Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 230

Chapter 230

The gallery was bright and warm and smelled of white wine and fresh paint and the particular energy of room full of people trying to look like they were not as impressed as they were

Monica had submitted the bowl of fruit and the windowsill at dawn. Two pencil drawings, each framed simply in thin black frames that Lena had chosen. She had not told anyone at home which pieces until the day be the exhibition, and even then she had described them plainly, just the drawings she had been making since coming home, without naming what they had cost her or what they meant.

She stood near the door of the gallery now, slightly apart from where Lucia and Alexander and Lena were talking to another family. She was wearing the dark blue dress she had worn to the trial, which she had chosen deliberately for reasons she had not explained to anyone.

Her work was on the far wall.

She could see it from here. Both pieces hung side by side, the bowl of fruit on the left and the windowsill on the right, in the row of work from the exhibition’s youngest contributors. Around them were paintings in colour, acrylics and watercolours, vibrant and ambitious. Her pencil drawings were quieter than everything around

them. More careful. More still.

She had not gone close to them yet.

She was not entirely sure she could.

Lena appeared at her elbow. “You should go look at them,” she said. “From the front. The framing changed how they read.”

“In a minute,” Monica said.

Lena looked at her for a moment and then went back to the others without pushing.

Monica stayed near the door.

The gallery filled as the evening went on, people moving between the pieces with their wine glasses, leaning in, stepping back, the particular choreography of people looking at art. She watched them without moving toward her own work, watching the patterns of attention, noticing which pieces pulled people in and which ones they passed.

A man stopped in front of her drawings.

He was older, sixty perhaps, with the unhurried attention of someone who looked at art professionally. He stood in front of the windowsill piece for a long time. Then he moved to the bowl of fruit and stood in front of that one for just as long. He did not lean in. He stood at the right distance and looked with his whole attention and his expression was the one of someone who had found something unexpected.

Monica watched him from across the room.

Then he turned and looked at the information card beside the drawings and she saw his face change slightly when he read it. He looked back at the work.

He turned and found Lucia.

Monica did not know how he knew which person in the room was her mother. Perhaps someone had told him. Perhaps the gallery had information. He walked directly to Lucia and introduced himself and Monica saw Lucia’s expression shift to the polite attentive look she used at professional events.

Monica moved closer without going all the way to them. Close enough to hear.

“Your daughter submitted these two pieces,” the man said. He had a measured voice, not loud, the voice of someone used to being listened to without needing to raise it. “The pencil drawings on the far wall.”

“She did,” Lucia said.

“I want to speak to you about her.” He reached into his jacket and produced a card. “I run the Meridian Gallery mid-twenties, though we occasionally on Fifth Avenue. We work primarily with

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Chapter 290

make exceptione

Lucia took the card

He paused Your daug

She is thirteen Lucia said careful

I’m aware. I’m not suggesting an immediate exhibition. Im suggesting a conversation Wha technically at thirteen is unusual. But what’s more unusual is the quality of attention in these res looking at very ordinary objects and she is seeing them completely. That is not something you ca either have it or you don’t” He looked back at the drawings on the wall. “She has it’

Monica had stopped walking

She was standing six feet behind her mother and the gallery owner, close enough to have heard every word. and she was not moving.

She looked at her drawings on the wall from this distance. The bowl of fruit she had drawn three times on three different days because the light was different each day and she wanted to get it exactly right. The windowsill she had drawn at dawn because that was when the shadows did the thing she had been trying to capture and she had gotten up at five-thirty four mornings in a row until she felt she it.

She had made those drawings because Dr. Williams had asked what it felt like to make them and she had said safe, because the thing she was drawing was right in front of her and it wasn’t going anywhere.

This man did not know any of that.

He had looked at them with the professional eyes of someone who spent his life looking at art and he had walked across a gallery to find her mother.

Lucía turned and saw her.

Monica looked back at her mother.

She did not know what her own face was doing. She could feel it doing something but she could not identify what. Something that was not quite any single thing. Not pride exactly, because pride felt too simple. Not disbelief, because she had looked at those drawings and known there was something in them. Something else. Something that sat in the chest and pressed outward from the inside in a way that had no clean name.

Lucia looked at her daughter’s face and her eyes went bright.

The gallery owner turned to follow Lucia’s gaze and saw Monica standing there.

“I didn’t realize you were close,” he said to Monica directly. His voice was the same measured unhurried tone.” I meant what I said. If you ever want to come in and have a conversation about your work, the door is open.” Monica looked at him. Then at her mother.

Then she looked at her drawings on the wall.

The bowl of fruit. The windowsill at dawn. Both things she had made in the weeks after coming home from a basement when big things felt too far away and small things were all she could hold.

On the wall they were just drawings. Nobody looking at them knew what they had come from or what it had cost to make them. They were just lines on paper, just two ordinary objects rendered with careful attention.

They were also the first proof she had offered herself that she was still capable of seeing properly.

She looked at them for a long moment.

Then she looked back at the gallery owner.

“Okay,” she said.

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Chapter 231

tu quant who told he

dence the

tast visit from her mother

the sentencing.

had visitors had said two names and Margaret her down trying to understand why her mothe had stretched since the trial

ess paint on the walls, same plastic chairs bolted to the floor. from her looking older than Margaret remembered, her hair greyer, her hands folded

way she had always held them when she was managing something difficult.

dud not look at Margaret directly at first.

“The food here isn’t good, Margaret said.

Mane’s face did something that might have been sympathy. “I have thought about you,” she said. Her voice was careful, almost gentle, in a register Margaret had not heard from her in years. “I know what you did was wrong You went too far. You know that, I assume.”

“I know it, Margaret said quietly. “Every day, I think about it every single day.” She looked at her mother’s hands on the table. “I wish I could turn back the clock. I wish I had stopped before any of it happened. I would give anything to undo what i did”

Mane nodded slowly, as if this was the correct answer and she was satisfied to hear it. Then her expression shifted, the gentleness folding away into something more practical.

“We need to talk about something serious,” she said. “The family is having financial difficulties. Josh’s business has not been doing well this year. He took out loans against the projections and the projections did not hold. And his wife is pregnant now. Their first child.” She paused. “We need to discuss what is available to help”

Margaret felt something in her chest go cold and still,

“I don’t have money,” she said. The moment the words left her mouth she felt the weight of repeating them, the same sentence she had said to her father weeks ago when she genuinely had nothing decided yet.

Marie’s eyebrows drew together slightly, “What about your properties? The apartment in Manhattan. Your jewellery. The investment accounts you had before all of this?”

“Gone,” Margaret said. “All of it. There’s nothing left.”

The room was quiet for a moment.

Claire finally looked at her sister directly. “What do you mean gone?”

“I gave it away.”

Claire’s expression shifted into something sharper. “Gave it away to who? When? You never told us any of this.” “Marco left me fifty million dollars privately, outside the will, Margaret said. “I only learned about it the day after Dad and Josh came to see me. When Dad called me useless and walked out, I had nothing decided yet. There was nothing to tell him because there was nothing to tell.”

Claire’s jaw tightened. “So you found out the next day and said nothing to any of us since.”

“I had to decide what to do with it,” Margaret said. “I decided alone.”

“Where is the money now?” Claire’s voice had gone flat and dangerous.

Margaret looked at her sister. At her mother. At the two faces across the table waiting for an answer they would not like.

“I gave it to Monica,” she said.

The room went very still.

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fiat with disbelief. “Marco’s daughter. The child

million. The fifty from Marco and everything I had personally. The apartment. The

it transferred directly to her

me down on the table hard enough that the sound carried in the quiet room. “Why would you would you hand that kind of money to the one family that already has more than they will ever

M

use I hurt her the most Margaret’s voice cracked slightly and she let it. “She was thirteen years old. I put basement for six days. I bruised her face with my own hand. I held a gun on her and her father died to put his body between us ” Her throat tightened. “She is in therapy now because of what I did to her.

will help with whatever she needs for the rest of her life because of what I took.”

“She doesn’t need it.” Claire said, and now something ugly had entered her voice, something that had been sitting underneath everything she’d said until now. “That spoiled little brat doesn’t need a single dollar of it. Her mother runs an empire. Her stepfather could buy this entire prison and not feel it. Marco already left her millions. And you handed her sixty-four more because you feel sorry for her?”

“Don’t talk about her like that,” Margaret said.

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