Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 255

Chapter 255

The bolding area feir different que Alexander and Lucia left. Not quieter. The station continued its business around them, the duty desk processing paperwork, distant radios crackling in the background, footsteps on tile somewhere out of sight But something in the air had shifted. The pressure that came from performing certainty in front of an audience released into something bollower and colder, something that made it harder to maintain the posture of a family that had been wronged

Josh Jumor looked at Williams. His father-in-law had not moved from the spot near the wall where he had been standing since he arrived, coat still on, hands still in his pockets, watching everything with the unhurried attention of a man who had seen enough situations like this one to know exactly where they ended. There was something in his stillness that was more powerful than any gesture would have been

“You have connections, Josh said. His voice had a quality of grasping, of reaching for something he could already feel slipping away. “People in this city know your name. If you made a call tonight, if you spoke to the right person and explained that this was a family situation that had been misrepresented”

“Joshua” Williams’s voice carried no impatience and no sympathy. Just the word, stopping him mid-sentence. “Let me be very clear with you about something”

He stepped away from the wall and covered the distance between them with the measured pace of someone about to say something that needed to land with weight.

“Alexander Kane holds forty-one percent of my company,” Williams said. “Not a minority stake. Not a silent investor. Forty- one percent, acquired five years ago when my business was weeks from collapse and every other door I knocked on stayed closed” He looked at Josh directly, and there was no unkindness in his gaze but there was no softening either. “He was not obligated to invest. He looked at my numbers and he decided the company was worth backing and he put his own money in when nobody else would. That company employs five hundred and thirty people. My retirement depends on it. My daughter’s inheritance depends on it”

He paused to let that settle into the room.

“And you are standing in a police station asking me to call that man and request that he ease off a lawsuit he has filed against your family for what you did,” Williams said. His voice remained steady. “I cannot help you. Not because I lack the will or the connection. Because there is nothing a man in my position could say to Alexander Kane that would make him withdraw a legitimate legal action. Even if I called him tonight, even if I invoked every conversation we have ever had, he would look at me and ask me why I was asking. And I would have no answer.”

His jaw tightened slightly.

“Because there is no answer,” he said, “You did what you did. You are here because of it. I cannot change that.”

Josh Senjor stood up from the bench. He straightened his jacket with the specific care of a man who needed to feel composed before he spoke, and he crossed the holding area toward Williams with his chin up, the posture he had always carried when he wanted to be taken seriously. He looked like a man who was still fighting, who did not yet understand that some fights were over before they began

“Williams,” Josh Senior said. “I understand that you are in a difficult position. None of us expected this to go as far as it has. But you need to understand that Stella cannot leave her marriage over this. She is six months pregnant. Her child needs it’s father present” He looked at Williams man to man, the appeal of one parent to another. “You know how much that matters. You know what it does to a child to grow up without both parents in the same house.”

Williams looked at Josh Senior for a long moment, and something in his expression suggested that he was not unmoved by the argument, that he was a father and a grandfather and he understood the weight of what Josh Senior was saying even a he rejected # entirely.

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Chapter 255-

My grandchild will grow up with a present and engaged grandfather. Williams said. “Whatever happens will be there. That much I can guarantee” He turned his attention to Josh Junior “What your var Cansu par

his child will respect him when it grows up and looks back at what its father chose to do during these works. That the question. Not whether the child has two parents under one roof. Whether those parents are people worth gromne p around.

Josh Junior looked at his father-in-law. The words landed between them like something heavy and real

“Dad,” he said, and the word came out with something raw in it, stripped of all the performance, just the word and needed from it. “Dad, please. Talk to Stella. Tell her to stay, Tell her to come home. She listens to you.”

Williams looked at his son-in-law for a long moment. His face shifted slightly, and Josh recognized something there had not expected to find. Not coldness. Sadness. Williams was sad about his daugher’s marriage coming apart in a police station, and that sadness made the rejection more final rather than less.

“I told Stella to think carefully before she married you,” Williams said. “Not because of you specifically. Because I saw something in how your family operated and I wanted her to be sure. She was certain. She loved you and the was certain and I chose to support her choice.” His voice was steady but the steadiness was deliberate, something he had constructed ‘1 cannot now undo the advice I failed to give her then. And I cannot tell her to stay inside a situation that has been harmrätig her for weeks just because you are asking nicely.”

He moved toward Stella, who was standing near the door, her handbag on her shoulder, everything about her posture communicating that she had already left this room in every way except physically. The distance between her and josh had become the width of the entire holding area.

She looked at Josh one final time, and he understood in that moment that she was memorizing him, cataloguing who be was so that she could remember him later when she was deciding whether to answer his calls or return them.

“Make this go away,” she said. “Whatever it takes. I cannot have this be the story of our child’s first year. Her voice did not crack. She had moved beyond the point where cracking was possible. “I will be at my parents. When you have done something real to end this, call me.”

Josh said nothing. What was there to say? The words that might have worked had all been spoken weeks ago when she was packing, when he was telling her not to come back, when he was still confident that she would come round

Stella walked out with her father. The door swung shut behind them, and the sound of it had a very final quality in the holding area, the kind of sound that marked a clear division between before and after

David had been standing slightly apart from everything, near the far wall, watching with the contained attention of someone who had decided to wait until the room settled before he said what he had come to say. Now he pushed off the wall and looked directly at his wife.

“Did it have to go this far?” he asked.

Claire’s jaw tightened. “We did what we had to do”

“You put your family in a police station” David said. “You made videos containing lies about a child who survived a kidnapping. You filmed your parents accusing that child’s siblings of causing a muscarriage” His voice remained even which was more effective than any raised version would have been. “And all the money is still gone. The lawsuit is still proxy Fig Stella just walked out Tell me what was gained here besides destruction”

“Margaret owes m..” Claire said.

Bring up the affair.” David said, cutting across her before she could get there herself, “and will leave this at tonight and I will not come back. Umean that, Claire.” He looked at her steadily. “I have paid for what I did in every conversation we have had for months, every time you brought it into an argument: Margaret paid for it too, in ways that none of us ever acknowledged.”

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Chapter 255-*

She destroyed my marriage. Claire said.

“She also saved my business, David said.

Nobody moved. Nobody interrupted him.

“Six months ago,” David continued, “when everything was falling apart, when Marco was still alive and Margaret was still hi wife, she went to Marco and asked him to invest in my company. She told him it had potential. She used her position and her relationship with him to advocate for me, quietly, without telling you, without holding it over me. The money that kept my company from closing came through because Margaret pushed for it.”

Claire was looking at him now, and her expression had shifted slightly, the edges of her certainty beginning to fray

“She also paid your parents’ debts,” David said, looking at Josh Senior and Marie. “I found this out afterward from her lawyer. Before she gave anything to Monica, she arranged for the arrears on this house to be cleared. She did it from prison. She did it because she was thinking about her family even from inside that cell.” He stopped for a moment, letting the weight of that settle. “And this family walke her visiting room and called her useless. You went home and made videos and spent

ion as ammunition against a family she was trying to protect.”

weeks using her name an

“David,” Josh Senior

“I am not finish

“You have al revenge

at ear

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voice carried something that made everyone stop.

Lucia Kane for what Margaret became,” David said. “You have all been saying that the the legal campaign turned Margaret into someone who could do what she did.” He looked ed, his gaze landing on each face. “But you have all been standing next to the real answer for sing not to look at it. Your father told her to her face that she was the useless one. Every time Every time she succeeded, you expected more. Eventually she started believing that was all not rise. “She was desperate long before Lucia Kane existed. She was desperate from childhood her that she was only valuable when she was being useful to it.”

et in the way it had in other moments. Instead, everyone in it seemed to stop breathing at the same ad been removed from the air.

re said. Her voice cracked on the words.

you, David said. “She loved all of you in a way that none of you earned and none of you returned. And ye a prison cell right now while this family stands in a police station still trying to extract the last remaining sacrifices she made.” He looked at Josh Senior and Marie directly one final time. “You never loved Margaret you loved Josh or Claire. And I do not think, looking at all of you right now, that any of you have ever once

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with what that cost her.”

that followed was different from the silences that had come before. The others had been pauses between volleys, of regrouping. This one had weight and finality This one was not going to be interrupted because nobody in the anything ready to say.

nior looked at the floor. His ha

d finally come loose.

he looked up.

aret was hard to lov

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