Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 241

2:04 pm PA

Chapter 241-

Chapter 241

The house was lit when she pulled into the driveway.

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All the downstairs lights on, which meant David was awake and waiting, and Claire sat in the car for a moment with her hands still on the wheel, looking at the warm windows and understanding that this conversation had been building since the moment Stella picked up the phone.

She had known Stella would call him.

She got out of the car.

David was in the kitchen with a mug of tea he hadn’t touched, his arms crossed, his face carrying the particular expression of a man who had been sitting alone rehearsing a conversation and still hadn’t found the right version of it.

“Stella called,” he said.

“I know.”

“She told me everything.” He uncrossed his arms and pressed his palms flat on the counter. “I want you to stop, Claire. All of it. The lawyer, the prison, what Josh did to that child outside her school. I want it to stop.”

Claire put her bag on the chair, pulled off her coat, hung it slowly on the hook, her back to him.

“It is not that simple,” she said.

“It is,” David said. “Everything was done legally. There is no court that will overturn it. Whatever your family is planning to do with the media, it will not get you the money. It will just destroy things that cannot be rebuilt.”

She turned around..

“Margaret slept with you,” she said.

The kitchen went very still.

David’s face changed. Not into guilt exactly. Into the expression of a man who had hoped, for years, that this specific sentence would never be said in this kitchen with that tone.

“Claire-”

“I did not know,” Claire said. “I want you to understand that. I did not know while it was happening. I did not know afterward. I did not know until Lucia Kane decided to release every secret Margaret had ever kept and put the affair in a press statement and I read about my own husband and my own sister in a newspaper article along with the rest of the country. Her voice was completely steady and her eyes were dry and both of those things cost her something visible. “I found our the way strangers found out. That is how I know.”

David looked at his wife and the silence in the kitchen held everything between them that had never been properly sand

“I am sorry,” he said. His voice was low.

I know you are.” Claire said. “You have been sorry since the moment I called you after reading at. You were remarelui. Margaret was remorseful, everyone involved was very sorry, and I stood in the middle of it being the only person us the entire situation who had not been given the dignity of knowing before the public did something shines in her face “Lacta Kane ruined my marriage with her revenge i ampaign. She did not care about me. She was not thinking about me, I was collateral. She wanted to destroy Margaret and she released everything she had and my bfe was it that pile. Her viser hart finally lost some of us steariness, just go the edges. “I hate her for that, I genuinely bate twee for patung uy haruikation ma

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Chapter 241

press release. For making it public before I even had the chance to process it privately.”

“Claire,” David said, moving toward her.

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“And I hate Margaret more. The words came out of somewhere deep, from the place where she had been keeping them. “Margaret is my sister. My blood. And she looked at my husband and she made a choice and she hid it from me and she stood at family dinners with me and she knew and I did not. And then Lucía Kane burned everything down and the whole world found out what Margaret did to me and had to hold my head up in public and go to work and speak to people who had read the same article I had.” Her jaw was tight. “The money is the only thing connected to Margaret that can give me something back. It is the only accounting I am ever going to get.”

“That is not accounting,” David said. He was close now, standing in front of her. “That is punishment. And the person you are punishing is not Margaret. It is a thirteen-year-old girl who had nothing to do with any of it.”

“I know that,” Claire said. Her voice cracked slightly on the word and she pressed her lips together. “I know that. Do you think I don’t know that? But the sixty-four million is the only thing I have to hold onto because I cannot hold onto anything else. H cannot make Lucia Kane undo what she did. I cannot make Margaret take back what she did. I cannot go back and be the person who knew before the world knew.” She stopped. Her hands pressed flat on the kitchen table. “All I can do is take the thing Margaret gave away without asking me.”

David looked at his wife’s face. At the lines around her eyes that had been there before any of this started. At the way she was holding herself upright with the specific effort of someone who had been holding herself upright through things she did not discuss and had been doing it for long enough that it had become simply how she stood.

“I am asking you to stop,” he said quietly. “I am asking you to come home. To us. To this kitchen and the life we built. I am asking you to let the money go because pursuing it is going to take something from you that the money cannot replace.” He looked at her steadily. “I am asking you to choose.”

The word landed between them.

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