Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 238

Chapter 238

Chapter 238

The cell door closed and the sound of it was the only sound left.

Margaret stood in the center of the eight-by-ten space for a moment, not moving, not sitting, just standing while the quiet pressed in from all sides. The corridor outside was going about its evening business, distant voices, the clank of doors down the hall, the specific institutional rhythm she had learned to live inside. She heard none of it.

Her father’s voice.

Fool. Worthless. Ashamed.

She sat down on the edge of the bed and her legs simply folded beneath her, not a choice so much as a collapse, and she sat with her hands on her knees looking at the small rectangle of wall in front of her, the nameless paint she had memorized over months, and she felt something move through her chest that was not quite crying yet but was its immediate predecessor.

She had known, walking back from the visiting room, that something had finished. Not the way the visit had finished or the way her father had walked out without looking back. Something deeper than that. A door that had been open her entire life, even through every disappointment, every comparison, every time she had watched her parents discuss Josh’s future in rooms she was not invited into, even through all of that there had always been the door. The theoretical possibility that if she did enough, became enough, gave them enough, the door would finally open properly and she would be allowed in.

Her father had not simply walked out. He had closed it from the other side.

She pressed her hands over her face.

The memories came without invitation, the way memories always came in this cell, because there was nothing else to fill the space with. But these were different from the ones she usually fought. These were older. Quieter. Memories she had not visited because they cost more to hold than she could usually afford.

The first Sunday she had spent at Marco’s house.

Not as his wife. Before that. When Lucia had travelled. When they were still in the tentative stage, still circling, and he had invited her over for what he had described as a family lunch in a voice that was clearly nervous about whether she would say yes.

She had almost not gone.

The house had been loud in the way houses were loud when children occupied them fully, music somewhere upstairs, a television, the particular noise of three people who were completely comfortable in a space. Ria had been watchful at first, the eldest’s suspicion, studying Margaret from across the table with eyes that did not miss much. Lucas had been polite in the way teenage boys were polite when they had been asked to be on their best behaviour. Monica had been the youngest and the most direct, asking Margaret within the first ten minutes what her favourite colour was and whether she had any pets and whether she could cook better than their dad because their dad burned things.

Marco had looked at Margaret across the table with an expression she had not been able to name at the time. She could name it now.

It was the expression of a man hoping this would work. Not in an anxious, grasping way. In the way of someone who had decided he wanted something good and was hoping the people he loved most would see what he saw.

It had worked. That first Sunday, tentatively, imperfectly, it had worked. The children had warmed by degrees over the following months. Monica had decided Margaret was acceptable the afternoon Margaret helped her find her lost sketchbook in the car park outside a restaurant. Ria had softened the night Margaret sat up with her after she had been sick and Marco was traveling and there was nobody else in the house. Lucas had never said much but he had started greeting her when she arrived, a single word, her name, which from Lucas meant more than a paragraph would have from someone else.

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Chapter 238

They had been becoming something.

The four of them, before everything fell apart. Before Margaret had looked at Marco’s face one evening and understood he was still somewhere else in his mind and the rage had started building in her chest that she had never found a way to put down.

Before she had become the person she became.

Marco had loved her. That was the truth she sat with now, the truth that had been sitting in his letter since the day Mr. Harrison delivered it, the truth she had been turning over in her hands every night since. Not perfectly. Not without reservations and ghosts and the weight of seventeen years with someone else. But he had chosen her. He had sat across from her at that Sunday table hoping his children would see her the way he saw her, and for a time, for a real and specific time, they had.

She had killed that.

She had killed him.

She pressed her face into her hands and the crying came, nothing like the careful kind, nothing she could control or manage, coming from somewhere she had been keeping locked since she walked back through the visiting room door an hour ago.

She cried for the Sunday lunch and the sound of that house and Monica asking about her favourite colour with the directness of someone who had not yet learned to be careful with people.

She cried because she had spent her entire life desperate to be chosen and the one time someone had genuinely chosen her she had destroyed it with her own hands, piece by piece, choice by choice, until the only version of herself she had managed to become was the one her father had always predicted.

She cried because her family had sat across from her in that visiting room and shown her clearly that they had never loved her the way Marco had. They had loved what she could give them. They had loved the version of her that was useful. The moment she ran out of things to offer she became worthless to them, and the word her father had used on his way out was not something he had reached for in anger, it was something he had always believed, something he had simply had no reason to say until now.

Marco had seen her differently. The man she had destroyed had been the only person who had ever looked at her and found her worth the trouble of a Sunday lunch with his children.

The crying hit harder and she bent forward over her knees and let it, her shoulders shaking, her chest heaving in long ragged pulls that hurt on the way in and hurt worse on the way out.

Then the coughing started.

It arrived in the middle of the crying, her body finding it somewhere at the back of her throat, building fast, and she pressed her hand over her mouth as the cough took over from the sobs, shaking her differently, more violently, until the cough tore something loose and she pulled her hand back and looked at it and saw the

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