Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 244

Chapter 244

he would not a phone, not at the blogger, at the journalist, because the journalist was the one who mattered.

“Furthermore Claire continued, “when our sister was convicted and imprisoned, the family expected to receive financial support through the assets Magaret had legally acquired during her marriage and after. Instead, Lucia Kane and Alexander Kane used the power of their combined legal teams to file a restraining order agahast our entire family, preventing us from even approaching their household so discuss what we believe is rightfully ours.” She held up the restraining order document. The photographer raised his camera and the shutter clicked. “And the sixty-four million dollars that Margaret chose to give to Luria Kane’s own daughter, we believe that decision was made under psychological pressure, by a woman who was isolated, incarcerated, and deeply vulnerable to the influence of a family that had already demonstrated it would use every available tool to get what it wanted”

“Can you explain what you mean by psychological pressure?” the journalist asked.

“Lucia Kane visited our sister in prison,” Claire said. “Shortly after the conviction. Whatever was said in that room between a powerful woman with legal resources and a newly convicted prisoner who had nothing and no one to protect her, we cannot know. What we do know is that shortly afterward Margaret gave everything she had to Lucia Kane’s daughter.”

This was not entirely accurate. The timeline was compressed, the visit and the transfer separated by weeks and by the arrival of Mr. Harrison with Marco’s letter. But Claire said it with the smooth certainty of someone who had decided the shape of the story and was not going to let accuracy interrupt the architecture.

Josh junior leaned toward the microphones.

“Alexander Kane is one of the wealthiest men in this country,” he said. “He has used that wealth to buy the silence of a grieving family through a court order. He has used it to ensure that the public hears only one version of events. We are here because we have no lawyers, no PR teams, no resources to fight this the way they can fight it.” His voice had the particular roughness of real feeling underneath a prepared speech, which made it land more genuinely than Claire’s careful tone had. “We just have the truth.”

The blogger typed something into her phone. The photographertook another photograph. The tabloid journalist asked three more questions, about the restraining order, about the prison visit, about what specifically the family wanted from Lucia Kane.

Claire answered each one.

When the conference was over the journalist shook Claire’s hand and told her the piece would run online that evening and in print the following day. The blogger said she would have her video up within the hour.

The family gathered their things. Josh Senior stood and adjusted his jacket. Marie picked up her bag. Claire closed the folder.

In the lift going back down to the lobby, the four of them stood in silence. The doors closed and the fift descended and nobody spoke until it reached the ground floor.

Then Josh Junior looked at his father.

“It’s done,” he said.

Josh Senior looked at the closing doors as they opened onto the lobby.

“Now we wait,” he said.

They walked through the lobby and out to the street, the mid-morning city going about its business around them, and Claire gealed out ber phone and refreshed the blogger’s page and the video was already there, already sitting at two hundred

already climbing.

She showed die wreen to josit without saying anything

2:04 pm PA

Chapter 213–

Josh looked at the number.

Then he smiled for the first time in weeks.

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35

2:04 pm P A

Chapter 214-

Chapter 244

The video had twelve thousand views by the time Alexander’s PA forwarded the link at half past ten in the morning.

Lucia watched it once, standing in the kitchen with her coffee going cold on the counter beside her, and she did not watch it again. Once was enough to understand what had been built. Claire’s composed grief. Josh’s toughness. The JUSTICE FOR THE Lowes FAMILY banner behind them, its dean black letters designed to look reasonable, principled, the language of people who had been wronged rather than people who had grabbed a child in a schoolyard.

Alexander came off a call and stood in the doorway with his phone still in his hand and looked at her face.

“I know,” he said.

“They framed the prison visit,” Lucia said. Her voice was very flat. “They compressed the timeline. They made it sound like I walked into that cell and coerced a vulnerable woman into signing everything over to Monica. Like the money was never a decision Margaret made freely. Like I engineered it.”

“I know,” he said again.

“And because there are no named sources and no verifiable facts they cannot be held legally accountable for most of it. They have said enough to damage and not enough to be touched.”

Alexander set his phone on the counter. “The legal team is already working on what can be challenged. The PR team is pulling together the response now. They want a statement by noon.”

“What kind of statement?” Lucia asked.

“Factual. Documented. The actual timeline of the prison visit and the transfer. Margaret’s letter and the circumstances of the decision. The restraining order context.” He paused. “They want you to speak to one outlet directly. A proper interview. Give the real account on record rather than just a written statement that can be ignored.”

Lucia looked at the counter.

She thought about every time in the past few months she had deliberately stayed out of the press. About the careful strategy of letting actions speak rather than words, of keeping the children away from cameras, of building something solid enough that it did not require defending. She had spent months avoiding exactly the kind of public exposure that the press conference had just dragged her into.

“Set it up,” she said.

The PR team worked through the morning. The legal team identified six specific factual inaccuraciesfn Claire’s statement and began the process of formal correction requests to the publications that had picked up, the story. By lunchtime the written statement was drafted, reviewed, approved, and released, a measured account of the actual events, the actual timeline, the actual documented decision Margaret had made through her own lawyer with no contact from Lucia between the prison visit and Mr. Harrison’s arrival months later.

The statement was accurate.

It was also four paragraphs and it competed with a video that had fifty thousand views by noon.

The children came home at half

past

three.

Ria arrived first. She came through the door and dropped her bag and said nothing immediately, which was its own kind of information. She went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water and stood at the counter drinking it and Lucia watched her daughter’s profile and waited

pengle way seminar group asked me about it,” Ria said. “By name. Not in a hostile way. Curious. Like it was ting they had read that they wanted to understand better. She set the glass down. “I told them I was not discussing my family’ private matters in a seminar room and I moved on. But they had read it. All three of them.”

weet name home twenty minutes later. He dropped his kit bag at the door and walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge and stood in front of it without taking anything out, which was what he did when something was taking up the wenalty occupied by hunger.

“Coach asked to speak to me after practice,” he said, still facing the fridge. “He told me he had seen something online. He wanted me to know it did not change his view of me or my place on the team.” He closed the fridge. His jaw was tight. I had to stand in the coach’s office and be reassured by a man I have known for two months that my family’s reputation had not affected my position. He turned around. “I did not enjoy that.”

Lena and Monica came together, which they had been doing since the school incident with Josh, a habit that had formed without discussion and had not been broken.

Monics came in and sat at the kitchen table and opened her sketchbook to a page that already had pencil marks on it, clearly started during the school day. She did not look up when she said it.

“A girl in my art class showed me the video on her phone,” Monica said. “She thought she was being kind. She wanted to show me so I would know before I heard it from someone who was less kind about it.” She was drawing while she talked, the pencil moving. “She is right that it was better to hear it from her. It was still not a good afternoon.”

Lena sat down across from Monica. She had the specific stillness she carried when something had taken something from her and she was deciding what to do about the space it had left.

“My form teacher pulled me aside,” Lena said. “She asked me if I was alright. I told her yes. She told me if I wanted to talk she was available.” A pause. “I did not want to talk.”

Lucia sat at the head of the table and looked at her four children and the particular damage that the afternoon had done to each of them, different in shape, the same in source.

Alexander stood in the doorway.

“The interview is arranged,” he said. “Tomorrow morning. A journalist who has worked with our PR team before, someone with a reputation for accuracy. We get to put the full account on record in our own words.” He looked at the table, at all of them. “It is not the same as making the other thing disappear. Nothing makes it disappear. But it gives us something real to stand on.”

“What did they say about me?” Monica asked. She was still drawing. Stil not looking up.

The table went quiet.

They implied the transfer was coerced,” Lucia said. “Phat I pressured Margaret into giving you the money.

Monica’s pencil stopper.

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