Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 250

Chapter 250-

Chapter 250

The living room was too small for four people and all the anger in it.

25

Claire had the laptop open on the coffee table, the press conference video playing on one side of the screen, the comment section refreshing on the other. She watched the numbers move in the wrong direction, the flood of support that had been running in their favor all week reversing itself real time, strangers who had been defending them two hours ago now turning with the specific swift cruelty of a public that had been embarrassed into a position it wanted out of

Josh Junior stood behind her chair, his hands gripping the back of it, his knuckles white.

“She destroyed us,” he said. “She sat in that room and destroyed her own family.”

Josh Senior was in the armchair, the television remote in his hand though the screen was off, turning it over and over in a slow unconscious rotation that he did not seem to know he was doing. His face was not the furious red of the previous weeks. It was something grayer and tighter, the expression of a man who had expended a significant amount of energy and was reckoning with the possibility that it had been spent for nothing.

Marie sat on the couch nearest the window, her hands in her lap, not looking at the laptop screen.

The comments continued to scroll.

The Lowe family lied about everything. Margaret told the TRUTH. These people are disgusting. Leave that poor family alone. I can’t believe I believed them. Josh Lowe grabbing a thirteen-year-old girl in a schoolyard and now THIS. Shameless. Absolutely shameless.

“We need to respond,” Claire said. Her voice was flat with the specific flatness of someone who had not accepted what they were looking at yet. “We cannot let this sit without a response. If we say nothing, silence becomes guilt.”

“What do we say?” Josh Junior asked.

“That she was pressured,” Claire said. “That she gave that statement under duress. Prison authorities threatening her parole prospects, telling her she needed to cooperate with the press to demonstrate good behavior. She was not speaking freely. She was speaking to protect herself from people who control her entire existence now.”

Josh Senior stopped turning the remote. “Will they believe it?”

“Some will,” Claire said. “Some will always believe the second story because believing the first one required deciding we were telling the truth, and people don’t like to admit they were wrong. Give them an alternative explanation and they will take it because it is easier than sitting with having been manipulated.”

She pulled the laptop closer and opened a new recording window.

Josh Senior filmed it from the armchair, the camera steadier now because less of him was moving than before.

Claire sat in the same chair she always sat in for these things, her hands folded, her face arranged with the practiced composure that had become its own kind of tell for anyone watching closely enough

“My sider was not speaking freely in that video,” she said to the camera, her voice carrying controlled griet. “We have been) informed by sources inside the prison that Margaret was told her parole assessment would be negatively affected it the dat not cooperate with media requests. She gave that statement under direct institutional pressure. She was protecting herself. She still protecting herself now, from the only people who have real power over her life.”

Josh Senior leaned into lame laicily

read my daughter,” he said. “They used her desperation for early release against her. That is the

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Chapter 250-

statement of a frightened woman who has been sold she has no choice, nor the mind

Claire uploaded the video.

They watched the response come in for forty minutes, both of them leaning toward what either of them had expected.

The comments were split. Not evenly, not in their favor, but genuinely divided in a way that

turnaround they had hoped for. Some people took the new explanation and ran with x grateful for the permana to doubt. Others pushed back harder, citing specifics from Margaret’s statement, the details that rang too true to particular vo have been invented under duress.

Josh Junior refreshed the screen three times in two minutes.

“It’s not working,” he said. “Not the way it worked before.”

“It doesn’t need to work the way it worked before.” Claire said. “It just needs to keep the question open. If pespie about which version is true, they’re not arriving at a single verdict. And as long as there’s no single nett

to-”

“You are doing it again.”

Marie’s voice came from the couch, quiet and entirely level and everyone in the room umed to book a te quality of it was different from anything they had heard from her in weeks.

She was still looking at her hands.

“You are calculating she said. “You are talking about what works and what gives us room. Like is a szeg looked up slowly. “My daughter sat in a prison interview room age sold the truth. For the first

about everything she did, about the people she hurt.’ Her voice was not shaking. It was steater than usual. somehow worse. “And the first thing we did was sit in this room and call it coercion and plan the new video

The room was very still

“I want to ask something.” Marie said. “I need to ask it and I need someone to answer ze them in turn. “Is this right? What we are doing. Is it right?”

Nobody answered immediately.

“The money.” Marie said. The sixty-four milhon A is actually ones? No legal st

can construct. Actually ours’ Her jaw moved Margaret gave x away because the believed

hurt. She believed that with enough conviction to put cu record in front of co weeks trying to take it back.” She stopped. “Is that righ

Josh Senior looked at his wife.

“The money belongs to this fact

broken arad atmaal wad was

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