chair by the bedroom window when she got home, reading, and he looked up and took her face in the same second. He set the book down without marking the page.

She sat on the edge of the bed and told him. All of it. Not in order. The board room. Thomas Read who had looked at her across the table and asked how she could bring herself to sit in Marco’s chair after what she had done to him. Gerald. Catherine Park. The way her voice had come out wrong in the room in front of everyone. The grass at the cemetery going cold through her coat.

Alexander listened. He did not fill the spaces she left.

When she stopped talking the room was quiet.

He moved to sit beside her. Their shoulders touching.

“The people in that room,” he said quietly, “knew Marco Hart in a building. They did not know him in a house. They did not know what your children lived through or what you absorbed for seventeen years before you finally stopped absorbing it.” He paused. “They are looking at where the story ended and deciding you are responsible for the ending. They are not wrong that choices matter. They are wrong about which ones.”

Lucia looked at her hands.

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